It was also a weird bookend to the time that Don went to the Hilton in Rome with Betty and they also rolled out the carpet, but that time the carpet was red, not orange, and it was Rome, not a crappy HoJos on the side of the highway.
Which reminds me – What kind of action did Roger think he was going to get at a Howard Johnson?
Not to get all pedantic, but what’s with the hyphen in the thread title every week?
Just a guess, as I’m not the OP, but it might help with searching because of the inability to search for 3-letter words.
It’s to make the threads searchable in the board’s system, which won’t search on three-letter terms. No longer essential now that you can google search the boards, but still thoughtful.
This ep didn’t do much for me–the musical Stoli bottle was the best part.
Not so much in my opinion but to each their own.
[QUOTE=ascenray]
Howard Johnson’s was one of the few places that had dozens of different flavors of ice cream.
[/QUOTE]
The joke was that “at Howard Johnson’s, the ice cream comes in 28 flavors and the food comes in one.”
Actually, they had very good frozen chicken croquettes.
And they essentially invented the modern Family Dining Restaurant - you know, Olive Rubybees. They figured out that if you took the bellies out of clams they’d travel better, so you could provide the same experience in Miami and Omaha.
Thanks for the iTunes recommendations!
can anyone identify the music playing from the vodka bottle?
We took a lot of driving vacations when I was a kid- early 1970’s and on. We would occasionally stop at a HoJo’s for a meal if there was nothing else around, but they were consistently bad, and that included the waitstaff. My parents used to joke that they must have sent every waitress trainee to crabbiness school because regardless of where we were in the country, they were uniformly surly, slow and unapologetic. And we’d never stay in one- we were meant for the finer things in life, like Holiday Inn. 
We’d always shout “Howard Johnson’s!” if we passed one, in a usually-failed attempt to get my parents to stop, but only because they served ice cream. Plus, we got a kick out of the nickname “HoJo”.
No, they don’t. Maybe on mushrooms (MAYBE!), but not on LSD.
The cigarette thing happens though.
Yeah, I think it was highlighting that Megan is a very different person than Betty, and not all the difference work out in Don’s favour.
Which raises the question; why did Don use Plattsburgh’s closeness to Montreal as a selling point in the first place? :dubious:
I was wondering why the hell they were excited about the clams. Who goes to Upstate New York for clams? :eek:
I don’t think he did.
From reading the history of Howard Johnson’s on Wikipedia, they were apparently famous for their fried clams. Also, a few years prior to the events in this show, they hired Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin away from a high-end French restaurant to develop recipes for the restaurants.
For the same reason people go to the Iowa state fair for deep-fried butter.
Deep-fried breaded fat is ridiculously delicious in any format. Believe it or not, fried clams were kind of a delicacy in those days. Not an expensive French restaurant kind of delicacy but one for ordinary folks. All over the northeast rust belt, cities had huge Catholic populations and in those pre-Vatican II days they were forbidden from eating meat on Fridays. So in every city fish stands opened on Fridays to process fried fish (always Haddock in our area but cod and other varieties elsewhere) and more expensive accompaniments like fried clams and fried shrimp. Acolytes battled over the holiness of bread crusting vs beer battering. Dinners came with fantastic french fries and a cole slaw that still is the gold standard that I downgrade all others by. Restaurants couldn’t function without their Friday only fried fish nights, but getting takeout from these neighborhood stores was cheaper and wildly popular among every ethnic group, not just Catholics. The smell of the cooking oil pervaded the air and drew you in from a mile away. The goods were served in paper bags that developed huge grease spots by the time you got them home. Nine million calories later, you popped one last cold fry into your mouth and wished for next Friday to hurry around. Getting fried clams on a non-Friday night would have seemed special to everyone involved. Getting them at will anytime by going to a HoJo was like taking a kid to a ballpark. Yum.
A er friend of a friend who was a big druggie says while LSD and shrooms might cause visual and auditory distortions and synesthesia the only drug they have ever taken that could cause full blown suddenly in the middle of a lucid dream delusions would be the dissociatives like ketamine and DXM, and even then it is while your eyes are closed.
Before my time, they used to be good. Fried clams with the bellies is an northeast coast staple the same way BBQ is in the south. Now most places have those frozen godawful rubbery little clam strips (no belly).
Wikipedia has info on when HoJo switched to clam strips, but no date.
I think it was the Russian national anthem.
God, I hope you’re right because that’s hilarious.