Just curious, what do you consider undercooking?
I have no real issue with Outback, but I never go there because it’s expensive for what it is. My father and my roommates love it, though. I hate Olive Garden because I have an acquaintance who works in its kitchen, and she told me 90% of everything there is precooked and comes frozen, to be thawed upon order. I can cook almost anything on their menu with fresh ingredients and have it end up a lot cheaper. If I end up at Olive Garden (which will always mean I’ve been outvoted), all I get is the unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks, which I admit are good.
I also try to avoid the “casual dining” chains, but I like Chili’s more than Bennigan’s or Friday’s. KFC is awful – if I want good, fresh fried chicken, I’ll go to Albertson’s. All the fast food burgers are worthless, including Sonic, and while I loved Taco Bell in high school and college, I never go there anymore. Chipotle is bland and boring, as is Moe’s (although I like the salsa bar at Moe’s), and the sit-down Mexican restaurants Don Pablo’s and On the Border aren’t much more interesting.
My biggest problem with the chain restaurants is that they have THIS menu, with THESE items on it, cooked THIS way, and any special request or substitution seems to throw the staff into chaos. This happened to me recently at a Chili’s, when I requested no pico de gallo (can’t stand cilantro and recognize that it’s a standard ingredient in pico de gallo) - my entree was served with no seasonings of any kind. Just a hunk of naked fish on a cedar plank. Realizing I had probably not communicated this well, I asked the waiter for a lemon wedge and some butter, which confused him mightily. “But… you asked for that plain. It doesn’t come with lemon and butter.” (He did bring me these things, just needed to be convinced I really wanted them first.)
I do like Applebee’s veggie patch pizza app (which is mainly their spinach dip and some tomatoes and mushrooms on a flatbread) and TGI Friday’s green bean french fries. I abhor fast food in general, though I do think Noodles & Company may fall into that category, and I like them just fine.
I know of the one Great Exception. It may not be authentic but it is terrific food. They have the smallest buffet in creation but what they do they do well. If you are ever in Huntington West Virginia you MUST go to Magic Wok on 5th Ave. Amazing.
Besides that one, all Chinese places are bad. Tasteless, greasy. Applebees is terrible. When they have their three course for a set price, they make the servings considerably smaller but don’t bother to tell you. I once had a waiter inform us that he had forgotten about us. Well, I forgot to tip him.
We have a Waffle House that is absolutely terrible. They use the same spatula on raw and cooked food. I am waiting for them to give someone food poisoning and then get their asses sued.
Maybe where you’re at, but there’s plenty of great authentic Chinese food here, as well as any of the big cities with substantial Chinese parts of town (San Francisco, New York, etc.)
I’m with Voyager. New York City, San Francisco and L.A. have fantastic (I was going to say world class, but I’ve only been to cheap restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai) Chinese food. I hope to go to Hong Kong some day. Sydney’s got some killer Chinese food also. I gotta say, cheap London Chinese takeout is pretty friggen’ weird (sample of one).
The more of this I read the more I think… “And English food has a bad reputation?”
Seems to me that if you want to eat out in most parts of America, you can choose between maybe a dozen different chain restaurants, most of them cruddy. Don’t you have real, locally owned restaurants anywhere?
There’s a Steak and Ale near me. I haven’t been there in years, but they seem to be doing a thriving business. I was not impressed the last time I went there.
Ditto the Red Lobsters around here. Like others have said, I don’t know why people feel the need to go to a chain for warmed-over plastic-tasting seafood when there are so many good seafood places around here (it’s Baltimore, for crying out loud!).
Applebee’s gets my vote for ‘Really Bad’ on all points. Lousy service, bad food, crummy atmosphere.
I’ve always liked Olive Garden and Outback.
It was a family outing, so I was just trying to go with the flow. Besides, I thought I hadn’t really given them a chance before. Usually, if I know a restaurant has televisions, I won’t go there. They probably did have them the first time, but I don’t recall.
Of course we do. My town is disproportionately blessed with a ton of fantastic, locally-owned restaurants. It’s just more fun to go online and bitch about the lousy chains! If I were to go into rhapsodies over my local Japanese place, I doubt many folks could identify. But if I say, “Yo, Applebees SUX!” (which it does), people are all “Yeah!”
It depends on where you go. There are two good take-out places here within 5 minutes of work.
The worst Chinese restaurant I ever ate at was in Scotland (shudder). Although I should also mention that if you are passing through Salina, Kansas or Millinocket, Maine and get the urge to eat Chinese - don’t.
The chains really don’t dominate, except in the suburbs of rapidly growing metropolitan areas. Because of their national advertising and reputation, they’re highly visible.
There are some cities where chains are rare, such as Buffalo, New York. Upscale and mid-end chains won’t tread there until they’ve finished expanding in the rest of the country, because they can get a better return on their investment in other cities. Even small regional chains like Dinosaur Barbecue and Quaker Steak won’t go near Buffalo.
