It’s not because I find their food exceedingly offensive, it’s fine in a bland, mass produced way. They tend to limit the obnoxiousness of the decor and generally stick to one theme. My problem is that they have become what the rest of the country associates with “Chicago-style Pizza”. The original Uno’s (and it’s superior sister Due) is one of the classics, but it’s also the worst example of Chicago-style pizza among the big hitters. The national chains that it spawned reduce the pizza to an even weaker version. The pizza served at your typical Uno’s barely even resembles a Chicago-style pizza and the low quality components make for a truly disappointing experience. Factor in the comparatively high price and we now have generation of people across the nation that think they dislike Chicago-style pizza. Little do they realize that they have never actually eaten it.
So, in the best interests of the American culinary bedrock that is the Deep Dish Pizza we must eliminate Uno’s from the planet. I hold that all people must make a pilgrimage to Chicago to truly try the dish and the first step in achieving that is to scour the corners of the world of this cheap knock off.
I realize that we might lose the Original restaurant in the blast being that it bears the name, and hence we lose one of the big four purveyors, but I’m hoping that Pizzeria Due will remain as a tourist trap as a result of it’s peculiar spun-off name. Really, it’s a risk worth running.
Funny, my dad loves Sbarro pizza, and my brother thinks they have the best baked ziti imaginable. They constantly remind me of poor, hapless Michael Scott on The Office, in the episode where he visited New York and talked about getting the perfect, authentic slice of New York style pizza… and the camera panned back to reveal Sbarro.
Say what? The original Uno’s is fine. That, Due’s (which I don’t think is superior to Uno’s, it’s just as good at best), Malnati’s, Superossa’s, Pequod’s, and Burt’s represent various great examples of the Chicago style pizza. It’s Gino’s that I personally can’t stand.
Now, now, I once ate a Tex-Mex place called Pancho McGillicuddy’s, and it was very good. The food was tasty, and the margaritas were outstanding.
I’ll join freckafree and turn the other launch key for Cici’s. Cardboard pizza with plastic pepperoni–gah. Honestly, you’d getter better pizza if you ate a Totino’s straight out of the freezer, and you could do it without being surrounded by screaming kids.
To be pedantic - and mind you, I didn’t know this until comparatively recently - “shrimp scampi” could also be considered wrong. The original use of “scampi” is to refer to a langoustine, aka Norway lobster. Thus even “shrimp scampi” is incorrect unless you’re using the word “scampi” to mean “with garlic butter and white wine.” I’d go with that as a good definition except that they have a different means of preparation in the UK. Confused yet?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure there are Subways that are quite excellently non-poisonous. I’ve seen threads here where Dopers sing their praises, and I trust in the collective Doper pallette.
But I also trust that not one of those Dopers has been to that particular Subway. I would guess that Jared has, though. If that place were my only source of calories, I’d be dropping weight like third period French.
Nuke the crap out of it. It’s a blight on society.
“Scampi”, AIUI, is Italian for shrimp. It annoys me that a restaurant chain that touts it menu as including a veritable “tour of Italy” thinks it means “cooked in garlic butter and white wine.”
I can’t believe people hate the cheesecake factory. Someone said their cheesecake was “grocery store quality”. I have to disagree. The food is better than most mid-priced resteraunt chains, and I haven’t had better cheesecake at a chain resteraunt.
The food chain I dislike the most is probably Subway. All of their megachain competitors are at least twice as good as them, but somehow they’ve managed to saturate stripmalls with their bad food. Brand recognition and exposure alone is keeping Subway going, and it really pisses me off.
There’s a cafe in the building where I work. This cafe has the advantage of being right here, so I don’t have to leave the building in bad weather.
In just about every other category I can think of, it’s not worth keeping around. I suspect they get a lot of business mainly on their location as a selling point.
I don’t suggest nuking it, though – that would wreck the building. Give me time to go home first, please.
Except both Olive Garden and Red Lobster don’t use butter, it is some sort of industrial yellow mineral oil, with no wine and a clove of garlic waved at the dish as it passes. Both eateries “scampi” is nasty beyond belief, tasting like an 800# man took a whole jar of Alli, washed them down with a gallon of 40 wieght, then crapped in my mouth. :eek:
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Mosier**: it is not the food at Cheesecake that most of us have a problem with- it is the service from hell, run by the two tortoises from the Comcast ads. Rude and slow.
If it isn’t on the list yet, Red Robin should be added. Small portions, mediocre chow, and between the full bar and the tables full of yelling kids, it can’t decide whether it’s another Chuck E. Cheese or another Chili’s.
Oh, Subway! I don’t ever eat there anymore, even though there is one in my place of employment. I used to go there 2 or 3 times a week and get the cheese pizza, but with spinach/tomato/onion on it. The register has “Veggie Pizza” button that rings up as 4.99, but the menu board has no such beast. Instead, it says “Cheese Pizza (choice of veggies): 3.99”. So every time I went there, I had to correct them when they rang it up as a Veggie Pizza. The last time I went there a few weeks ago, I got in the standard discussion, and the guy running the register turns around and looks at the menuboard, like he did every time, and says that the manager says that he has to ring it up as a “Veggie Pizza”. I told him that the menuboard says otherwise, and he responded that what the manager says overrides the menuboard. I left the pizza on the counter.
As a corollary, I have worked for that man (the manager) before at another Subway (for two weeks), and he is easily the most tightfisted man I’ve ever met. He’ll pinch pennies anywhere he can, which is ridiculous, given that he’s working in an industry with sufficient markup to make McDonald’s blush.
For my own edification - consulting my copy of Marcella Hazan’s Marcella Cucina, she confirms that scampi refers to the Norway lobster/langoustine: “The best known of Adriatic creatures is scampi, which, notwithstanding having its name misappropriated by that over-garlicked standard of Italian-American menus, shrimp scampi, is not a shrimp at all. It is a small, orange-pink, lobster-like crustacean, whose sweetness and tenderness surpass that of lobster itself.” Man, I love this woman.
You’re funny, tdn. I take Spanish.