biobioprof said:
PS3D said:
halibut sinclair said:
PS3D said:
halibut sinclair said:
Quote:
Sorry, but chains have to come first, if you can't support chains, you can't support these mythical "great local restaurants" everyone speaks of.
What? Most towns are chock full of local restaurants and other businesses long before the chains come in.
College Station is a relatively new city, and in many ways functions as a typical suburb would on the edge of Houston that gets its start with chains and moves onto great local sustainable restaurants later on (and by "sustainable" I mean ones that won't get run out by chains). The original stock of "local" restaurants like Pelican's Wharf, Fort Shiloh, et. al. seemed to go away with the rise of the chains, but if you can't support chains then you won't be able to support hip local joints. You know what I'm saying...?
I really don't and I don't think you do either.
Well, explain your position without passive-aggressively attacking me as you've done in the past.
Don't know about halibut, but it seems to me that you've shifted your position from "chains come first" to "locals can't always survive the arrival of chains in the same market niche". It might be true that chains actually come first in new suburbs attached to a larger city. You could even argue that this is what is happening within B/CS as a smaller city where chains tend to dominate the periphery - like the ongoing discussion of Tower Point.
Even then, it does not follow that a community's ability to support the local joints (hip or unhip) is connected to supporting chains.
I've been here long enough to remember Fort Shiloh and Pelican Wharf existing, but I never ate at either. Did they go because of competition from chains or for some other reason? Given how hard the restaurant business is, they might have gone away for unrelated reasons.
Well, I did expand my opinion that we can't forget that College Station DID have some local options years ago, but my point was that chains have their place in the "restaurant food chain". It seems to me that when people demand "local restaurant options", they don't mean mediocre Tex-Mex or another seafood place that serves tilapia. They want something that's
trendy, something that food writers will write home about, something that excels in the local cuisine, and something you can be proud of taking people to when they visit town, because Koppe Bridge and Chicken Oil Co. just aren't what they used to be. But to support
those types of restaurants, you need an environment where the big restaurant chains can do well, too. As for your second question, I know for a fact that one of the officially stated reasons for the closure of the Texan Restaurant
was chains. I can't speak for Pelican's Wharf or Fort Shiloh, though.