I’ve been to one or two of those back in the days when I traveled to Beijing frequently. My Chinese hosts always felt the need at least once each trip to take me someplace ‘western’. It was always terrible. I mean just vile.
Not too different from the time I spent a month working in London and my team wanted to take me someplace I’d appreciate. T.G.I. Fridays. I appreciated the thought. I did not like the food.
Tim Horton’s is really now Restaurant Brands International (RBI), traded on the Toronto and New York exchanges and 32% owned by 3G Capital in Brazil. It’s still technically headquartered in Toronto through a tax-inversion deal. But not really a Canadian chain anymore.
That’s ok. For purposes of this thread I’m going by where the chain was founded, not the current ownership.
Regardless of who actually owns it, Tim Hortons is still culturally very much a Canadian chain.
I guess I’ve never really thought of El Pollo Loco as a Mexican place, even if they technically are (I never order the burritos and quesadillas and whatnot). I think of them as a chicken place. Sort of the anti-KFC.
We are a few miles from a Pollo Campero. We greatly prefer Super Pollo, which appears to be a small local chain which has no affiliation with other restaurants that have the same name.
There are a few Nando’s around here but we haven’t tried their food.
Yeah there’s a ton of different places called Super Chicken or Super Pollo that are not related at all. They’re all pollo a la brasa joints and the quality is fairly consistent across the many varied establishments. Another common feature of these places is they tend to have a very generous hand with the sides.
Right before we got married, I told my wife, “The two most important words for living in China are ‘for China’.” And at school, I mentioned to one of my fellow foreigners, “You know how the government here likes to say they have ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’? Well, what we have here is education with Chinese characteristics.” That’s the way I view the foreign themed restaurants here. What you encountered was American style food with Chinese characteristics that was okay for China.
Who knows? Maybe some Chinese feel the same way when they encounter American-style Chinese food in the US.
Hijack but Googling, El Pollo Loco seems to be mostly in the West and Southwest but did they formerly have locations in the Northeast? I distinctly remember one being in New Haven, near the Yale Co-Op. We never ate there but found the English translation of the name amusing.
I’m in Boston, and I’ve never seen any of the chains mentioned so far in this thread, not even Boston’s Pizza.
The same two young women that took me to an appalling Italian restaurant for China in Beijing came to work out of our US office for a couple of weeks one summer. A woman that worked for me that was possibly the nicest but most clueless person I ever met took them to the mall for ‘Chinese’ food. I tried that place one and thought it was sub-Panda Express.
Well, our two Chinese friends acted quite thankful and said all the right things, but they sure didn’t eat with any enthusiasm. My boss explained the situation to them later and suggested some authentic places they could go if they really wanted food like from home.
Just going by Wikipedia, apparently so. The article says they’ve tried at times to expand beyond California and the Southwest, but were never very successful. It doesn’t specifically mention New Haven, but it mentions former restaurants in Boston and New Jersey, so it seems plausible that there might have been some in other areas as well.
There’s one in Chicago proper now, too, on Elston just east of Cicero.
I loved the place but I can’t argue with that. It’s about as simple as you can get. I personally thought it was delicious, I loved the way the chicken was seasoned and how fresh everything was. (This would have been back in '90-91, I have no idea what it’s like these days.) But yes, it was not just simple for a Mexican food place, it was probably the most simple fast food place I’ve ever seen. I still loved it.
I have yet to actually eat at Jollibee, I assume it must be pretty good for it to be so widespread. But the menu is weird. Which doesn’t mean bad, but it’s definitely not what most people would expect.
Fried chicken, okay, sure, that’s probably what they’re best known for. Burgers, okay, fried chicken and burgers at a fast food place, pretty standard. A burger steak… Which is a burger patty with mushrooms and gravy, like a salisbury steak. With rice on the side. Now it’s getting weird. And you can get spaghetti with meatballs. At a fast food place. With burgers and fried chicken.
Anyway, I really should check them out someday, like I said there is one not that far from where I live.
East Asian cooking rarely requires an oven, and most kitchens there don’t have one. So if people want Western baked goods, they have to go out. The competition leads to higher standards.
I was looking into Jollibee more last night, and apparently their spaghetti is a particular Filipino style “sweet” spaghetti, made with banana ketchup. And with hot dogs, not meatballs (unless they’ve changed it since the YouTube video I watched was filmed). Some people like it, others find it, well, too sweet.
A note on the Korean chicken places: It cracks me up that in Korea, they all (or so it seems) say they serve Mexican chicken.
Speaking of Korean chicken places, a Vons Chicken opened near me maybe a year or so ago. According to their website they started in Korea as well. Now it looks like they have a bunch of restaurants mostly around Northern California.
I hadn’t actually realized the chain started in Korea and apparently has franchises in several countries until I looked into it thanks to his thread. I just assumed they were a small regional chain serving Korean style chicken.
They’re not that great. The beef always seems to be gristly and tough.