My In-laws love Cracker Barrel. They’re West Virginian and their food is very southern.
I always considered it all right, but not worth the price.
Burger King has the worst food.
I’ve never gotten a hot sandwich there, though I’ve been dragged there many dozen times by whoever was driving.
And they pour on way to much sauce, so it drips down your arm, even if you ask for it “your way” without mayo.
My first thought was Little Cesar’s and their $5 cardboard pizza’s covered in ketchup and some kind of gut binding cheeses.
I hate this.
It isn’t even food.
And my husband and kids go all ape-shit-happy whenever Daddy brings it home.
BARF.
I make pizza that takes better and costs less. And they prefer Little Cesar’s.
I weep for the future.
I got one too, and it’s a doozy.
I was at the bar at a Friday’s playing NTN trivia with some friends (which IMHO is the only reason to go to Friday’s) when I had to pee. Upon entering the men’s room, I can’ help but notice that the floor is covered in blood. Further inspection reveals that the blood is coming from a man laying on the floor in the stall. He’s being attended to by a marginally attractive woman in a pantsuit, and he’s not moving very much. “Oh my god! What’s happened!” I say. “Don’t worry, I’ve got everthing under control,” says the woman, who most certainly did not have anything under control.
“I’ll go get the manager,” I say.
“I am the manager!” she replies.
“I’ll call the police!” I say.
“I’ve got it under control, sir,” she replies.
“Well, OK then.” I say, and proceed to belly up to the urinal.
“Do you mind?” she screams. “There’s a lady in here!”
“I’ve really got to go!” I say, because I really, really had to pee very badly.
“You can’t do it here! There’s a lady in the room!”
“It’s the fucking MEN’S ROOM lady! Where the am I supposed to go?”
“Well you can’t go in here!”
I left without peeing, paid my tab, and got the fuck out of there and peed in the alley.
There’s a Cheesecake Factory in Old Town Pasadena, and despite the profusion of other (pretty good) restaurants in the immediate vicinity, the sidewalk in front of the Cheesecake Factory is always packed with people waiting to get in every night. I haven’t been to this particular one, but guessing by the lines I’d say it’s general forty-five minutes or so. In other places, like the one in Thousand Oaks, it’s been about a two-beer wait on a weeknight, but I’ve only done that once, so don’t get your confidence interval calcs out.
And yeah, while not bad, the food isn’t anything special. Given some of the other nearby restaurants, I just don’t understand the draw. I’ve had their cheesecake and while it is good, it isn’t I’d-wait-an-hour-for-this-cheesecake good. But then, I’d rather either go down the street to Barney’s and have a good Black & Tan with their decent (if not exceptional) bar food, or hit one of the Indian, Afgani, or Tibetian restaurants to the north of Colorado Blvd.
Stranger
That ‘minds me of the time that two of our cooks got in a knife fight over which one was going to get to screw the hostess that evening. Let me just say, if you think you’re worried about a piece of hair in your food, you don’t know nothin’. I’ve seen abattoirs that were less blood-splattered. The manager, though, proved adept at diplomacy AND stitching up wounds, and dinner was saved, if slightly more enriched than usual. :eek:
That particular restaurant is no longer open, not due to the constant state of warfare in the kitchen, but because the owners were snorting the profits up their noses. Ah, the food service industry; it’s the perfect place for paroled felons to fit right in.
Stranger
I worked at Denny’s for a while. Part of the draw of working there was using the cheap meals to cut my meager food budget. But I found that I could rarely stomach the meals.
The only fresh food is the eggs and the huge piles of the greyest, mealiest tomatoes ever. The back rooms as stacked high with cans of soup, just-add-water mashed potatoes, and dehydrated hashbrowns. The freezers are packed with frozen entrees, frozen pre-seasoned veggies, and pies that are left to thaw and kept in the pie case for a week before it is thrown out. The little produce and fresh food they do use is the lowest quality possible. There is nothing good and pure at Denny’s. There is very little that you’d ever consider serving in your own home, much less paying a premium for.
All this would be forgivable, but it’s not even cheap. Taco Bell and Little Ceaser’s aren’t food- they are cheap stuff to eat. But Denny’s costs just as much as a real meal somewhere.
Have you ever read *Kitchen Confidential * by Anthony Bourdain? It sounds like your passage could have come right from the book. It’s a fascinating and funny look at the dark, seamy side of the restaurant business, and you’d probably appreciate it.
I’ve read it. It’s entertaining, but I wonder how much Bourdain exaggerates some of his exploits; that fight was about the wildest thing I saw, but then, I was working kitchens in a medium-sized Midwestern city, not the Big A, so…
From what I understand, the drug use has dropped off quite a bit, after peaking in the Eighties. Too many people shoveling blow up their nasal cavities led to a Darwinist filtering of that particular gene pool, I guess. It’s still a hotbed for quick hookups, though. Hmmm…maybe I should start looking for a part-time job as a bartender…
Stranger
TGI Friday’s = Houlihan’s = Bennigan’s = etc.
Ever been to Bennigan’s? Yeah, but I’ve never been again. 
But don’t you just love when all the waitresses come out and sing happy birthday? :rolleyes:
Ivylad took the kidlets to some place called TropiGrill.
