It quickly went viral, linked to by websites such as Eater and Huffington Post, retweeted hundreds of times.
A few weeks later, the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency ran a piece titled “If This Fusion Restaurant’s Website Could Talk.’’ An excerpt: “HEY HEY HEY! Watch this slide show! LOOK! We have modern chairs and minimalist light fixtures!! LOOK! It’s an orchid floating in a pool at sunset! Want to hear some DANCE MUSIC???? Mute it any time you like! Just click the animated parakeet flying around the screen! You want to get into the site??? Just click the smallest fork!!! DANCE MUSIC!!!!!’’
Restaurant websites are famously bad. They are easy targets for mockery — often user-unfriendly tools that feature Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files, as you realize only once they start downloading. Meanwhile, basic information about location and hours is hard to come by, daily specials lists date to 2006, pages are permanently “under construction,’’ and the darn things won’t load on your iPhone.
Anyone who enjoys eating out spends a lot of time looking at these sites. Perhaps you too have tried to view, say, the menu at Bergamot, only to be buzzed by an adorable cartoon bee flying whimsically all over your screen. Or maybe, on a groggy Sunday morning, you’ve turned to Coppa’s website for information about brunch and been defeated, in your pre-coffee state, by screens asking you to wait while they load, advising you to resize your browser window, and assaulting your eyeballs with flashing yellow and brown graphics. And God forbid you’ve needed information about a specific Todd English restaurant. You might have tracked it down, but not until after watching an animated version of the chef freaking to dance music while seasoning food and sharpening knives. It’s enough to make you want to create a restaurant website parody of your own.
