“My daughter lives in Wisconsin and that place is just — everybody raves about that place,” the woman said. Other members of the tour started whispering to each other and shrugging. Melting Pot? What’s a Melting Pot?

“It’s a fondue restaurant,” said a man in a suit who’d been sitting quietly in the corner. Strang introduced him as the mall’s manager. “See, it’s set up with these individual kind of cubbies, and they do seatings of seven and nine,” the manager said, then realized that this level of detail probably wasn’t necessary. He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and said, “It’s an experience.”

“We have them in a number of our properties,” Strang said. “If anybody’s driven by Buffalo in the last few years, we just did a renovation there. And they have a Melting Pot, a P. F. Chang’s, a Cheesecake Factory — ” The woman in pink clapped her hands. “Oh see, that too, a Cheesecake Factory!”

I stared at the notebook on the table in front of me. In it I’d written a list of Destiny USA amenities that had gone by the wayside over the years. My plan was to ask questions as if I’d just stepped out of a time machine from 2002. How much did it cost to play the back nine on Onondaga Dunes? Stuff like that. But I didn’t have the courage to do it. For some reason, I figured that a mall tour scheduled for the middle of a weekday would coax other unemployed cranks like me from their caves for the rare opportunity to harangue Destiny USA executives in person. But my compatriots were nice people, the kind who came to the mall on a summer afternoon to buy presents for their grandchildren. My bitterness dissolved inside a steaming pot of gooey cheese.