I’ve given Coco’s restaurant several chances, but they’ve let me and my cohorts down every time, so we’ve opted out of them for the long haul.
Specifically, their quiche is baked three times (“so it will be thoroughly cooked and people won’t get a stomach ache” <----this was the official and incredibly ludicrous explanation) and is as hard as a brick;
the sweet potato fries are cooked in something that left us queasy later;
there are very few shrimp involved in any shrimp dish;
their “pies” are a joke.
Come to think of it, Olive Garden is no great shakes either, but if Coco’s is trying to be the worst chain, they are succeeding.
I’ve never heard of Coco’s, but I think I’m a lone voice when I say that the Olive Garden isn’t so bad. You can get a lot of food very cheaply, and it tastes pretty good. No, it’s not the equivalent of “the little Italian place near me,” but I don’t EXPECT that. I know what I’m getting, and I like it. Some pasta, some soup, some meat, some breadsticks, it’s all good…
Eh. I like Coco’s for breakfast. I take my mother there often. Their “Pacific Sramble” is tasty (eggs scrambled with spinach, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes and Swiss cheese). The rest of the menu is pedestrian at best, but what do you want from a chain?
And I’ve never had anything bad at Coco’s. It’s not hawt cuisine. It’s a family restaurant with pedestrian fare. Chili’s tries different things at least, and BJ’s is downright good (I admit to a bit of bias. I know most of the brewers and middle-management.) You might just be eating at a badly-run Coco’s. I know the mince pie we got from them last Thanksgiving was very good.
The Coco’s by my work is pretty blah and never gets my business. As I explained to a co-worker, “I have no problem with eating diner food. But if I’m going to eat Denny’s food, then I want to pay Denny’s prices.”
They closed all the Coco’s by us. The few times we went in we were the youngest people there by at least 4 decades.
One has been replaced by Black Bear Diner. While their breakfasts are good man the service sucks. So much so that on multiple occasions I have seen people get up to retrieve their own coffee refills.
A lot of it is TVP, or textured vegetable protein - probably 49% TVP or just enough to let them legally call the stuff “meat.” I happened to get a look at a box of the stuff one day as the JitB near my office was getting a delivery, and thought “EeeewW!”
