Restaurants you don't like

"Dinin’ at the Y!. Giggity giggity! :stuck_out_tongue:
:smiley:

Huh, glad I missed that. There are so many great local places (Maudie’s, Juan’s, Taco Shack, etc.) I don’t see the point of a chain. Heck, even Taco Cabana is miles away from Pancho’s.

With the sopapillas, it’s mostly the free, automatically after the meal thing. In Arizona and New Mexico, I saw it a lot; in Texas, I"ll see 'em on the menu but you have to order 'em.

Co-sign.

The service was nothing nice either. Empty restaurant and your hostess can’t be arsed to get off the phone to seat us? Utter bullcrap.

Apparently, it’s “inventive, beautifully created and imaginatively flavored.” I’ve only been there once - it’s outside my budget for a regular casual dinner out - but that was indeed my memory of it.

(Great peoplewatching, too - lots of gay “meet the parents” dinners.)

If you are ever in Mackinaw City, MI, and absolutely must have Chinese food, do not go to the Chinese restaurant there. It sucks. I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s only one there, so you’ll know it when you see it. I ate there with my parents like 9 years ago, and the food was so disgusting we didn’t even eat it when it arrived - my dad left some cash on the table and we walked out. If you are in Mackinaw City, you should go to Nona Lisa’s, though. And if you ride the ferry to Mackinac Island, you should go to the Horn Bar or the Yankee Rebel Tavern.

The Mexican restaurant that I go to most frequently has free pralines and iced tea with a couple of their dinners. Otherwise, you have to pay for the pralines. I don’t believe that I’ve seen free sopapillas offered anywhere but Pancho’s, and eating at Pancho’s is a very painful experience for me. I used to love it when I was younger. These days, though, I’ll pay a heavy price for eating their food.

Oh, not at all. I live in Central NC and within five minutes of my house is some darn good Chinese and Mexican. And they’re locally-owned, too, not just P.F. Chang’s and Chipotle. The Mexican joint near me is especially good, and has a menu that goes well beyond the normal formula food. There is also a terrific Latin-American restaurant that just opened up in town, and two very good Thai/Singaporian/Indonesian places as well. Yeah, we got Bojangles’ and barbecue joints too :slight_smile:

What I’ve learned both from personal experience and from several people I know who have lived there is that Florida is a culinary void for the most part. In urban areas with diverse ethnic makeups, like Miami, there are a few good authentic places, but in the more touristy areas of the state (i.e., everything else), you can forget it. Orlando is especially bad: the vast majority of the eateries there seem to want to cater to the widest possible range of tastes, and thus nearly everything is pretty bland and standardized. Not that there aren’t ANY good places there, but there are so many restaurants tailor made to satiate the unadventurous tourist masses that it can be tough to find a good meal. Florida is interesting anyway because not many people around where I live really associate it with “The South”. It just seems to be in its own hemisphere sometimes.

As for the restaurants that I don’t like…

To the person above that mentioned On the Border: yes, they do exist in other places. There is one near where I live, and it is always PACKED, despite the fact that within a couple of miles of it are several locally-owned Mexican joints which are far superior. On the Border isn’t terrible, but it’s rather bland and pre-fabricated by comparison, so why bother?

I very seldom eat fast food burgers, but if that’s the only halfway reliable thing to eat then I won’t fall on my sword over it. However, I absolutely CANNOT tolerate McDonald’s. The food there makes me ill no matter what I get. The last thing I ate from there were some Chicken Selects, and I woke up in the middle of the night with a weird sensation in my chest and rapid heartbeat. Never again.

FWIW, I like In-n-Out okay, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat there. Then again, I’m an East Coaster, so I didn’t grow up with it. I think it’s more of a cultural, regional thing that way, same with one of my friends in college who was from Buffalo and worshipped Mighty Taco.

My family occasionally goes on trips to Puerto Rico (where my brother lives), and contradictory to the stereotype that you immediately will have severe digestive problems upon entering Latin America, not one of us had ever gotten sick from the food there until last year. On that trip, my mother became very ill after eating at a Church’s Fried Chicken joint - a mainland American chain.

Shaw’s Crab House Chicago…overpriced over cooked seafood. They are not as good as they think they are.

Maybe the shops are different in different areas. We live on the coast, so finding fresh and tasty seafood is not difficult around here.

