Hooters has all the trappings of a great institution: good food, low prices, attractive women. The sudden closure of more than 40 branches of the chain in the US is perhaps one of the surest signs that America in 2024 occupies a different universe to the one Hooters entered into in the 1980s.
This looks like the beginning of the end of the American “breastaurant” dream. Rising food and labour costs are eroding the fast-casual dining sector’s reputation for affordability. “Like many restaurants under pressure from current market conditions, Hooters has made the difficult decision to close a select number of underperforming stores,” a company statement read. Fox News blamed its usual suspect: “Bidenomics hits Hooters.” The chain is truculent, arguing that it remains both resilient and, er, “highly […] relevant”.
One conservative pundit joked that “the Hooters in Gainesville, Florida closed permanently today. If that one can’t survive Biden’s economy, none can.” Others think that the gimmick has simply played out – that the boobs-in-your-face, slap-the-waitress-on-the-backside kind of restaurant experience just isn’t that fun any more. The Gen Z and millennial social justice activists are quick to label more innocuous things as deplorable or problematic. Hooters is hardly a fitting HQ for this HR revolution. Or maybe, after 40 years, it turns out that America is just more of an ass guy.
When I pulled up to my local Hooters in northern Virginia at 3.15 on a Tuesday afternoon to investigate, it took me 30 seconds to conclude that truly good things never die. That, and America really does have a workplace productivity problem. The parking lot was packed. Hooters was brimming. The covered patio, for those who wanted to smoke in 30-plus degree heat with a serene view of the parking lot, was also heaving. At the bar sat 12 men and me, seven months pregnant. The man to my left was WFH (working from Hooters), sending emails and Slack messages to colleagues with a beer in hand. The man to my right was, I think, schizophrenic.
The thing about Hooters is that you’re compromised the moment you walk in the door. You’ve come in for some chicken wings, maybe to catch the game on TV. But there are loads of places that serve these needs. By choosing Hooters you’re confessing: I want all of these things, with cleavage on the side. You could lie, but it’s no good. Playboy really did have some great articles, some of the best in fact. But no one believed that as an explanation for buying an issue. The middle-aged maths teacher who joined me as I sat outside tried this. I asked him if he thought it was sad that Hooters outlets all over the country were closing down, without even telling their staff. “Oh, that’s crazy. But I just came here because of all the traffic on the highway. It’s not somewhere I’d usually come.” Right. “Not a bad place to be stuck,” he added.
It’s an everybody’s welcome kind of place, a model of diversity: teachers, the WFHers, a man with his large Samoyed, a mother and her child, and the Trump-loving hairy bikers sat with a view of their Harleys. But this cross section of American society is typically apolitical. “Are you showing the presidential debate later?” I asked the 20-year-old waitress, who I’d seen walk in ten minutes prior in an oversized Little Mermaid T-shirt (a chilling reminder she’d probably been a kid at Disneyland just a few years ago). “The game?” she asked. “Never mind,” I replied.
Hooters was founded in Clearwater, Florida in 1983 by six men with no restaurant experience. They wanted “a place we couldn’t get kicked out of”, as one of them put it to the Tampa Bay Times last year. The first Hooters girl, Lynne Austin, was hired by one of the founders after he had spotted her at a bikini contest. She went on to model for Playboy. Soon, more “breastaurant” chains opened across the country; the Tilted Kilt Pub and Eatery, a Scottish-themed bar that serves cottage pie opened in the early Noughties in Las Vegas, featuring tiny skirts and bikini tops. Twin Peaks opened in 2005 in Texas, a mountain-themed restaurant with women in tiny khaki shorts and camo bras. In 2014, Twin Peaks was recognised as “one of the nation’s fastest-growing restaurant chains”. In 2017, in response to the first bout of declining sales, Hooters opened a spin-off, Hoots, where it employed men and women who were modestly dressed.
American culture will be flatter for losing a chain like Hooters. As astute cultural critics have noted, we live in a weirdly sexless moment, one in which “everybody is beautiful and nobody is horny”. What people miss, underneath the sleaze and cheap leering, is that Hooters in 2024 is a conservative institution: this is a world of stripper poles at the Super Bowl half-time show; an internet culture that gives Gen Z access to graphic nudity via their smartphones; and where “sex-positivity” has eroded traditional mores. That a Hooters waitress may show a little more skin than the place next door seems like a trivial difference in this milieu. Hooters symbolises something otherwise lost in the culture: somewhere you can eat wings, watch the game, have a beer and, of course, check out chicks.
The US in 2024 is being pulled between two poles. On one hand there is the priggish HR culture that seeks to censor and purify the world. On the other, there is the turbo-charged erosion of traditional sexual ethics at the hands of pornography, OnlyFans and social media. In the middle is Hooters, a last vestige of pre-internet America. Without it the world would be less sleazy, less gross, and less fun. And, really, the wings are good.
[See also: The four-day work week is the future]
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