The Wallflower Report

Last time I explained one way to know if you’re in a mall or an airport. I guess next I should explain The Rules of Eating At The Mall, so that once you’ve figured out that you’re in a mall, you know how to eat appropriately. Apparently, a lot of people don’t know these rules or even realize that there are rules.

The thing you have to realize is that when you’re in the mall, you have to eat mall food. You know, it’s like that saying: when in Rome, eat lark’s tongues or something gross like that.

Mall food, obviously, comes from the food court, but not every restaurant in the food court is serving actual mall food. This is why you have to know The Rules.

First, any Chinese or other Asian restaurant in the food court is automatically mall food.

Second, any Cajun or other ethnic restaurant which mimics the set-up of the Asian restaurants (sometimes right down to having Asian staff) is also automatically mall food.

Any food court restaurant which serves sub sandwiches and is not a Subway, Blimpies, Little King, or Quiznos is mall food.

Any restaurant in the food court that does not exist in your area as a stand-alone restaurant is mall food. Any restaurant that does have actual restaurants is off-limits, unless it fits into a category above. For most people, this means no going to Burger King or Arby’s. Those have no business being in a mall food court in the first place, and by buying their food you’re only encouraging them to loiter around, taking up spaces that could be used for another Chinese restaurant or a Sbarro’s or something.

Oh, yeah. Sbarro’s is also automatically mall food, even if you live somewhere that has actual Sbarro’s restaurants. Same thing for Orange Julius and Cinnabon.

So, for instance, if I went to a mall and saw a Chick Fils-A, I could eat there, because there is no Chick Fils-A in my area. I could not eat at a Runza, but somebody from outside the midwest could.

Now, these rules are very important. They are as important as they are totally not something I just made up. The reason for them is to protect the delicate ecology of the mall’s… um… biosphere. In my years as a mall environmentalist, I’ve found that once a hole-in-the-Great-Wall Chinese restaurant closes and a Burger King moves in, there’s really no going back. If you really want to live in a world where you can walk into a proper sized shopping mall with a Hot Topic and everything and not know without checking that there will be a Sbarro’s Pizza and a Chinese place, give your food court dollars to Burger King or Arby’s or McDonald’s or whatever.

But I for one believe we must preserve our nation’s precious mall eateries for our children’s children, which works out good because that’s mostly who seems to be hanging out in the food courts now.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.