Remember when people used to defend their choice to go to Hooters? It wasn’t about the girls, they would say, it was for the food. They had good food, right? You’ve probably heard people singing the praises of their wings, and while that might have gotten them by in the 1980s and ’90s, we have higher expectations now.
When Hooters got their 30th-anniversary overhaul, USA Today reported they were finally giving their menu an update, too. It wasn’t until then that they brought in a new chef with some actual fine dining experience, and he wasn’t impressed with how they had been doing things. Chef Gregg Brickman told one reporter that when he arrived, the most important tool in a Hooters’ kitchen was “a scissors — to open a bag.” Yikes.
Those wings? Frozen. The burgers? Frozen. You get the idea. In an era of social media and celebrity chefs, people just want to get more than that for their hard-earned dollars, and Hooters spent far too long coasting on the idea that people were really actually going there just for the food. Honest.