[QUOTE=pulykamell]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Meh, Uno’s and Due’s pizza is way too crusty. It reminds me of Pizza Hut’s atrocious take on Chicago Style Pizza. Deep-dish does not equal thick-crust. I agree that Gino’s is nothing special though.
We had an Uno’s here in Charleston WV for about a year. It’s now a Japanese steak house and doing more business than the old restaurant did.
[QUOTE=JohnT]
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. 
[/QUOTE]
Since I have young kids, I’ve been to several parties there. The place is headache-inducing, but I’ve found that the pizza isn’t too bad, and the one in our area actually has a fantastic all-you-can-eat salad bar.
I’ll also admit to taking my kids there on a rainy day once in a while. We love playing each other in skee-ball and air hockey.
CharBars,You pay top whack for raw meat served by staff dressed like burger bar staff and then cook it yourself over a pretend BBQ in the middle of your table thus recreating the “outdoor experience”
An incredibly expensive Japanese restaraunt in Milton Keynes where you were expected to sit at tables with attached plastic seats of the bolted in place "would you like fries with that ?"decor.
But my last I almost feel affectionate about ,took a female friend for a sad final dinner before she went away from our rainswept shores.
We went to a Caribbean restaraunt where we were the only customers and remained so for the duration of the meal(soon found out why)
The staff were so stoned out of their minds (I assume) that they forgot our order three times in about five minutes and had to keep returning to our table to ask what it was again.
The waitress was having extreme difficulty in focusing on us and the “chef” had taken out the ingredients for our meals but had then gone into a trance and I had to walk up to the counter to wake him up as it were so that he would actually cook it.
Unusually I was drinking tea as my mates had attempted the traditional sabotage in the pub knowing what time I was due to meet up with her and had done their very best to get me drunk out of my mind (they failed but I was late)
As we ate the meal when it finally arrived (and I must say it was very enjoyable ) I asked for a second cup but the waitress prevailed on me to have a coke instead which I agreed to as apart from the complexity of the task I didnt want her to scald herself.
Normally I would have been a right grumpy bastard and would have let them know so but leaving aside that they probably wouldn’t have understood me it was so bloody funny it was an experience to remember.
Wouldn’t fancy it on a regular basis though ,I think I must have been mellowed by the pre meal beer.
[QUOTE=vivalostwages]
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.
[/QUOTE]
:eek: Bite your tongue! Red Robin is the source of the holy beverage…the most excellent freckled lemonade, which I could guzzle for hours on end…
On the subject of this thread, I would nuke TGI Friday’s off the earth if I could. Every time I’ve gone, the staff has been openly rude to me and my friends, just because we were young (we were talking at normal volumes, non-drunk, and we tipped…they just assumed we were going to start tearing up any minute just because we were young…)
Oh god. Don’t get me started on Olive Garden.
Why the hell do people eat here?
I was recently on a roadtrip with a friend. After a long day on the road we decide to stop in an Olive Garden. I’ve never been to Olive Garden before, but I’m familiar with their annoying ads. My friend who likes the place okay said described them as “images of people shouting in each others faces and stuffing food down each other’s throats” Cue stereotypical Italian Music
Now…Here we are, road weary, and we get one of those servers who really puts in a lot of “effort.”
Let me just add, at this point, that I normally tip 15 to 20 percent. I’ve worked service industry before and I know what it’s like when you’re tired, and have had a bad day. It’s the reason why I think that we should do without the tipping culture, but I digress. However, our waitress comes up.
“HI! My name is Ashley, and I’ll be your waitress tonight! Would you guys like to try some wine?”
We were quite tired at this point but still trying to feign enthusiasm, “No thanks” I said with a smile that seemed to be much more tiring than usual. My friend said the same.
“Are you sure? Why not?”
“…no thanks.”
This continued on although she eventually got the idea that we just wanted to eat and be left alone. But she kept trying to get a gregarious response out of us! I simply didn’t have it in me! I just wanted a bit of peace and quiet, low voices, etc…Nope! Not here! It’s the Olive Garden! We have ATMOSPHERE!
The meal proceeded on, and of course we got stuffed. And the worst thing was that when it came time for desert, she again tried to push it on us in this friendly, yet annoying way! It’s all too much like being screwed around with if you ask me. I don’t feel like defending my choices to an overzealous waitress.
So I hate every single place where the service is all too “casual” I don’t want a butler, I just want someone to bring me my food, and then be waiting for anything else I might need. I don’t want to feign enthusiasm when they come back around to “check up.” This is obviously out of the same page of the corporate playbook. In the service industry it is important to know if the person is enjoying their meal, but if I’m sitting there stuffing my face, I’d rather not be bothered. It should also then be obvious that it does the trick.
Everybody seems to think that European-style service is bad. I don’t get it. I really appreciate it. I like to be left alone. I can’t stand this “all-up-in-your-grill” stuff that goes on at most chain restaurants.
Also, the most absurd thing is how they offer food at the end of the meal. Now that you’re full, would you like some more food?! They even give you breadsticks to take home. And the absolute crazy thing. They now have to-go cups for drinks! Kind of weird, but not particularly annoying.
