I live in a section of Baltimore called Hampden. It’s a longtime white working class neighborhood that took its cinematic turn in John Waters’ 1998 film Pecker. The story takes place and a lot of the exteriors were shot right here, in this neighborhood I’ve called home since 2003.
Much of Waters’ work is of course an ongoing cinematic ode to the beloved absurdities of his hometown, where he still lives much of the year. And through films such as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, and Hair Spray, his renderings of Charm City have become iconic.
And that brings us to this shitty restaurant on 36th Street, the neighborhood’s primary commercial strip of small local businesses known as “The Avenue.”
Cafe Hon opened back in 1992, when Hampden was still a thoroughly working class neighborhood, down on it’s de-industrialized luck. The hipster invasion was still a few years away.
Serving lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, Cafe Hon was an immediate success despite its bland food and bloated prices. To be sure, overpriced mediocre food is nothing to get excited about one way or another. But in addition to slinging hash, Cafe Hon has also commodifies culture in a way that makes those ironic hipsters seem sincere. And that recently came to a head in a dispute over a single word: “Hon.”
In Baltimore, “Hon” is white working class term of greeting or mild affection between people brought together by circumstance. It is often (but not exclusively) uttered by women.
How ya doin’ Hon?
Can I get you some more coffee, Hon?
Take care, Hon.
That kinda thing.
Cafe Hon owner Denise Whiting is from Baltimore. But when she named her restaurant not, it was less a loving ode to Baltimore, a la John Waters, and more as a crass commercial endeavor. Her restaurant is a paean to kitsch. Beehive hairdos, mangled Baltimorese, so on and so forth. There’s even a huge papier mache pink flamingo in front of the restaurant. Get it? Huh? Huh?
For several years she’s also been running an annual street fair called HonFest, where mostly bourgeois women dress up as caricatures of white working class women from the 1960s: lots of hairspray, leopard print clothing, pearls, horned rimmed glasses, etc. The whole thing is really pandering and uncreative, a yawning display of grasping cliches, and to be avoided at all costs.
As you might’ve guessed, very few Hampdenites actually eat at Cafe Hon. By and large the place is easy enough to ignore, and most of the clientele seem to come from nearby suburbs.
But for many locals, the final straw came about a year ago. In advance of opening up a tacky souvenir shop across the street from her restaurant, Whiting trademarked the word “Hon.”
On one level this is akin to trademarking “Dude.” It’s just silly. And since the word has tremendously wide colloquial use, from a legal perspective Whiting’s enforcement needed to be very narrow and relevant. Instead, she did just the opposite, acting like she owned the word outright. She bullied, she threatened, and generally made a show of aggressively enforcing her trademark at every turn. She picked a fight with the Maryland Transit Authority, which had used the word
in an ad campaign for the train system; she accosted some poor retail working stiff at the airport; and she generally pissed off a good chunk of the city and nearly all of Hampden by being a greedy, dictatorial, self-important asshole.
The popular uproar was a local news sensation. A half-hearted boycott soon emerged, there was even a picket protest one day, and Denise Whiting’s name was essentially dirt. But of course the restaurant kept chugging, and even her heinous gift shop is still hanging on, though we’ll see what becomes of it after Christmas [Update: The tacky Hon gift shop was replaced by a wonderful sex shop called Sugar].
Anyway, you know the old saying: One asshole deserves another. Enter Gordon Ramsay, host of the TV show Hell’s Kitchen, wherein he goes to supposedly troubled restaurants, screams at everyone in his completely uncharming British accent, and then takes credit for turning the place around.
Hell’s Kitchen is purely formulaic television at its most predictable and uninteresting, combining last decade’s crazes of reality TV, makeover TV, Food TV, and Limy TV.
And so last week, for an entire week, Ramsay’s film crew took over three blocks-worth of precious metered parking on and around The Avenue, to the chagrin of the other merchants, so that Whiting could get her restaurant on national television. They painted the storefront, blocked all the windows, did lord knows what inside, and no doubt will edit it all down into a heartwarming episode to be aired at a future date. Of course I won’t watch it, but for the same reason I normally don’t watch Hell’s Kitchen: it’s a shitty show. Frightfully boring.
As part of the media blitz, Whiting and Ramsay held a press conference. Whiting announced that she’s dropping her trademark of “Hon,” and then nearly broke down as she apologized to the city and inadvertently exposed some of her deeply seated control issues. Schadenfreude footage here.
Personally, I don’t consider myself to be in a position to accept or reject the apology. I’ve lived in Baltimore for over ten years, but I’m not a local, so really it’s not my fight. Besides, my critique of Whiting, Cafe Hon, and Hon Fest long predate the trademark controversy, so I will continue in that vein so long as it’s relevant.
Misappropriating, commodifying, and peddling the culture of marginalized groups is beyond distasteful. It’s demeaning and 
exploitative. So no, I won’t be giving Cafe Hon another chance to prove it has somehow transcended mediocrity. Instead, I’ll happily keep visiting Hampden’s other eateries, from Angelo’s pizza, which has been run by the same family for decades, to the brand new Indian lunch spot, to the Egyptian place with homemade pita to die for, and the many, many other fine places in between.
So keep your flamingo, keep your limy, keep your film crew, and gimme back my parking spots.
Well, actually, I walk, but you get the point, Hon.