I’ll nominate some places in decreasing order of horrendousness: (nasty language below)
(1 visit) Long John Silver - I swear to God I expected to come out of that place with some exotic liver parasite.
(1 visit) Taco Cabana - how fucking difficult can it be to make cheap Mexican drive-thru-type food?
(1 visit) Probably Wendys - touted as a great place to eat after closing the bars. I ate there once in the daytime and nearly puked.
(2 visits) Outback. Maybe it’s just the one I visited, but is there no fucking off-switch on the black pepper mill? And I’m not just talking steak and potato. The damn green salad was overloaded with black pepper! And the second time, I specifically asked them to lay off the black pepper.
TGIF - Honestly, this was my gang’s TGIF place to eat and drink. One night I wanted something that was not breaded and deep-fried, so I ordered something that sounded innocuous. Guess what I got.
And when I went there to eat on a couple of date nights, I was seated under the same ghastly stuffed fish twice in a row. The second time it happened, I had to request to wait for another table, which took another half-hour or so.
I’d better quit. This is making my stomach hurt and my angry-old-guy come out.
I’m going to actually give some loving to Chili’s.
On our recent honeymoon to Hawaii, both myself and Mrs Smurf were having quite some problems with the local ‘cuisine’. Without wanting to have to shell out for a good quality restaurant every night, we found a Chili’s down the road from the hotel.
We found the food quite good, Mrs Smurf absolutely loved it, and big bonus number 1 for both of us (possible TMI) - the food seemed take the normal amount of time to pass through our systems rather than the ‘express freight train’ passage we were getting from a lot of other places.
Cracker Barrel. It’s got horribly bland food, bad music, crap in the gift store, ambiance just this side of a dull aunt’s house, and is generally a horrible travesty of all that is good about Southern cooking. Of course, my elder relatives love it.
About chain restaurants: Try traveling across a dozen states and thousands of small towns and picking out the good local place in each one, given that you’ll be in each town a matter of minutes before settling down to eat. Add to that the fact local places are not on the highway and may not take traveler’s checks, credit cards, or out-of-state personal checks. Chain restaurants are the only reasonable alternative.
And it sucks* on purpose.* There was an article years ago in a trade 'zine. It mentioned a new idea of deliberately making customers wait in order to give an illusion of being “hard to get/exclusive”. The Cheesecake Factory’s name was mentioned as one of the industry leaders in this detestable practice. IMHO the cheesecake is only B+, and overpriced. The food is otherwise better than average and the prices are higher than average so it’s a wash. But their seating practices are impossibly rude. (I got good seats once by noticing the restaurant was empty and saying “I want a table for 4 but only if you can seat us right now”.)
I love Outback.
I despise Black Angus. Nuke time.
Red Lobster? Well, my friend loooves the biscuits. The waitstaff usually go along with the joke and allows her to fill a bag with biscuits to take home. The deep-fried shrimp are pretty good, and the serving size is huge. Their “shrimp in industrial yellow grease with wafts of garlic/scampi” is some of the nastiest stuff on earth. So, as long as you know what to order, you are OK. She gets the crab legs and they are fine.
Shoney’s Used to serve decent pie and/or ice cream as a dessert stop. Their breakfast buffet wasn’t too bad with all of your impoverished friends on Sunday mornings between the church crowds. You could also get a mediocre burger and fries at lunch. Last time I was there (3-4 years ago), it was all extremely nasty buffet food.
Waffle House I believe it’s a law that you have to be able to blow a .08 to get in the door. And just try to get whole wheat toast there. Scattered, smothered, covered, chunked if it’s 2 a.m.
Krystal Only if there is a lot of alcohol involved and it’s 3 a.m.
White Castle They don’t make enough alcohol for this one.
IHOP. Every single one I’ve visited, the service invariably sucks; they take forever to bring the food, and even then it’s like the wait staff is doing us, the customers, a favor by deigning to bring the food to our table. I haven’t visited my local IHOP in 2 years. My folks stopped at an IHOP off the I-5 last year while driving back from Sacramento, and they noticed that everyone seemed to finish eating awfully fast and leave, but they didn’t think too much of it as they were starving. When their food arrived, they said, everything tasted like it had been fried in rancid oil. That’s when they decided to pay their bill and leave their uneaten food on the table, as their fellow customers were doing.
Quizno’s. (Warning: TMI) No matter what I eat there, it decides to exit my body, one way or another, within the hour.
