A Bad Location

There is this one plaza in the city where I live that has had many businesses come and go. Most store owners don’t recognize that the location is bad. Sure it is a plaza, but it is not around enough other things to draw people in from neighboring cities. Anyway, there is this one spot in the plaza that has had more name changes and more businesses move in and out than anywhere I have ever heard. The lot in question has seen three restaurants and a liquor store. And all of those are just in the time frame that I can remember. The plaza has been there at least 15 years before I was born, so who knows how many occupants that place has had.
If you ask people out on the street what restaurant is in there right now, most will not correctly tell you that it is El Capesino, a fashionable Mexican place. Most people will still tell you that it is Tailgators, the local burger and beer joint. Some of my friends still ask me if I want to go there to get a burger and I have to inform them that it cannot be done any longer. The name change throws everyone off. I want to say “hey lets go to Tailgators tonight”, but then I remember that it is El Capesino now. The food there is actually really good, but it just seems like you should not be able to get Mexican food there. That place used to have character. It had a huge bar with giant televisions to what the game on and twenty cent wings all week long. It was a place that had its own regulars and people that you could count on to be there after work or school. Weekends there were great. There was a party atmosphere that still can’t be duplicated. On Sundays during football season, there was not an empty seat in the house. Everybody from grandparents to little kids would be there to root the Browns on. It was a great place to be and when they closed and was bought up to be turned into a Mexican place, it would never feel the same again.
Even with the name change, people would always just expect to find the same kind of party atmosphere there. Don’t get me wrong, they have the best food there and it has been redecorated to pull of the Spanish motif, but it is just too different. It could compare to biting into a candy bar and expecting to taste milk chocolate and finding that it tastes like a stick of gum. It is just not what you are looking for in the current situation. The name change and food change is just something different and something we all have to get used to. We all call it by the new name, but it does not feel natural. The old bar name will always stick and it won’t hear people saying “Let’s go to El Capesio!” , you will hear “Let’s go to that restaurant where Tailgators used to be! “ And now, even though El Capesio is there, in a few years, it may be another place doomed to fail in that horrible location.