Ah, nostalgia

I'm not generally a fan of theme restaurants, but this is ridiculous:

At the door of the Commune Mess Hall restaurant, a young woman in loose-fitting army fatigues and a cap, with a red "Serve the People" armband and braided pigtails, greets customers.

"Welcome, Comrade! How many?" she chirps.

Huge portraits of Engels, Marx, Mao, Lenin and Stalin adorn a back wall and Chinese propaganda posters hang on pillars and side walls, showing chipper workers, peasants and soldiers toiling.

Blocky, red characters painted on the rafters implore: "Be self-reliant, work arduously" and "Use your own two hands to have ample food and clothing."

The eatery here in the capital of the booming southern province of Guangdong is a throwback to the Mao era, modeled on the communes that dotted the countryside from the 1950s to 70s.

Staff dressed like the Red Guards of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution serve peasant fare. Revolutionary songs play in the background.

Scores of similar restaurants have opened around the country, recalling a turbulent period in China's modern history that many remember with bitterness but which also evokes feelings of nostalgia for what some say was a simpler time.

They are perhaps the Chinese equivalent of America's milkshake and hamburger drive-ins with Motown classics on the jukebox.

Yeah, but at the end of your meal at those drive-ins, the authorities don't pack your kids off to work in the countryside to work on a collective farm and they don't have massive purges of, say, Eisenhower's or JFK's political rivals.

To be fair, I did eat at Medieval Times once when I was a kid, and they didn't examine the harsher realities of life in the Dark Ages there, either.