I went to Hooters in the UK. The beer was cold and the wings were crispy, but I was puzzled by the family-friendly vibe.

Business Insider

3 days ago

I visited Hooters on a Thursday evening.
The restaurant I went to is located in Newcastle upon Tyne, which I was visiting to see my parents at Easter.
Newcastle is in the north east of England, about 250 miles north of London as the crow flies.
There are two other Hooters in the UK: one in Nottingham, and one in Liverpool.
While Hooters is renowned for its scantily-clad serving staff, the restaurant's entry has a distinctly family-friendly tone.
Alongside a folksy faux "wanted" sign appealing for customers was a framed photo of some staff posing with a gaggle of young children.
I was also struck by the wide array of merch available. I'm a big fan of the tendency of pretty much every business in the US to sell some kind of branded apparel, and promptly bought myself a T-shirt. Even more promptly, my partner prohibited me from ever leaving the house wearing it.
The family-friendly feeling continued inside with a sign advertising free kids' meals one day a week.
While lots of restaurants offer similar deals, it was nice to see Hooters embrace being family-friendly. It certainly seemed to be working when I visited at around 8 p.m., with two families with preteen kids eating dinner.
Hooters Newcastle is located right in the very heart of the city.
Located a three-minute walk from Newcastle's cathedral, Hooters couldn't be any more central.
Newcastle is a city renowned for lots of things: its history of shipbuilding, producing globally successful musicians like Sting — and its soccer club, Newcastle United.
It's possibly most famous within the UK, however, for its nightlife. The city has a reputation as a great location for stag and hen parties — the UK equivalent of bachelor and bachelorettes — thanks to its abundance of cheap and hospitable late-night bars.
Hooters Newcastle seems to want to lean into the city's reputation
As well as being extremely central, the restaurant is also located on a street called the Bigg Market, an area with a reputation for attracting the worst of the city's drunken revellers.
The location, twinned with the forefronting of the family-friendly ethos, struck me as slightly odd and a little contradictory. Why open your restaurant right in the heart of partyland, a place where few families are likely to visit, while also very visibly trying to attract families?
This question intensified late on in my visit when, during a particularly exciting moment in a Manchester United soccer match being shown, one customer — perhaps intoxicated by both booze and sporting loyalty — sprinted round the restaurant screaming in support of his team.
As my colleague Alex Bitter noted when he visited a US Hooters recently, Neil Kiefer, the chief executive of Hooters' founding group, HMC Hospitality Group, has recently placed an emphasis on being more family-friendly.
While the Hooters in Newcastle is not operated by HMC, this could explain the confused messaging.
Mixed messages aside, I was impressed on entering the restaurant.
Not only was it spacious, airy, and very clean, but the staff were — as expected for a business that prides itself on its friendly servers — absolutely delightful.
Plenty of TVs showing an array of sports dotted the walls, as did lots and lots of "fun" signs, including mottos such as "Tans fade, but wings are forever," and a cartoon of Marge Simpson dressed in a Hooters uniform.
I'd taken the precaution of booking a table, something that seemed to slightly throw the waitress who greeted us given the 200-seat location only had about 25 customers in it when we arrived.
We were seated right away by the smiling Michelle, our server for the night.
Michelle, clad in Hooters' famous tank top and orange hot pants, immediately delivered us pint glasses filled with iced water, something you get in virtually every restaurant in the US, but is fairly rare in Britain.
She briefly explained the menu to us, before leaving us to our own devices … for roughly three minutes.
Service was speedy, friendly, and precise.
If you're looking for discreet and quiet service, Hooters is not the place for you. Our server came to our table every few minutes to check how we were doing and asked if we'd like to order no less than four times in the first 15 minutes after we sat down.
We Brits are used to a certain cool disinterest from our waiters, in contrast to the exuberant friendliness of American servers.
This is largely down to the difference in tipping culture between our two nations. While tipping and service charges are becoming much more common in the UK, unlike in the US, our service staff don't rely on tips to ensure a livable income.
I'm skeptical of Hooters in the UK for this very reason. Because servers aren't working for tips, there's simply less incentive for the staff to be overtly friendly and engaging, possibly undermining one of its key selling points. That said, it didn't seem to be the case with our server.
I had zero complaints about how quickly my beer arrived.
A pitcher of beer arrived ice-cold in just a couple of minutes, and our food order was taken very promptly.
Hooters' menu contains a baffling variety of foods.
We opted for a handful of Hooters classics, including chicken wings.
While wings are certainly a thing in the UK, they're nowhere near as popular here as they are in the States.
Hooters wings in the UK come with a choice of nine sauces and four rubs of varying spice levels, running the gamut from Parmesan garlic to spicy garlic, which carried a warning of being "really, really hot."
This reminded me a little of the heat options at Britain's legendary chicken chain, Nando's.
For our 20 bone-in wings, which cost us £16.99 (roughly $22.50), we opted for the medium.
We also ordered 10 boneless wings.
Costing £10.99 ($14.50) we got them tossed in a cajun honey sauce.
It was my first time trying boneless wings — which aren't actually wings, but glorified chicken nuggets. They were delicious: tender, juicy, and with a nice sweet and spicy kick from the Cajun honey.
The regular wings were pretty darn good too. I've eaten my fair share of wings in both the UK and US, and these were a fine example. Crispy on the outside but with soft, yielding flesh on the inside, and importantly, generously sauced.
The sides were good too.
Tater tots don't really exist in the UK, so there was a definite novelty to ordering what the menu called "Lots-A-Tots."
The tots for £7.99 (about $10.60) were very good, topped with melted American cheese, sour cream, scallions, and bacon bits. I'm sure if you've had tater tots before, these would have been nothing special, but they scored big points on novelty alone.
Fried jalapenos were also perfectly serviceable, though the mountain of sour cream was overkill.
All in all, the food at Hooters was substantially better than I expected. Would I tell all my friends to rush down there? Probably not. But would I happily go back for some wings and a couple of beers? Absolutely.
The one bum note of the evening was the cocktails.
For the sake of testing every part of the menu, I asked my dining companions to order a couple of cocktails. They opted for a classic margarita and a Sea Breeze, which featured vodka, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, and lime.
The verdict? Too sweet, and not nearly boozy enough.
I found myself asking one big question: who is this place for?
I just couldn't really work out the target market. The location and the general concept of the restaurant seemed to be geared toward straight, sports-loving men, but the signage and promotions seemed geared to attracting families.
Sure, these two demographics can probably coexist, but do groups of men want small children hanging around while they watch soccer, and do parents want drunk, rowdy men swearing and drinking near their kids? Probably not.
I don't doubt that the Hooters location in Newcastle, which opened earlier this year, will be a success. "Geordies" love eating and drinking, and its prime location sets it up well for success.
Beyond that, however, it's not hard to see why the mixed messaging at the heart of the brand's modern identity has confused some customers, and left some pundits questioning where Hooters fits in modern dining.