The funny thing is that the food was okay. I didn’t mind, although it suffers from what all chain restaurants do. It’s not as cheap as it ought to be for the quality of the food.
[QUOTE=Boulter’s Canary]
Not a restaurant, but a takeaway - The Town Kebab House, Gillingham, Kent.
Their Doner is an act of terrorism - in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are an Al-Quieda cell charged with poisoning the inhabitants of the Medway towns one by one.
[/QUOTE]
I made the mistake of going to a Kebab van that I’d used for several years after the pub .
The mistake ?it was early evening and I was stone cold sober,I discovered that I’d been eating lukewarm,half raw shit with strange things in it all that time buoyed up by the rosy glow of alcohol.
Baja Fresh and Desert Moon, two psuedo Mexican chains. Their motto ought to be Mexican food for people who don’t like Mexican food. The watery salsa, stale chips, underseasoned chicken and bland beef were not worth our while even with coupons.
I have arrived at the conclusion (probably not original) that chain food simply can never be particularly good, because the majority of the employees are simply Workin’ For The Man and have no personal investement in the place, and because there is always some bright spark back at headquarters who can say “if we substitute this with this, we’ll save 3 cents a serving and it’s almost as good”. Unfair, probably, but it often seems the case.
With that in mind, all chain places, at all levels, depress me to some extant. Nevertheless, I’ve patronized nearly all of them at least once. There are none, sad to say, I’d never eat at again under any circumstances, but the ones that for me are truly last-resort are:
McDonalds: ghastly, soul-sucking atmosphere and food, plus, sometime within the past couple of years, something they put in their hamburgers gives me the shits every.single.time I go there.
Panda Express: I despise most chinese buffets, and this is as if McDonald’s decided to do a chinese buffet. Decidely inferior to any independent food-court chinese joint I’ve ever been to. Not a single thing I’ve ever had there tastes appetizing; it’s as no one who works there ever actually sampled any of the food they slop onto the steam table. Even their tea sucks. How the hell do you screw up tea?
Ci Ci’s: only been there once, and the place weirded me out big time. Definitely the dark side of the all-you can-eat model. Apparently the done thing there is to load up with 15 pieces of pizza in a go, eat only the parts skimpily covered with toppings, then go back for another 15. There were huge piles of abandoned crusts at every table except mine. I can’t get on board with such a disgusting waste of food, even if it is crappy as hell.
TGI Fridays: I don’t actively hate their food, but all it took was one viewing of Office Space to make it impossible to ever go in there with a straight face again.
A few words about a couple of joints mentioned by other posters: I actually like most of what Wendy’s serves up, particularly their salads, the double-meat burger, their fries and their chicken nuggets. There, I said it.
Likewise, although I’ve had some truly horrendous Denny’s experiences, there one near my place of work that has happy, pleasant staff and serves food the cook actually seems to care about. No, I can’t explain it.
That’s part of it, yeah. The other part is that every single aspect of service, from food preparation, to its arrangement on the plate, to what words the hostess uses to greet you – all of that is dictated from on high by the holding company.
Take Chili’s for example. I waitressed there for about a year in college. All of the ingredients for the salads, side dishes, main dishes, etc. were prepackaged in set amounts. All the cooks had to do was dump the contents of any given packet onto a pan/microwave/griddle etc. and cook for specific amounts of time. Not a single one of them spoke English, so if you’ve ever wondered why making a substitution or leaving off an ingredient, that’s why. It doesn’t fit the schema, and it’s hard for the wait staff to explain it to the recent immigrant doing the preparation. Egads I hated working there.
Man, I don’t know what it is. Every time I read a thread like this, mentioning how absolutely terrible Olive Garden is, I crave it. Yummy soup, yummy breadsticks, fake alfredo sauce… I think I’ll go get some for lunch!
[QUOTE=Lynne_kilii]
Man, I don’t know what it is. Every time I read a thread like this, mentioning how absolutely terrible Olive Garden is, I crave it. Yummy soup, yummy breadsticks, fake alfredo sauce… I think I’ll go get some for lunch!
[/QUOTE]
You sound like my mother. She can’t understand why I refuse to go to her favorite restaurants. Oh, gee, I don’t know, Mom. Maybe it’s because I still have a few tastebuds left? Olive Garden is at the top of my “Nuke 'em, then bounce the rubble.” list.
I’ve given up on OG, because they don’t serve veal anymore (too expensive). The salad is OK, and the soup is surprisingly good. But I don’t care for their marinara sauce-it is simply too sweet. Place is always packed though-so people must like it.
Culver’s custard is actually yummy. Haven’t tried their burger yet, but will next time I’m back in Ames.
I’ve started using “Butterburger” to refer to Iowa’s rather heavyset governor, who shares a last name with the chain. I can’t be alone in this.
Silenus, I have tastebuds, I really do. However, while my tastebuds like many very good, very well prepared things, they still crave utter crap from time to time.
So do mine, truth be told. Sometimes I get a craving for fast-food burritos, for example. Don’t know what it is, but I can never make fast-food style refried beans at home.
