TheBanyanTree: trendy schmendy

[Julie Anna Teague]

I hate to pop in for a rant, especially when life is good, but a button
has been pushed, folks, and the warning bells are ringing.  I have 
lived in Bloomington, Indiana, since 1979 when I came here to go to the 
University.  I have always, for the most part, loved it here, and was 
thrilled to find a good job here after college.  The winter cold gets 
tiresome, and honestly, sometimes even the summer heat gets tiresome, 
but living in a smallish University town has a lot to recommend itself. 
   When I moved here, it was almost a sleepy little town--the 
University, which nearly closed down in the summer, warm lakes, deep 
green woods, some classic old-time greasy spoons and mom-n-pops', small 
hardware stores, a five-and-dime store with a lunch counter downtown, 
and a smattering of health food co-ops, yoga studios, art studios, head 
shops, coffee shops, bead shops, record stores, and ethnic restaurants 
that made Bloomington "different" from the surrounding areas.

Over the years, things exploded, of course, as towns and Universities 
have a way of doing.  But it wasn't until the past, maybe five, years 
that things turned toward the ultra-trendy.  It's as if someone decided 
that they wanted Bloomington to have a more cosmopolitan flair and set 
out to artificially create it, deliver it unto the great unwashed.  
Because we're still in Indiana, and cosmopolitan flair doesn't come 
naturally.  We get a lot of students from Chicago and the East Coast, 
so maybe it's what they want.  But it's not what most long time 
residents want.  We want Bloomington, with it's uniqueness, it's 
quirkiness, it's old shops, it's regular small town dirt and grime, 
rather than something slicker and possibly slimier.

Before I sound like a "things were better back in the day" kind of 
whiner, I do realize that small towns tend to grow and change, but the 
growth spurt and the change we've seen lately feels so foisted on us by 
developers and downtown renovation experts.  They are robbing 
Bloomington of it's identity, along with creating even a wider and more 
obvious gap between the haves and the have nots.

So last night my partner, Lee, and I went out to a new restaurant.  We 
had a gift certificate, or I'm not so sure we would have bothered.  
It's a locally owned restaurant touting real food (whatever that 
means), fresh produce (the mushrooms on our fire-baked pizza were 
described as "foraged"), etc.  The concept was interesting, although it 
all seemed a bit too trendy and slick.  And it was.  The whole place 
seemed to be shooting for a fake kind of uber-trendiness.  The staff 
was snooty.  The prices, for Bloomington, were steep.  The food was 
pretentious, and to top it off, it wasn't even good.  I got a stomach 
ache from one innocent-enough sounding dish that lasted the rest of the 
night.

The highlights: when the hostess (and restaurant manager, we later 
found out) decided to notice that we had come in the door, after we'd 
stood around for a couple of minutes trying to figure out what we 
should do next, she sort made a feint at coming halfway towards us and 
motioned us to follow her with a pointed finger and no "please".  We 
did so, and by the time we caught up with her in the dining room area, 
she had stopped to talk to someone at one of the tables.  We stood 
there, in the middle of the dining room, and waited rather awkwardly 
for several minutes.  A waiter looked at us and shrugged and we were 
just about to pick out our own damned table when the hostess turned 
back to us, and without a word of apology for leaving us hanging there 
like lost idiots, directed us to the worst table in the place, despite 
there being many other tables empty.  The table was next to a cabinet 
to which waitpersons came and went once every minute or so to pull out 
silverware, small plates, etc, and had to move so close to our table 
that Lee felt they were going to step on his feet.  We couldn't even 
have a private conversation.  We're not shy--we moved ourselves to a 
new table.  Which made the waitress rather snooty, but we didn't care, 
it was just so awkward.  The waitress started rattling of the specials 
at a clip that was hard to follow, and when she got to "frog legs", Lee 
and I both wrinkled our noses and said, "Ewww."  This reaction in her 
customers, however, did not dissuade her from continuing on with the 
drawn out description of the frog leg special as if we might be 
persuaded to order something that we found ghastly to begin with. After 
her spiel and a look at the menu, I said, "I'd seen on the website that 
you had thus-n-such, but I don't see it on the menu."  She said, "Oh, 
you must want the tapas menu."  Well, yeah, I thought, I would like to 
see ALL the food that is available to me at this restaurant.  Like, did 
I need a secret word?  Did we not look like "tapas" people?  The whole 
thing was just weird weird weird.  Oh so trendy, and oh so weird.  We 
won't eat there again. We will go back to our little ethnic restaurants 
where we know the owners because they are run by friendly people who 
are less interested in being trendy than in being authentic and 
welcoming.  We'll be going back to eat Sammy's food at the Peach 
Garden, a hole-in-the-wall with paper place mats and tacky Chinese art 
but the best seschuan green beens I've ever eaten.  Or back to Samira 
where the owner always comes out to greet people and make sure you've 
enjoyed his food and his little restaurant.  Give me a wobbly chair, 
some mismatched cutlery, and some really good food.  Give me heartfelt. 
  Give me community.

Julie