Although it’s known for home-grown specialties such as chicken wings, beef on weck, a unique variety of pizza and dat der fish fry der, Buffalo really doesn’t have that much in the way of innovative dining. It’s getting better, with a growing number of “new American cuisine”-style restaurants, but it’s still far behind … oh, Cleveland. The modal cuisine is Greek diner and southern Italian red sauce, and restaurant menus at many restaurants are straight out of the 1950s; practically every menu item will be prefixed by “roast” or “fried.” The area is even lacking in Mexican restaurants (except for the local fast-food chain Mighty Taco; Western New York hasn’t experienced an influx of Mexican immigrants), and many ethnic cuisines that have been long-established in other parts of the country (Ethiopian, anything from South America).
Worst dining experience? Any Canadian pizzeria. Although some Doper will probably come along to mention some hole-in-the-wall in Montreal, I’ve never been able to find good pizza in Canada, period.
There is a Thai restaurant on the corner of Harlem and Touhy. Avoid it. I was served a sauce that looked like dishwater, but with less flavor. It did have a dirty soapy flavor, but was more watered down than genuine dishwater despite being thicker. The rest of the meal was just as impressive and all of it was tepid. The place was not busy despite being lunchtime. We paid and left without eating and grabbed a gyros at Nick’s.
goodness. what happened? i eat at olive garden from time to time. :eek: do i need to rethink that?
for me, it’s white castle. horrible, horrible, horrible. did i mention it was horrible? :rolleyes:
first, last, and only taste (and i do mean taste. one bite and i was done with the sandwich) of it was some 35 years ago. never been near one since.
the only other that comes close is the now-defunct chi-chi’s. gawd what awful food they had…
That’s my experience with Outback as well. In fact, the one time I went there, I kept looking around me to see where everyone was because the place seemed so quiet!
You see, every table was full, and everyone was conversing, but they didn’t have to talk loudly because they could hear each other since there were no televisions or music blaring! The same crowd in a Chili’s would have been deafening.
(And Outback has a pretty good steak IMO.)
Straying a bit from the OP, but Florida has really bad Chinese and Mexican food. Seriously, They can’t do ethnic in the South or something. I live in BFE, Ohio and can go to the worst local restaurants of the chinese and mexican varieties and get superior food in quality and taste than some of the supposed best restaurants of these types in Florida. It just seems like the Chinese and Mexican regional style that has sprung up in Florida is all lowest common denominator type food or something.
I’m mystified. I have a hard time pinning it down, but why are these foods so much worse in Florida? The Mexican restaurants are usually owned and operated by Mexicans in Florida as in Ohio but the frijoles are just bad, the spanish rice is dry and tasteless. The red salsas are generic, and you can’t get a decent hot green salsa. The default green sauce in Florida is some grassy, pasty, concoction made with what I believe are Poblanos…very low heat, as well. The Tex Mex fare that is indigenous to Ohio and brought many years ago by migrant workers is all so much flavorful and richer, and the green sauce is a proper, extremely spicy, jalapeno and or tomatillo sauce.
The Chinese food is all just really bad meat tenderized behind comprehension and texture with some kind of Magic wok process and the sauces are all sugar and soy… theres no difference from one dish to another…
Is the Mason-Dixon line some kind of impenetrable culinary barrier to decent Mexican and Chinese? Are the only things that get better past its demarcation BBQ and Biscuits?
I can verify that canada has terrible pizza-ouitside of a few places in toronto, canadian "pizza’ resembles melted polystyrene on carboard-with a smattering of tomato paste. The same holds true for many places in the midwest-once you leave Chicago, what passes for pizza is pretty grim. As for the popularity of chain "restaurants’, one has to realize that many people like the “food” they offer. It’s hard to belive, but maybe, once you pass 60 9and 80% of your tastebuds are gone), bland is acceptable. As i say, the chains (ocassionally) produce some good stuff (like APPLEBEE’s chicken salad). But in the main, its just low-quality, very bland food. “Dead” lobster is accurate; on the few times I’ve tried the place, it was all the same-fish that had been in a freezer since Jesus was a boy-no taste, except for the grease!. of course, you can get bad food anywhere. My favorite Italian place in town used to be great-the last time, no good.
I won’t eat at either of these places because of their stupid commercials. “Gourmet Burgers” at Ruby Tuesdays? :rolleyes: And those idiotic brothers or cousins or whoever they are that own Carrabas always try to sing or tell jokes and act like Regular Guys TM. Ugh.
We just went to Outback last weekend and had a great meal! We never have to wait because we sit in the bar area and you seat yourself. Could also help that we usually eat at a late hour…by 8:30 or so the dinner crowds have dwindled. Our Bloomin Onion was crispy and tasty and everyone’s food was prepared just right. Maybe we are just lucky? Or maybe we’re just weird…we also like TGIFridays, but they are really too expensive so we only eat there maybe once a year. I’ve never had a bad meal there.
The trick with these places is to tip well and get to know the bartenders, then they will make sure our food is done right and not something that’s been sitting under the heatlights for an hour.
We mainly frequent the privately owned restaurants in our city. There are a ton of great Mexican food places here and we have a couple tavern style places closeby that serve excellent and cheap steak, shrimp and burger specials every week.
Applebee’s isn’t all that bad. My picture is hanging in my town’s Applebee’s 
because they sponsored my baseball team a few years ago.