I had already been thinking about places and their meaning when I received an email from Fuddruckers telling me that the Annapolis store was closed and if I wanted to stay on the email list I should pick a new location. Normally, an email telling me that a chain restaurant was closed would elicit no more than a shrug from me. This one, however, was different. This Fuddruckers was our place.
I can remember being at the restaurant before we had kids. I’m not sure why we started going in the first place. I know my wife really liked their burgers and it was right across from the mall where she used to shop a lot. I just know we started going pretty early on in our Maryland lives. We continued going after we had kids. For a while, it was a mall/Fuddruckers trip. My wife would shop while I watched the kids play at the mall playground and then we would go get lunch. When the kids got older, they started asking to go, both for the food and the video games. Even after we stopped going to the mall we continued going to Fuddruckers. It became our Sunday thing. We would go to church, the kids would ask to go to Fuddruckers and we would head down for lunch. We were there enough that the staff knew us. We had not been lately. Part of it was my wife changing her diet and not wanting to go out as much. Part of it was the kids getting older and moving away. We got out of the habit and it became a lesser part of our lives. We had commented the last few times we were there that it didn’t seem busy. I don’t know if that’s what did it in or not. It is sad to see such a big part of our family life gone. Had we known this was coming, we would have gone one last time. I guess we need to find a new place.
The World's Common Tater 
Man, I miss the hell out of Fudd’s. There was only ever one location that I was aware of that was even remotely convenient to me after I moved out here (and given that it was in a mall in downtown Cleveland, “convenient” is a reeeeeeeeeeally relative term there), but man, I loved it. Tower City gave it the shortest of shrift–it was tucked back in a dim corner where it was basically impossible to stumble upon unless you knew what you were doing (it suddenly strikes me that the best possible metaphor here is the painted-over stairwell door in Dawn of the Dead that the zombies ignore until they have Steven to help them), which probably contributed to its very early demise–it had been gone for nearly a decade by the time the company went bankrupt. And as a result I haven’t had access to a Fudd’s in nearly twenty years.
OTOH, I found out a couple of weeks ago that the Arthur Treacher’s on State Rd. is one of seven(!!!) left in America, so I need to get my butt over there….
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The only two left in Maryland are too far away for me to ever go. The kids could easily get there from campus if they wanted. I am, however, getting another Steak and Shake close to my house soon.
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I was never a big fan of Fuddruckers. It took the location of another place that was similar (burgers), but that I liked more. We used to go there when Jane was little. Then when it changed, none of us were big fans. Or maybe I just wasn’t and it wasn’t that big a deal for them not to go rather than hear me complain. Hahahaahaha,
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