Last night, I cooked spag at home in my sink with used dishwater. I was not pleased with the results.
I also cooked the sauce in my camp toilet. That was slightly better, but I was confused about what some of the chunky stuff was.
Experiments for the SDMB, that’s what I do.
Dear Father in Heaven, WTF?!
I’m still trying to understand the OP - he waited 18-20 years after going to a number of ‘chain’ restaurants to wonder if this was a trend. Not only that - the restaruants he specified are not known for their italian cuisine.
Most likely - the type of spaghetti he was served is the 'throw nooldes on plate, top with ‘sauce’ - leaving plenty of ways that the person dishing up the slop would not have drained the pasta well enough.
In any event - it would be starchy water - not soapy water - and if there was a soapy taste to it - it may have been cilantro from the sauce (as that has a tendency to taste soapy to some individuals, me being one of them).
I thought about cilantro, but I can’t imagine any normal spaghetti sauce containing it. I know cilantro shows up in sneaky places, but in a chain restaurant spaghetti sauce?
I’ve seen people mistake cilantro for Italian parsley which isn’t all that uncommon in red sauce.
Although they taste very different they look similar in a bunch on the grocery shelf.
[Shrug] FWIW, the pizza is the backbone of Shakey’s business. I’ve enjoyed Shakey’s pizza since the early 60s–in fact, before that I wouldn’t even eat pizza!
What does pizza have to do with Italian cuisine?
Shakey’s spaghetti sucks, too.
“I don’t order spaghetti at restaurants” is the new “I don’t own a TV”. 
Actually I don’t ever order spaghetti at restaurants, either. Linguini, though, I will order any day of the week! Or tagliatelle, or rigatoni, or…
OK, so I know where American pizza stands vis-à-vis Italian cooking; hence the FWIW. :rolleyes:
Well, some people eat it that way… I prefer the good old knife & fork.
Ravioli is a different matter. *Abbondanza! *
terentii writes:
> It’s called chili mac, and it’s the state dish of Ohio.
I assume you’re joking, but just to clear things up for everyone, no, it’s not the state dish:
I haven’t been able to find any reference online to it being the state dish. I spent twenty-three of the first twenty-nine years of my life in Ohio, and it wasn’t until long after leaving Ohio that I even heard of Cincinnati chili or chili mac. Cincinnati chili isn’t even that well known outside the Cincinnati area.
:Sigh: I have lived in California for 60 years, and I don’t know what our state dish is.
Avocado sodomy.
What?
Not over the top enough?
According to that chart, Illinois doesn’t even get a state dish. We get a state snack. And it’s popcorn.
My rule of thumb regarding pizza, which has served me well over the decades, is, “Never order pizza in a place that serves anything other than pizza.”
Well, since nobody will tell me what the state dish of California is (I don’t buy the bit with the avocados), I hope there’s a Doper from Indiana who can tell me what their state dish is–I was born there.
FYI, I did that. The two people with me ordered a pizza, and nothing happened to them. I ordered a hearty ravioli dish and got violently ill.
The corollary to my rule is that I also avoid eating *anything *at places that also serve pizza. The logic behind this is that since pizza made at places that aren’t strictly pizza joints is inherently inferior, restaurants that serve pizza alongside other dishes are OK with serving inferior food - which means that their standards are pretty low to begin with, and anything they serve is suspect.
In short, if there’s pizza on the menu, then the food is probably mediocre.