Let me start by saying that I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, the typical Hooters customer.

I’m a woman. I’m a straight woman. I hate sports (and by proxy, sports bars). I have never, in my entire life, eaten a chicken wing.

Still, there’s a certain anthropological appeal to visiting a restaurant that, for the last 35 years, has dressed waitresses in uniforms designed to leave little to the imagination, and footwear straight out of a geriatric ward. So when I recently found myself moseying past the orange glow of Manhattan’s last remaining Hooters, I decided to go inside.

Hooters NYC is just a few blocks from Times Square, so there were some tourists, but the bulk of the crowd could have been plucked from any chain restaurant, anywhere in the country. Families of four, five, and six huddled around boxes of crayons; couples held hands and debated appetizers. Waitresses cleaned up soda spills and moved sticky highchairs from table to table — low-cut tops be damned.

It was all sort of quaint. And shockingly, quite busy.

This was a Sunday afternoon in July, one of the slowest months of the year for some restaurants. More importantly, this was in an era of #MeToo, “Time’s Up,” and a paradigm shift where conversations about systemic inequality, power imbalances, and the myriad ways women are subjugated in the workplace are supposed to be moving us towards a more equitable future. Hooters, it’s safe to say, does not exactly jibe with this new, woke worldview. And I’m not the only one who’s confused.

“I’m scratching my head,” says Juelene Beck, a Florida-based chain restaurant expert and consultant. “It’s amazing that the brand has such power. It’s like, sex still sells.”

Delightfully Tacky and Growing
So what, pray tell, is going on?

Hooters is a privately-owned company and declined to talk to me for this story. So officially, the answer =¯_(ツ _/¯. But there a few socioeconomic trends that could be contributing to the brand’s lasting appeal.

In December 2017, Hooters opened its 200th corporate location, and has added a dozen more in the months since. The number of franchise units, or non-company-owned branches that pay a fee to Hooters headquarters, have dipped slightly, but the chain is still one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the country, beating sales at Ruby Tuesday, Macaroni Grille, Dave & Busters, Chuck E. Cheese’s, Hard Rock Cafe, and California Pizza Kitchen, according to the data firm Technomic.

Internationally, the brand is growing even more rapidly. In the last six months, Hooters outposts have opened in Germany, Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica, Japan — with 14 additional locations slotted for Spain and Portugal over the next three years.