It sounds like the beginning of an uncomfortable joke: Four brown kids of Pakistani descent — from Karachi, Dubai, London and Augusta, Ga. — walk into a Hooters on a recent Saturday afternoon.

They order cheese fries, mozzarella sticks and a plate of fried pickles that will later give the Londoner (me) a wild bout of indigestion. Waitresses in the company’s trademark orange shorts flit about, taking orders and smiling at families with children. Burly men in baseball caps clink pints of gold libation. Football plays on one flat screen TV, but is muted for the golf tournament that plays on another.

In truth, this expedition wasn’t a joke, but more of a fascinating ethnographic adventure. My friends and I didn’t plan on eating at Hooters initially. We go to Princeton, where two of us are international students, and that Saturday, we craved the spicy curries and fluffy flatbreads of our pre-college lives. A new biryani joint had opened up at a strip mall not far from campus, so we took an Uber over to check it out.

Across the parking lot, we spotted a branch of the famous restaurant chain, complete with a Hooters owl and a sign in the window that read: “Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.”