Originally Posted by BamaVol

We've had 3 in 4 years. None lasted more than a year. I ate at one a month after it opened. The waiter was a 16 year old with a toothpick in his mouth! It took tremendous self-control not to slap it out of his face. The food was utter ..... I'm thinking of several problems.

1. Without the training you get from a corporate chain, most independents have no idea how to run a restaurant.

2. Local citizens are interested in quantity, not quality. All you can eat would go over well, but the only way to make money doing that here is to serve slop. Charging for quantity and quality is not an option due to the (generally) low incomes.

3. There are no local citizens of Italian heritage. One of my doctors (a fellow damn-yankee) says he's met one other It-Am besides me in 14 years of practice. He and I talk about delis and pizza when I have an appointment. We'd both frequent a good Italian restaurant, but it would take more than us to keep it going.

As I said, I don't have a problem with OG food, in fact I love the soup/salad/breadsticks lunch. And I grew up in a 2nd generation It-Am home, eating the family recipes hand written (some in Italian) my whole life and have generally lived in and around major cities (Boston, San Francisco, Denver) where good Italian food could be found. So, regardless of what your opinion of OG is, people here want one.

I just want to know how much hate mail I should expect when I point out the perpetual hunger that exists here, and the resulting average 44 inch waistline. Really.

People here are so fat ...

Ed: How fat are they?

They're so fat, that there's one small store for short and thin people. All the other stores sizes start at XL.