This week was the grand opening of Panama’s first “Hooters” restaurant and on Saturday I went over there with Jenny and his friend to check it out. The following is a rant not only on Panamanian behavior but masculine behavior… I’ll try my best to keep the connecting thread between both themes at plain sight.

To put it in simplest terms, Hooters is a very odd beast to put in a country like Panama not only for the consumer but for the girls who have been dealt the hand that has them catering to said consumer’s needs as well. Look, in this instance I’m torn on the subject: on one hand you have these girls, all of them stunning in their own particular ways, being put in these oddly attractive uniforms going up and down a testosterone-fueled piece of real estate that’s just opened, all of it painting a sad picture on how sex sells and calls attention (if you want a more immediate example, if you see this site’s most popular posts all of them are NSFW galleries. Bad, bad.)… but on the other, I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear like an absolute idiot while I perused what was going on around me. It’s ridiculous how smitten I was with the place, and if every customer can fall for the place’s tacky-yet-refined charm then the restaurant will break the years-old curse that has plagued that particular building (prior to the Hooters taking residence where it is now, there were 3 other establishments that went bankrupt withing the year since they opened). I’ve been saying it all weekend and I’ll tell you now: the service overall sucked, but I was so smitten with the girl who was tending to us that if she had brought a steaming pile of shit on a plate instead of my chicken wings, I wouldn’t have minded at all. I wanted a Budweiser and there wasn’t any; instead I scored an Amstel Light, and even though my stance on light beer is that it’s ass, the mere fact that the waitress brought it for me 20 minutes after I asked for it kind of made here even more adorable. Hell, she didn’t even have hooters and I didn’t give a crap.

Looking around after getting my beer I saw the image that would represent our trip to Hooters for me, at least: imagine, if you will, a table with 3 generations worth of family. there were 4 girls that weren’t any older than 12, teenagers, young adults, mothers, fathers and a couple of grandparents. I What catches my eyes is this sweet old lady who’s quite easily 82, sucking on a chicken bone as her son talks to the Hooters girl with the double C’s, bent over to the table as the dude’s wife looked on. There were many tables like that; families going to Hooters for dinner… Hooters, quite possibly the most repulsive establishment if you’re a feminist/Latina prude. Latin american women (a large part of them, anyway) are very conservative. Very conservative. I can easily see some of my friends’ girlfriends having a serious problem with me taking my buddies over there for a beer or 7… even worse, some of them will even take themselves through the torture of going with them and then both my friend and I have to put up with her “faces of disapproval” while we punch a hole through the wooden tables with the amount of tits and asses running all around us.

It takes a special kind of woman to see through the gimmick, I think. Hell, I could go on and on about the macho behavior some Panamanian women go through sometimes. Anyway, I can only assume that the main reason why most of the families who did manage to go to Hooters this weekend was because they’ve never heard of the place and they wanted to check it out, thinking it’s nothing more than another Friday’s or whatever. Since Panama is so small, a side effect of that is that if there’s anything new and exiting opening, people will flock to it no matter what it is they’re selling. Just like everything else, if Hooters is still being flocked 3 months into 2007, the place will stay there a while; it depends on us (as in guys) to keep it alive… and why wouldn’t be want to? The girls are adorable. As I said, the service was horrible and as I waited for my shitty light beer I kept looking for excuses so that I don’t pin it on the girl. In retrospect it was all her fault but she could’ve punched me in the face and I still would’ve given her a 4 dollar tip. They dance stuff at random as well, with the intoxicating enthusiasm of a Panamanian stripper (read: someone who wants her life to end, hopefully in a swift and determined manner) and this is the part were Jen and I differed: she pointed out the girls’ obviously lukewarm performance of The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A” and I thought it was glorious. Not because I thought they did great; a three-legged crab could’ve danced better than they did on their best day but I thought it was adorable because they frickin’ tried, dammit. It’s like… it’s like seeing girls jumping on a trampoline in slow motion… the girls can look like raisins and I’ll still can’t bring myself to stop staring. Men are simple in that regard; we can’t turn that off, and that’s why I think Hooters will be just fine. And the chicken wings are killer.

The question I’ve been asking myself all weekend though, and one that I think is worth pondering upon is if Hooters going to become the place where the men who go to it will be regarded as chauvinist pigs or dirty tit-loving scumbags or whatever the hell else we can be called. There are girls I know that look at their boyfriends funny if they so as much stare at another girl for too long, so that’s why I see validity in making the question. Very traditional. Is Hooters going to become a reason for break-ups? The notion is so ridiculous that it could happen. In this sense we, as men and women, are a little hypocritical with each other because the very same guys that want to be left alone when they’re being called on going to Hooters every day for lunch are the same guys who throw fits whenever their girlfriends check out some hot dude rollerskating at the causeway or something silly like that. Girls have a right too, just as much as I have the right of being served shit on a plate and not mind one bit when it’s a hot girl handing it to me in the first place.

The Panamanian website is not up yet, but the one on the menu is this one, if you’re so inclined. The chicken wings are hella good, and they’re just $5.95 for 10. The service is shit, but the girls compensate with charisma and breasts.