He's got lacquered carousel horses and wooden airplane propellers. He's got tin advertisements (the old-fashioned, colorful kind) and antique gates (the black, wrought-iron kind). He's even got a 14-foot water wheel that once spun at a mill. All told, he's got tens of thousands of items.

And you've probably seen a lot of 'em -- over a plate of potato skins on a random weekend night.

For decades, chain restaurants like Applebee's and Bennigan's have looked to Walsh's warehouse, Hospitality Solutions, as a one-stop shop for the bric-a-brac matted above diners' heads. Purchased and polished by antique pickers like Walsh, the "artifacts" are often doctored to look older; at T.G.I. Friday's, an orange shellac is the elixir of aging.

Each establishment, aiming for apple-pie nostalgia, is trying to tell America's story -- only they don't seem certain of which story that is. Authenticity doesn't matter as much as "authenticity."

"It's not about food, it's about sensation," says James Twitchell, a University of Florida professor who writes about advertising and marketing. "And clearly here the sensations are coded in nostalgia -- what food and family and going out to dinner all mean. It's tied up in the iconography of the past. But it's completely confected. Even the signs are imitations of reality."

Now, fearful of being viewed as outdated, some establishments are rethinking the décor.

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THE `OLD' `COUNTRY' `STORE'

Cracker Barrel, billed as an "Old Country Store and Restaurant," is a mass-market simulacrum of an obsolete institution: The all-purpose, dirt-road general store.

Only this country store never existed at all.

Products sold at today's Cracker Barrel include cream separators and tractor tools and baseball mitts, combining to form an anachronistic collage of various eras rather than a single time period.

The country store "went back to the 1800s. The things, we get them from the 20s, 30s, 40s," says Larry Singleton, who runs Cracker Barrel's warehouse in Lebanon, Tenn., where more than 100,000 items are stashed. "But we still use things from the 50s."

At Bennigan's restaurant in Falls Church, Va., the senses are assaulted by decorative chaos. Wooden snowshoes and field hockey mallets adorn the walls. Matchbox 20 wails from the speakers. Amber light drapes over the bar, where a neon sign spells out the word "BILLIARDS." Near the ladies' room hangs a convincingly ancient-looking Bayer Aspirin advertisement: "Safe for Aches and Pains. Does Not Depress the Heart."

A casual diner might be forgiven for wondering whether the tavern is meant to evoke your grandfather's basement or a shopping-mall food court.

"I like the old country instruments, the banjo, the dulcimer," says regular customer Larry McManus, 60, referring to the restaurant's rusty assortment of instruments. "Unless you go to someplace in Appalachia, you don't see that stuff."

But as the restaurants age, so does their decor. Hoping to lure a younger crowd, Friday's is fast-forwarding consumers' nostalgia clocks by a few decades. A five-year renovation process will swap that pre-WWII Coca-Cola ad for an old-school cell phone, circa 1995. Gone is the orange shellac. Star Wars and disco balls are elbowing aside Marilyn and Mickey.

"We tried to stay within a 20-year time frame," says Chris Devlin, T.G.I. Friday's senior vice president of development. The existing pieces of memorabilia, he says, "are getting to be so old, people don't know them anymore."

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LOCAL LOCAL LOCAL

Applebee's is approaching things differently. It is shedding what it calls "general memorabilia," leaving nothing but very local artifacts. The items, which belong to specific categories like "local history" and "hometown hero," buttress the store's claim that "no two Applebee's are exactly alike."

"We're not doing general memorabilia anymore because we feel it's not as relevant to our guests," says spokeswoman Laura Tigges. "I think it's more fun for our regulars to see things that they can relate to."

The Bennigan's rehab is all about Ireland, the company says, with photographs of the Emerald Isle's countryside and a "signature mural" that "reflects the Irish heritage."

"The Irishness is more on the hospitality side, the service standpoint," explains Susan Karlen, director of marketing. "From the food perspective, we've incorporated some Irishness, like Guinness-glazed chicken."

With declining demand for artifacts, chains rely less on antique pickers. Devlin even trolled eBay for newer Friday's artifacts like an "original" Burton snowboard that he couldn't find in flea markets. Faced with a shrinking customer base, Hospitality Solutions has been forced to expand its business to include more contemporary restaurants.

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THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

But do new attitudes really change things?

At Friday's, colorful ceiling tiles have replaced the wood paneling, and the wall decorations include a Levi's sign and a plastic replica of a Columbia record. The memorabilia, though, makes no more sense than it did before. A canoe is tanked, inexplicably, along the entire length of one wall. A yellow Route 66 sign is posted alongside a Beatles poster.

"Everybody is serving pretty much the same reconstituted food, so storytelling becomes crucial," Twitchell says. "But the stories are completely Fig Newtonized. They're completely saccharinated."

What adaptation of American history is this? A story of old cell phones and Mickey Mouse ears? Where is the real history? Maybe it's tangled up somewhere next to a bubble-gum pink Britney Spears poster, buried in the cracks of an old washboard that never saw a single day of laundry.

Or maybe these places aren't telling a story at all. Perhaps customers are supposed to craft their own narratives from what they choose to see -- and add their own distinctiveness to the dining experience with a few carefully curated nostalgia aids. That's how it hits Jean Capriles, 57, who enjoys the cluttered walls but struggles to explain why.

"It makes you feel more at home," says Capriles, heading to the Falls Church Bennigan's with her family. "It makes you feel more comfortable."

The past, it seems, often does -- whatever jumbled, calibrated and marketed American past it happens to be.

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Meghan Barr works on the AP's National Desk in New York.

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