I was feeling like a burger, there was a non-chain individually operated place with burger in its name I had seen a few times and decided to check out.(never saw a car in the lot though)
The front door is locked:confused: A security guard appeared quickly and let me in looking kind of uncomfortable, he assured me they were open.
Dining room totally empty, go to the counter manned by one woman and ask if they have any specials and am told they have no burgers as they are sold out of patties(due to the rush obviously:dubious:) so I ask just what they do have and she says fries and other sides. The posted prices for burgers was expensive anyway, as I leave the security guard locks the door quickly behind me.
I have since that day never seen more than one car in front of this place.
The first thing that came to mind was that this place is a front for some other kind of operation.
The presence of a security guard is very suspicious.
This is either something run by the government (you know… them, those guys in the trenchcoats), or else by some organization even more shady than the aforementioned gentlefolks.
I forgot to add that this was at 1pm on a weekday, so it isn’t like right before closing or opening.
I like to stroll and wander if I have the time, and I like to try new restaurants or unfamiliar ethnic restaurants on a whim. In all my days of doing this I have seen two restaurants including the burger place that made me wonder wtf was going on, the other was a vegetarian place in Houston that claimed they catered to buddhists on the sign. Nice inside but no one else was there but us(I wasn’t alone this time), one woman and her son? who was watching what looked like Korean soap operas. We order and the woman takes our order and goes to the kitchen never to return, we’re waiting for close to thirty minutes and the kid refuses to respond and no response from the back so we just decide to leave and get something else.
EDIT: I’d be interested if anyone else has ever experienced something like this.
Trust the internet to paranoid. There are many places that are not open for lunch but start to open close to that time for more an evening crown. Sounded to me like a bar that was closed but decided to open since they had the staff there. For all they knew you just wanted some onion rings and a beer.
Pretty sure they didn’t have a bar or even serve beer, they are also closed at night(around 6pm) because everytime I pass by at night they are totally dark.
If they were only planning on opening in the evening, fries are the last thing they’d have available. It takes a long time to get a deep fryer up to temperature. I think that a front of some sort really is the simplest explanation.
Not quite in the same category: There’s a new Turkish place in town that closes on weekdays at 6:30 PM, and isn’t open Sundays at all (I haven’t tried on a Saturday yet). I have been there once when they were open, though, and they really did have food (quite good, actually), so I think that one’s just a case of poor business sense. They might be trying for the weekday lunch market, but they’re really too far from campus (the major employer in this town) to be convenient for that, and besides, if you’re planning to just be open for lunch, you close at about 2:00, not 6:30.
My mother once worked at an Italian restaurant like that. They had very few customers outside the occasional “business lunch” where local “businessmen” would discuss “business” over a huge meal in the private dining room.
It could be a drug money laundering place. There are a couple in my neighborhood, they always seem surprised that you want to order something. There was this Salvadoran place a few blocks from my house that started out great, but then got worse and worse until we all asked ourselves how could it stay open? Then a couple of years ago, four people were shot outside it in a shootout and then an undercover sting busted the owner. The place is still locked up and you can see menus and sivlerware on the tables.
I used to live in Japan. There was this ramen place in Shin-Yokohama I walked by once. It was a storefront in a building with the front picture window painted opaque black with a picture of a ramen bowl on it. Of course, this is not only just weird on the surface but completely contrary to common restaurant practice and Japanese restaurant practice in particular, where the desire is to have a window to look through and verify that others are joyfully partaking of the food. There was also no menu posted outside to see, which is also rare in Japan. I thought then that it looked like a front.
This is what cracks me up about fronts. What, you’re *surprised *that I want what’s advertised in your window? I’m not part of your nefarious underbelly, dude! If you’re going to keep a front, you should probably keep a few burgers in the back to throw in the nuker when some clueless non-criminal type wanders in your door!
There’s a “bakery”* near where I used to live in West Rogers Park like this. Blinds always tightly drawn, the front door is always locked despite the “OPEN” sign, absolutely zero web presence, doesn’t even show up on Google “Search Nearby” or Yelp! or Centercity. …I’ve never had the nerve to go inside.
*I’ve got an absolutely perfect picture of it on Google Street View, but it doesn’t seem you can share a link to it, being Flash and all. If you’re terribly interested, look for the CTA depot at Western and Howard, and then back up about 100 feet. Look east. Spooky, eh? That red pedo van is ALWAYS there, too.
It’s in a space that used to be a bowling alley. The room is huge and there aren’t that many tables, so it’s like a small group of tables in the midst of a room with space around the edges. Five or so years ago I went there half a dozen times over about two years. I was nearly always the only one there. The menu is bizarrely diverse. (Even the free appetizers they put out when you get there make no consistent sense. They give you chips and salsa and also bread and butter.) The food was actually good. There’s no way that they can be making money on the restaurant. It’s next to a nightclub and owned by the same people, but I don’t understand why they would be bothering with the restaurant.
There’s a pizza place about 3/4 of a mile from my house. It’s been in business at least 45 years, under different owners and with several different names. I used to drive by with my father now and then, and he’d go into his paranoid rant about how it had to be a front for the mafia because nobody ever went in and nobody ever came out* and have you ever seen the door open? I just let it go in one ear and out the other until finally I got fed up and drove around the back to show him the parking lot full of cars and people going in the back door.
I didn’t know it was even there. I always just assumed if people weren’t coming in the front, they must be going in the back. Duh.