In general, yes. You drive through any city and it’s like being in an old Warner Bros cartoon where the background is recycled every four seconds–the same strip mall with the same Chili’s/Outback/Chevy’s/Olive Garden/Macaroni Grill/etc cycle every half-mile or so.
NajaHusband and I… we love food. Really love food in an amateur foodie kind of way. Thus, we never eat at chain restaurants–they tend to cater to the most generic, least offensive palate possible and never have any flavor or character to their food. That’s what happens when you’re striving for conformity across a country and don’t have actual cooks making actual food with their actual cooking talent. Plus, all of those places are always sooooo expensive. We can drive through any random place, pick a random locally owned restaurant of any genre and get a decent meal for half the price of eating at Applebee’s–and more often than not these randomly chosen places are really, really good. Sometimes we strike out, but it’s rare. We spent part of last fall driving ~6500 miles around the western half of the country and never ate in a single sit-down chain restaurant. We ate fast food if we didn’t feel like stopping, but if we went into a restaurant we picked something out of the phone book or just chose an offramp and drove around until we found something that looked good.
I can’t for the life of me imagine why people support those pasteurized, homogenized, grill-stripes-painted-on-the-steaks, microwave meccas. Try it some time. Pick a restaurant that has a focus on food instead of flair. Viva la hole-in-the-wall!

And for my contribution to the actual topic at hand, NajaHusband flat refuses to ever set foot in an Applebee’s, it’s kind of a standing joke by now. He practically froths at the mouth when the name is mentioned. We went to the Outback and had a goodish steak a few years back, and wanted a steak one night when we were looking for a nice meal out on our anniversary. There really aren’t any good local steakhouses here, so we headed to the Outback. We waited an hour and a half for a table (they told us 45 minutes). When we finally got seated we asked to order right away. I asked for my lamb to be bloody rare and got medium well. NajaHusband’s steak was drastically overcooked as well. The meal was… thoroughly mediocre and ran something like sixty bucks. I will never eat there again, particularly when a fabulous steak dinner is very easy to make at home. I feel like if I’m going to spend more than $15 for my meal I want better service and better food than I’m going to get at home… else what’s the point?

Most mid-level chains like Outback tend to overcook steaks, which is why I so rarely order steaks in restaurants… that, and they cost an arm and a leg. When my girlfriend’s parents took us out to Orlando’s finest steakhouse (Del Frisco’s) around Christmas this past year, I practically got sticker-shock just looking at the menu, even though they were treating. I ordered a rare steak, and it came out perfectly deep red in the middle, the most flavorful, tender, and juicy steak I’ve ever had. I still can’t afford fine dining like that on my own, but a place that is really serious about steaks will do it right every time. I can cook a beautiful rare steak on my grill at home, of course, but the quality and cuts of meat I get will never be as good as what they serve.

In a thread like this, it makes more sense to focus on national chains, since everyone knows what you’re talking about. There are locally owned restaurants that I hate, but I wouldn’t expect more than a few people to know what I was talking about if I said I loathe the Hula Hut.

Anybody who complains about the food at Applebee’s, TGIF, Bennigans, etc., should be forced to eat at Cracker Barrel.

Blasphemer! Or are you under the mistaken impression that when people spend $10.50 on a burrito they’re going there for the food?

I’d rather at at Cracker Barrel than any of those places! While their past discriminatory hiring procedures were unsavory, they are apparently a compliant equal-opportunity employer now, and their Southern-style home-cooked food is delicious. Great breakfasts, amazing meatloaf, awesome chicken ‘n’ dumplings, wonderful biscuits… I used to love that place, but haven’t been in forever.

Cracker Barrel

Chili’s

Applebee’s

Ruby Tuesday’s

Max and Erma’s

Mesquite Grill ( one place, local, I beleive. Yuppie and overpriced.)

Sweden House ( limp or greasy food)

Outback. I’ve never understood its appeal except the steak knives are very sturdy.
Eidleweiss ( in Chicago.) Very very pricey for a bland german meal. Good god, it was expensive.

These are all examples, to me, of Generic eating with 60-90 minutes of waiting.
I’d rather eat at a local mom and pop restaurant anyways.

A few weeks back I fed a friend who’s a world class violinist and used to fine dining… she said it was the best steak she’d ever eaten. It’s all in how the meat is grown and aged. Look for a local butcher or small, grass fed/pastured beef producers. We don’t eat meat all that often, but when we do I buy it from a local butcher shop that cuts their own meat grown by small, local farmers. I can choose how thick I want my steaks cut and from what end of the loin. The meat doesn’t cost much more than buying from a grocery store and is exquisite with nothing more than a sprinkle of kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper and a quick flash-sear in a cast iron pan. Side with a salt-rubbed baked potato and some broiled asparagus or brussels sprouts and I’m in NajaHeaven :).

I had a friend who worked at Applebee’s about two years ago. He said that 80% of everything they serve is microwaved, 15% is fried, and stuff like steak that you really can’t microwave gets grilled by the one guy who gets more than $5.15/hour.

Gods, what a disgusting place.

I should mention that while most chains suck ass and fast food places are occasionally worse, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest – Popeye’s. The first time I ate at one I told the counter guy “compliments to the chef.” I didn’t realize it was a chain at the time. Their foods probably come from a warehouse at corporate, but they got them right.