TVs in Restaurants...

... threat or menace?  :)

Comments

[Fritz]

The strangest TV invasion I have seen lately in a Durham restaurant was my last visit to Spartacus.
I like to sit at the bar when I go there and wolf down my Gyro sandwich. Much to my chagrin they have now reworked the bar to add two additional large screen TVs blaring out their respective
sports simultaneously.
It is kind of hard to watch a baseball game on one screen when there are two others blaring out Pro golf and Car Racing.
What the hell are they thinking?

[Kira]

Shoot, I don't even own cable/have a satellite dish. The last time I turned on my TV to watch TV...was one and a half years ago, and that's no joke nor an exaggeration. Our TV is something we use to play video games and watch movies (which we do as a family a fair bit). So, finding a TV on at a restaurant would be a definite turn-off for us. Yucky icky poo. Sure, at a bar, I don't care if they have one, but I draw the line at a restaurant. That's not why I'm going there.

[Maura]

I love television, but not in a restaurant. It's enough of a time suck at home. And it's annoying enough when I'm trying to have a drunken conversation in a bar. I don't need to be distracted by it when I'm having dinner.

By the way, Joe, I love that the two choices you gave were "threat or menace".

[Joe Eater]

Maura - I stole the "threat or menace" phrase from someone else. :) But thank you.

[ellen]

How do you blare out pro golf? Whisper at the top of your lungs?

[Jack]

I liked your comment on the original blog, Joe. I was wondering if this "trend" of noisier restaurants is something that is consciously being planned/produced, something that is a feature of a change in the "culture of dining" (a new generation of diners (I'm not just talking really "young," but just folks who might be genX or just pre-genX) who think about the dining experience different than others), or something that is simply "tolerated" by people but might merely be happening for some other reason. There are lots of possibilities to explain this and I'd love to see something that might have been written on this that really takes into account a broader number of explanations. Lemme know if anyone has seen stuff written on this...

[Kevin Davis]

My wife and I were debating this a couple of nights ago while we ate in a restaurant with TVs. I suspect that this has much to do with the same trend driving so many new restaurants: people, particularly professionals/two-income households, are eating out more and eating at home less. To the extent that dining out moves from an irregular treat to a more regular occurrence in that demo, the more that the old home standby of grabbing a meal in front of the TV set replicates itself in restaurants.

I have no facts to back this theory up -- just a theory.

[Joe Eater]

Jack - The noisy restaurant thing seemed to start maybe in the 80s. I think it was consciously adopted by some restaurateurs, but I don't know that TVs were necessarily part of the mix. I ought to do what some places do and include a sound rating as part of information about restaurants.

Kevin - Pretty much everyone is dining out more than they used to, say, 10 or 20 years ago. I'd like to know what's driving that. Is it time pressure? Is it money, somehow (in either direction: could be, say, an increase in disposable income, or a decrease in how cheaply one can eat out)? Is it people forgetting how to cook? Is it that restaurants are better at sucking people in, either through tasty food or advertising or some other method? It's a big question.

BTW, for whomever didn't click through to the blog I linked to (which is what I intended, but whatever): If you really feel like you have to put a TV in every corner of your restaurant, at least turn the damn closed captioning on and the sound off.