The many chain restaurants with bland food and random crap, supposedly from somebody’s attic, nailed to the walls. About the only redeeming factor for those places is that they tend to be an easy default restaurant to take a coworker on her birthday and buy her an umbrella drink to wash down her overpriced steak with. :rolleyes:
Because of the edit window, I was unable to add another nuke-worthy establishment to my previous post: Hometown Buffet. The food there is mediocre enough. I must also add poor sanitation practices to my reason for the nuke. Of all the Hometown Buffets I’ve visited, invariably the ladies’ room is filthy. One time I even accidentally stepped in some human waste deposited on the floor of a stall. (puke)
Regarding Friendly’s: When I visited in-laws in Ohio we all went there. I kept calling it “Johnny Friendly’s” and asking about the mob connections.
My ex-in-laws never did think I was funny.
We have Golden Corral here, which at some point went from mild, inoffense chain steak house with a very nice salad bar to an Open Trough Pig Slop place, for $14.95 a person.
In July, my son begged to go for his birthday. Oh my God. I did manage to pretty much eat my own weight in fresh strawberries, which honest to God was the only thing edible in the place. Well, no – the salad was fine; they had fresh spinich. But everything else, YUCK. Even my son was ill and pretty embarrassed he made us go there.
I hate Cracker Barrel, but cannot remember why. As I age, I find it hard to keep track of the reasons for all my visceral hatreds.
I’ve got to disagree with you about traveling and avoiding chain restaurants. I just made a two-week, 3500 mile road trip and did not eat in a single chain restaurant. I did a little research ahead of time (roadfood.com is a good source, and even the AAA tour books can be useful), and kept an open mind, and only once had a bad meal.
Admittedly, 60-70% of my travel was not on interstates, so my experience might not be typical.
For some reason, the hardest place to avoid chain fast food was southwestern Virginia. But even there I had a fine meat-and-three at the Roanoker, in (not surprisingly) Roanoke, Virginia.
Post pub, its great, the £3.50 special, half chips, half rice, chicken balls and curry sauce, great stuff.
Then two things happened. One, I ate there sober and tasted their batter, two the council rated it as one of the most unclean places where food is prepared in the city, rating it at 0 out of 5 :eek:
I was going to say Applebee’s too, but it would just be repeating everything you said here.
except for one time I went there and ordered Alaskan codfish (I think it was that, anyhoo it was like 3 years ago), and it came back WAY too over-seasoned and the top part of it was charred. Being the conflict-avoiding girl I am, I didn’t send it back or anything. But when the waitress came to clear our plates she wondered why half the fish was still sitting on my plate, and I had a chance to politely explain what was wrong. But she said, “Was everything OK with the fish?” And I looked at my hands and mumbled, “Yeah, fine.”
It’s partly my fault. :smack:
And another thing…GET ALL THAT GOD-AWFUL CRAP OFF YOUR WALLS!!! This goes for Friday’s, Chili’s, Outback, and all those stupid restaurants that think that’s cool. Nobody’s even looking at the walls. We’re Americans, we just wnat to eat and leave. Well, most of us anyway.
May I perhaps make a suggestion as to why your stomach rejected the food? This is what happens to my mom and I: Outback puts so much DAMN garlic on the food…we love garlic, but our body can’t handle more than a certain amount, and we haven’t figured out exactly what that is, but apparently it’s the exact amount of garlic Outback puts on every single entree, and we either barf or are doubled over with horrible stomach cramps all night.
And speaking of alcohol, as much as I dislike Outback, they make the best strawberry daiquiri ever. I’ve only had the virgin variation of course (I’m 16), but I love it…
I eat a lot of fast food. Jack in the Box is the only place that I have not been able to find anything good on their menu. Everything that I’ve had there sucked ass. Even Arby’s with their shitty meat has 2 decent items (Chicked Cordon Bleu and Cheesesticks. Don’t order anything else.)
I don’t know why people think that if they keep ordering the pasta dishes and the sauteed vegetables on the side at a Chili’s/Applebee’s/TGIFriday’s/Olive Garden that they’re ever going to get anything other than boiled noodles and a microwaved bag of sauce. Same goes for the steaks - they are of a low quality - that’s why they’re loaded up with tenderizer and garlic and blue cheese and barbeque/peppercorn sauces.
I can be quite happy in a Chili’s ordering a burger and salad. They’re aren’t too many ways to avoid actually cooking a burger to order, and even salad out of a bag is better than greasy fries or the steamed (in a bag) vegetables.
The second worst meal in my life was the daily special at Olive Garden (daily special at a chain retaurant = getting rid of the overstocked/old ingredients). I have no problem, though, with the soup, salad and breadsticks lunch.
The one place I can say that there was no redeeming qualities, and I’m not sure if they’re even still around, is Chi-Chi’s, a Mexican chain that appeals to the blandest of Midwestern palates. That place sucked.
Well, in terms of the worst food ever consistently dished out at a chain restaurant, nobody beats Chuck E. Cheese.
But then, nobody actually decides to eat there, do they? After all, the food is secondary to the real appeal of the restaurant: a place for your five year-old to wig out.
