Tryphoon’s Lair

Yesterday, having taken my third official day off since we moved to California 9 months ago, the family (including Mum visiting from France) decided to spend part of the day at the beach. Weather was good (~ 30ºC), sky was blue, wind was OK in Santa Monica…

Lunch time arrived rapidly and I suggested we go to a place called Bubba Gump. Not the best restaurant in the world, but easy going, on the pier and serving some fab chicken tenders coated in some hot sauce…

I had already been in one of these restaurant once but I couldn’t help but being amused by the way things work there. The place is themed after the movie Forrest Gump. We are talking the full shebang here, including ping pong racket for dessert menu, plastic plates, memorabilia on the walls and as a result, one of the most famous sentence of the movie is constantly present…. “Run Forrest Run”…

So, imagine you are at your table and you would like to order a new beer… Instead of having to find a waiter, wave, wait, wave more, wait more and get annoyed (or on the other end of the spectrum, have a waiter at your table every 2 minutes asking if things are OK so far (mainly US way of doing things) ), you simply replace the “Run Forrest Run” sign by the underlying one showing “Stop Forrest Stop” and within a very short time, a waiter stops at the table, shouts “Stop Forrest Stop” and starts taking orders…

Definitely another  way of doing things on this side of the pond… but this time I must admit I found it pretty useful. 

The next thing was that I couldn’t help but thinking how such a concept would work, back in France… Creating a French Movie themed restaurant, maybe not based on one film but on several classical comedies… And here we could have the Martini or shots from “Les Tontons Flingeurs”, the “Doubitchou” and “Kloug” from “Le père Noël est une ordure” and the cheese fondue and crepes from “Les Bronzés font du Ski”… All we would need is someone else who knows more about French cinema than me, a couple of nice investors and we would be done, retiring in 10 years.