Pessimistic Politics: Tastes of Toledo Locked Behind Closed Doors

Before I begin today’s article, I’d like to see a show of hands. How many of you have ever heard of Toledo, Ohio? Let’s see… one… two… three, oh, he was just stretching… okay, I see about five of you with your hands up. I’m taking into consideration that most of you aren’t idiotic enough to actually raise your hands in the middle of your home or office because you were told to do so by a website, but if you are, I severely hope your family and/or co-workers managed to take some unflattering photos of you, and you can bet they’ll be posted up here.

But back to my point. Not a lot of people have heard of Toledo, which is a shame, because the Glass City (so called because it was once completely made of glass, until they got a baseball team, which ruined everything during a single practice) was once a prosperous, thriving city many years ago, before I was born, which means I don’t need to bother looking those dates up. They had many shops and restaurants, and a thriving community where hundreds of people would walk around and enjoy the city without fear of getting a hypodermic needle stuck in their neck. Instead, they had to worry about getting shot, because the Mafia decided to hang around Toledo because of the port access. But as the pin striped suits began to fade, so did Toledo.

Now, much of Toledo doesn’t look so hot, with many empty storefronts, impoverished conditions, and COSI as the star attraction. Officials have been trying to revive the city for years, but just as the officials themselves are mysterious shadows that are only talked about and not seen, so are the proper answers to this problem. I’d like to point out that I don’t have the biggest stake in the matter, since I live in neighboring Oregon, which was once part of Toledo until they wised up and took their oil refineries with them. Now Oregon is a successful little community. Smelly and cancerous in some places, but successful.

I think I found out Toledo’s main problem, and that problem is restaurant hours. I was driving around with my girlfriend at six o’clock on a Friday night, both of us starving, Entertainment book in hand (for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Entertainment books, they are a national chain of coupon books that are much more organized than newspaper coupons and about a million times more expensive). We decided to try something new, a philosophy that hasn’t worked out well for me in the past. I’m the kind of guy who can eat nothing but Wendy’s double cheeseburgers for the rest of my life and be content forever, or at least until I died of some kind of heart failure. But since we had some serious discounts coming to us, we decided to give a shot at trying something fresh.

Our first stop was Focaccia’s, a nice-sounding restaurant tucked away in a largish building. In fine urban fashion, we parked a block away, paid the meter, and trudged over to the restaurant, only to find that the doors to the building were locked. Apparently, the restaurant closed at three, information we responded to with a variety of good insults. Already sixty cents in the hole, we decided to cut our losses and go to a place I was a little more familiar with: Easy Street Café.

I’d like to say, for the record, that Easy Street Café is a nice restaurant with a variety of good food. I say this from previous experience, because we definitely did not go there that night, since the parking lot was completely full. There was a sub-parking lot, but that too was full. This is one of the reasons why I refuse to live in the city. Because of the lack of space, designers feel that they can put anything anywhere it’ll fit, regardless of its functionality. These parking lots were all one way, literally, as there was no way to get out of them without backing up the entire way. With foresight like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had parking lots on roofs with no ramps to get up their with. Combine that with the fact that the parking lot was currently built on a solid foundation of slick ice, and you have the ingredients for a real hoot of a time.

Discouraged, we left the parking lot (backwards, of course) and decided to go somewhere else. I spotted a sign for the Erie Street Market, which is a collection of shops and restaurants to entertain city dwellers that haven’t already left the city for restaurants with parking. This is where another reason for my loathing of city life comes in, and I’m sure a lot of you can relate. It is clear that Toledo’s streets were designed by a three-year-old with an Etch-a-Sketch, since they twist, transform, go one way, merge into oncoming traffic, and all sorts of horrible things that made me feel like a country bumpkin driving my 1956 Ford pick-up into the Big City. I’m frankly surprised that more lives weren’t lost as I jerked around the dark streets, searching for random signs.

When we got to Erie Street, we were rewarded with: darkness. This is because apparently, like everything else in Toledo, everyone calls it a day after lunch is over with. It has never dawned on these restaurant owners that people might, as hard as it seems to fathom, get hungry at dinnertime. We gave up and decided to head back towards the suburbs where roads and restaurant hours made sense, even though we did pass one of Toledo’s best restaurants, the Spaghetti Warehouse, which operates under normal, human hours.

In fact, I’m just going to give the place a free plug and recommend that if you’re in Toledo, you should check the place out, and you might as well catch a Mud Hens game while you’re here. I know Spaghetti Warehouse is a limited franchise, but with only fifteen or so locations, the chances of one being in your neighborhood are slim, so you might as well come on over for a bite, a game, and a walk along the riverbank. If you don’t have any plans to come here, make some so these people can get some damn money. And if any of you Toledo officials are reading this, if you experience a rise in tourism, I assure you that it’s directly because of this article, and you can thank me with a simple handshake and a large cash contribution. If you experience a decline, it's because you’re not trying hard enough and you’re making me look bad, you jerks.

Anyway, we headed over to Gino’s (another excellent restaurant, I might add) and had a fairly normal meal. The entire experience had me thinking, though, that Toledo’s problems may stem from the lack of good restaurant hours. If you think about it, America is the fattest nation in the world. We’re a bunch of porkers, and that's because we love food. Restaurants are the one place that you’re more than likely to keep throwing your money at. The food industry is probably the biggest in the world, because food is one of our basic needs, right next to sleep, shelter, and (especially for men) sex. The dream of every American is to have sex in their own bed in their own house clutching a gooey Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Just so the sandwich doesn’t cause any undue confusion and is used in an inappropriate manner.

So it stands the reason that if Toledo really wants to get its act together, it’s going to need some restaurants with real hours. The next logical step is to have plenty of nice living spaces, good, inexpensive mattresses from a local manufacturer, and alleys littered with prostitutes. No, wait, adult bookstores. Yeah, that’s more sanitary.

I know it’ll be a daunting task, getting all that investor confidence into a failing city. That’s why we need to bring the Mafia back; their crazy antics should help ensure plenty of excitement and thrills while stimulating investor dollars. Or you die.
Thank you.