Reply #15: You live in Raleigh. There's demand for such things.

[jmowreader]

In the Land of the Lost, your restaurant can almost only stay open if it's a chain eatery. This isn't an absolute but it's close to it. This town is full of GIs who want to eat the same things they ate at home...meaning Applebee's is packed, Chili's is packed, IHOP is packed, as is the Waffle House...while the Lobster House went out of business thirty times under twenty-five different owners (Bobby Warren owned it six different times), the Rose Garden lasted a year and a half (to be fair, the Rose Garden went out of business because Bobby Warren was killed in a traffic accident while taking a load of linens to the cleaner's), De La Fayette's been empty for the last nine years (yup: Bobby Warren owned that one too), the Rainbow Room went out of business four times...

The restaurants that cater to local tastes are all of the "diner" persuasion. These places advertise "home cooking." Well, guess what, friends and countrymen: I know how to make "home cooking" myself. I don't want to pay someone to make me "home cooking." I want Restaurant Food, dammit. I swear that if I win the Powerball I'm gonna open me up a place and write "Restaurant Food" on the side of it in foot-high letters. It's like the old joke I saw: "Food like mother used to make: $2.50. Food like mother was trying to make but couldn't: $5.00."

And with that...the very classiest restaurant in the city of Fayettenam is the Hot Box Imbiss. A GI's German wife got lonely for good old fashioned German snack bar...well, I guess you'd call it cuisine...so she flew back to Germany to buy a Doner Mystery Meat machine, leased a storefront half a mile from Fort Bragg, and started cooking up doner kebabs, currywursts, bratwursts and schnitzel sandwiches mit Pommes und Cola oder Bier. With the wheelbarrows of money all of us guys who were stationed in Germany (and who also missed Imbiss food) made her, she bought her space plus the storefront next to hers, knocked a hole in the wall, and created a proper German gasthaus with a bar and everything. It's really nice in there--and it's full every day.