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<em>Coming To America</em> Restaurant Gets The Yelp Review It Deserves
By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 29, 2011
Modified Dec 29, 2011
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 29, 2011
Modified Dec 29, 2011
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Coming To America, Eddie Murphy's first foray into playing multiple characters on film, is one of our favorite movies of all time. When we heard about a real life taxi fleet owner who happens to be an African Chief, we were screaming "Good morning, my neighbors!" to everyone we came across for a week. So you can imagine our glee when Vulture pointed us to a Yelp review of McDowell's: "Yeah, that place is a dump. Stopped going there 'cause some mutherfucker that looked like Samuel Jackson kept on robbing the place. WTF?"
In case you aren't familiar with the fantastic film, McDowell's is the Queens restaurant (actually a Wendy's on Queens Blvd. that was scheduled to be closed for a complete renovation) Murphy's character Prince Akeem goes to work for when he's pretending to be a poor foreign student. McDowell's was restaurateur Cleo McDowell's blatant attempt to copy McDonald's: the "Big Mac" is the "Big Mick" ("both contain two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions. But they use a sesame seed bun. My buns have no seeds."), and as McDowell explains, "They [have] got the Golden Arches, mine [is] the Golden Arcs." In real life, the film's producers had to obtain legal permission from McDonald's in advance to use the name.
The Yelp reviews are hilarious and obsessively specific, with comments such as: "Some weird guy kept trying to talk to me about the Giants v. Packers game, but apart from that, I guess it was okay. The floors were spotless and the windows were incredibly clean too." Go ahead and read the whole thing here, and you can look at all the user-submitted photos as well here.
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coming to america
eddie murphy
mcdowell's
queens
review
yelp
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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