That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, they’ve opened a new casino resort in Las Vegas and they’ve called it Hooters.
On the face of it, it sounds a perfect match: Sin City and a hotel whose chief selling point is the vital statistics of its staff. In my book, anywhere that links breasts and bedrooms quite so directly sounds pretty sleazy. The worst-case scenario? Spearmint Rhino with sleepovers. And the best case? Hello, Frat Boy Central — soaked with tequila and beer, and ringing to the sound of 100 bachelor parties.
Strangely, it’s neither. Stranger still, it’s not even risqué. In fact, in Vegas, Hooters feels like a refuge.
To understand why, you need to bear two things in mind. The first is that Hooters is already long established as a restaurant chain in America. Founded 20-odd years ago, it now has more than 300 branches, scattered across nearly every state. These are not clip joints — they’re restaurants, selling pitchers of beer and “Nearly Famous” chicken wings. The core audience may be 25- to 54-year-old men, but still, if you want to shift a lot of chicken wings in towns such as Topeka, Kansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma, you don’t want to offend their wives.
That’s why, over the years, Hooters has learnt to walk a fine line between fun and flirtation. Sure, the girls are wearing minuscule orange shorts and stretchy Lycra T-shirts, but the uniform is finished off with thick tan tights, big white socks and a pair of sneakers. Yes, I can happily report that, en masse, the effect will put a smile on any man’s face — but, really, it’s far more cheerleader than striptease. If the girls swapped their menus for pompoms and started high-kicking the Hooters company song, the look would be complete.
Do they feel exposed working the floor in such outfits? Not the ones I spoke to. Take Toni Trimboli, for example, a 23-year-old from the town of Bullhead, Arizona. Toni is one of those squeaky-clean, relentlessly optimistic young women who are impossible to imagine in any country other than America. She’s moved to Las Vegas with her boyfriend because she knows that a job with Hooters can open doors to a modelling career. She was genuinely baffled when I asked if she felt uncomfortable in the company livery. “Who goes into a restaurant and grabs someone?” she asked. “You’d have to be a pretty seedy person to do that.”
All right, then, let’s put it another way. Do they feel it’s demeaning? “Yes.” When one of the other girls said that, I thought I’d struck gold. Maybe there was a proto-feminist movement stirring in the staff canteen after all. But then she told me why: “It’s so unflattering,” she said — and went on to describe the uniforms of the cocktail waitresses over at the Rio. Now those, she said, were nice outfits to work in. “They’re cut really well, so you get this kind of under-side cleavage, looking up,” she explained.
And there’s the rub. Elsewhere in America, Hooters is obviously a finely judged concept, striking just the right balance between titillation, humour and — under the surface — Stars-and-Stripes normality. But plonk it down in the middle of Las Vegas and suddenly it seems tamer than a vicar’s pet labrador. Especially in 2006, when the city is in the midst of an X-rated makeover.
After a bizarre interlude in which it marketed itself as a family-friendly resort (“Hey, kids! Come and watch mum and dad gamble away your college education!”), Las Vegas has remembered that its main business is the purveying of forbidden fruit. Lap-dancing and topless clubs are doing a roaring trade in the western suburbs, and casino-owners are busy vamping up their offerings in response. It’s by no means Sodom and Gomorrah just yet, but “the Strip” is looking a more and more appropriate moniker.
Take the new fashion in nightlife, for example — “burlesque” clubs where the staff are dressed in stockings and suspenders, and put on regular floor shows as well as pour the drinks. Or the new fashion in hotel-bedroom decor — floor-to-ceiling rods, so that you can put in a spot of pole dancing before turning in for the night. Or even the show that was once known as Pirates of Treasure Island, and is now called Sirens of TI, which has been restaffed and recostumed accordingly. In this environment, the Hooters girls might as well be dressed in the habit of a nun.
In fact, the main reason Hooters seems to be prospering is not because of the girls, or even the Nearly Famous chicken wings, but because it offers such good value. In quiet weeks, the price of a night here, just across the road from the MGM Grand — one of the focal points of Las Vegas — can be as little as £26 for two. For that you get newly refurbished rooms, good-quality beds and the company of as deep a cross-section of Middle America as you could hope for. Maybe the clientele was fantastically unrepresentative when I was there, but for every bachelor party, there was a young family, complete with prams. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly blue collar and unpretentious.
()
And that, I have to say, is just how I liked it. Because the other remarkable thing about Las Vegas these days is its delusions of grandeur. Along with the sex has come a preoccupation with style.
