A place where everybody knows your name . . . or likes hooters

Hooterrific!

It seems slightly out of place, standing unabashedly on the border between the buttoned-down civility of Princeton and the frayed blue collar nature of Lawrenceville. Its clientele — or more aptly, its guys — arrive from both sides of this invisible line-in-the-sand with little in common beyond a shared interest in chicken wings, sports, beer and, of course, hooters.

Newly opened in the Mercer Mall, residing beside the respectable establishments of Rockaway Bedding, Leslie's Pool Supplies and Joe Canal's Discount Liquor, Hooters of Princeton has officially arrived. And it has unofficially served notice that even small Ivy League towns are not immune to chauvinistic atmospheres of noise, smoke and spectacle.

The portions at Hooters — of food that is — are generous and generic. The walls are covered with TVs, team logos, car parts and beer signs. The waitresses' infamous outfits leave little to the imagination, save for a burning curiosity about those long, 80s tube socks and the tan-colored tights. From the "Bumps" and "Double Curves" road signs on the walls to the roll of paper towels on each table, the restaurant is indeed "delightfully tacky yet unrefined," as their motto affirms.

Hooters, to be sure, is not quite the typical restaurant one might find in the Princeton area. But something about the neon orange sign and the savvy entrepreneurship of it all makes one think Princeton and Hooters could be long lost cousins.

Predictably, the vast majority of patrons are male — clad in baseball hats, football jerseys and polo shirts. They range in age from late adolescence to early 30s, and when inside the raucous confines of Hooters, the atmosphere seems more like a 10-year reunion of the Tiger Inn than a family restaurant.

More than anything, Hooters is a haven for the normally polite gentlemen of the world — a place where they can shamelessly gawk at attractive women, flirt with a surprising amount of success and escape the mundane rigors of work, if only until the final Monday Night Football whistle blows or the table's pitcher of Bud runs dry.

"The outfit is really tight, and the job can be kinda creepy," said a 22-year-old waitress, who is also a student at the University of Pennsylvania. "But the money is so good that I wanna work here for as long as I can."

The $150 in tips for just one night of work was too much to turn down, she said. (No University females have been hired as waitresses since Hooters of Princeton opened four weeks ago).

On the whole, the guys who frequent Hooters seem surprisingly respectable and almost always obey the "look, but don't touch" mantra, for fear of a visit from one of the beefy 300-pound managers should that rule be broken.

The mood is generally jovial, much like a local tavern, fully furnished and resembling a log cabin. And the waitresses are admirably able to flirt and to be friendly without letting on that it's a contractual requirement of the job.

"You just sit down and talk to them for a while. It's pretty easy," the waitress said. "Everybody has something to talk about, at least about how their day went."

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By the looks of its first four weeks in business, it appears as though Hooters of Princeton has found its niche in the community, and is ready to provide University students with a place "where everybody knows your name." Or, at least, a place where everybody likes hooters.