Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Bye bye, Bennigan's

Though I haven't had a Monte Cristo or Turkey O' Toole in years, the news about Bennigan's restaurants shutting down in the Tampa Bay area and around the country saddens me a bit.

One interesting comment from a reader caught my attention, though: "While I feel bad for the employees, really, how many places like this does the world need? With Applebee's, Friday's, blah, blah, blah... They have no soul. I'll stick with locally owned independent places."

That, to me, is such a tiresome and worthless complaint. Are we supposed to punish restaurants for creating a business strategy and replicating their success elsewhere?

I care not much for "soul" with my meal; I'm all about finding good, affordable food. And so should most other folks, especially those of us firmly entrenched in the middle class. Goodness knows what I'd do if, say, Chili's were to go the way of the dodo.

UPDATE: Glad to see I'm not the only person who will miss Bennigan's. But it certainly sounds like that one, situated near the infamous Mons Venus in Tampa, had a little more to offer than overpriced burgers and flat beer.

2 comments:

John P. Araujo said...

The DFW area woke up yesterday to find out that all but one of their Bennigan's had closed. The Bennigan's staff barely had any warning as well - basically just getting a call not to come in to work. The DFW area has a lot of stuff coming up, but also a lot of stuff shutting down. That's how a market economy works, I suppose.

blackink said...

Yeah, that market for casual restaurants is a tad, uh, overstuffed and has been bit hard by all the recent economic woes.

What really hurts is that more than 400 folks in the Tampa Bay area also lost their jobs. That can't help our job market here, at all.