As I understand it, they all took one bite of their food and left it sitting on the table. The food was cold and tough. And the kidlets are almost teenagers, who would eat almost anything. It must have been extremely nasty food to turn them off.
Oh my, so many to choose from!
Applebee’s is disdained by me and the Mrs. the most at present. A few mediocre meals there, followed by two nasty ones when we were really hungry.
Denny’s is just too surreal anyway.
The Texas Cheesecake Depository, I mean the Cheesecake Factory thinks it is a lot better than it is.
George Webb’s, an otherworldly chain in southeastern Wisconsin, notable for having two clocks on the wall (don’t ask why), has the most amusing day-glo yellow Chicken flavored noodle soup. It’s chili is ok tho.
An earlier poster mentioned Zantigo’s! Gee, I miss them.
I don’t understand people who complain about Applebees and Red Lobster.
If you count fast food, Burger King, Popeyes and Taco Bell has got to be one of the worst, and Hardees/Carl’s and Jack in The Box the most edible.
If you don’t count fast food, then I’d say Fresh Choice is pretty gross but edible. Dennys or Carrows probably still wins.
The thing with Applebees and the like is that it tries to be good.
None of us would mind The Olive Garden if it’s mushy pasta and too-sweet sauce came in styrofoam boxes and cost five bucks a pop. It’s the big to-do with fresh grated parm and decanted wine and double digit prices that get us. Applebees isn’t offensive in and of itself, it’s the fact that when we visit our parents house they want to take us in for their new “teriyaki cajun chicken strips” or whatever instead of going to an actual restraunt that serves more than frozen and fried meals. It’s an offense to us that truly deeply love food, enjoy freshness, delight in exciting preperations and value delicacy of flavor and texture. These chains take the things we love and turn them in to sloppy horrid monsterous things that the rest of the world then tries to tell us this is good.
Is it elitism? Nope. Why not?
Because these places are damn expensive. I’m all for feeding the masses, but this is kind of the opposite. You can buy a decent entree at anything but the smanciest bistro in town for the same price as The Olive Garden. These places exist so largely so that people can spend a lot of money and think they got a great meal out of it. They play on the underlying self-consciousness of the nervous middle class, who need to consistantly reinfornce to themselves that they are going to an “relaxed but upscale Italian restraurant” or a “trendy bar and grill.” They are not about food, they are about branding. The satisfaction does not come from the eating, but from the spending of money on a “nice meal.” Nobody checks to see if the meal is nice.
What is the problem here? Well the first is that people keep wanting to take me to these godforsaken places, when I’d really rather slum it at the local pho shop or greek deli. The second is that they contribute to the ever growing blandness of America- a country that you can drive across and never have to experience anything different except the scenery out the car windows. They contribute to a santized, standardized world, which is the antithesis of everything I love. They take business away from the good stuff, and even if it’s anyones right to eat wherever anyone wants to, it still sucks.
Amen! Preach it, Sister!
(uh…Brother? I think I remember even sven being of the female persuasion, but I’ve been wrong before…)
Word to whoever was bitching about Bojangles. I ate there once. That’s it. Never again. Nuh-uh, no way, no how, not for a million bucks. Nastiest chicken I have ever eaten in my entire life, and the only time I have ever left fried chicken unfinished. I ate half a drumstick and threw the rest away.
As for CiCi’s…well, it is what it is. It’s all the pizza you can eat for $4, so you can’t really expect artisinal pies. That said, their dessert pizzas are really quite tasty. And their regular pizzas are no worse than Domino’s or Little Ceasar.
As for even sven’s accusations that chains are homogenizing American food, that may be true in large urban areas. But for many parts of the country, they’re the first wave of food diversity. It’s awfully hard to have authentic ethnic food when you’ve got no authentic ethnic people to provide said food, ya know? It’s been within the last 10 years or so that any honest-to-goodness Mexican places opened up in my home town, but we’ve had Taco Bell and similar all my life. Same for the pizza chains. We don’t have an Italian-American population, and so we still don’t have the little family-run artisinal pizza places, but we’ve always had Pizza Hut. I dunno what a pho shop is, but I’ll guarantee you there’s not one within 30 miles of where I was born, and probably not within at least 80 of where Dr.J was born. Ditto the Greek delis.
So the chains come in with their frozen stuff preseasoned for consistency across the chain, and build up a following for some relatively unfamiliar type of ethnic food over many years, and then slowly the real deal starts to filter in. People try to the new places, realize they’re far better than the chain stuff, the businesses take off, and demand increases enough to support more and more little authentic places. You may hate the chains and everything they stand for, but they’ve really expanded my parents’ culinary horizons.
huzzah for the resturn of this thread from the netherworld!
I guess where I live (south santa clara county in california) the branding conglomerates have already won. What we have left in my neighborhood is double-digits steakhouse, a dress code brewery, and chains chains chains chains. When it’s 9pm and I get off work on a friday, the only things open are Chili’s and Applebees and whathaveyou. I don’t know of a single place to eat where I could go and get something that pretends to be a steak for $10. This is why I don’t dig on applebees, in my neighborhood it’s dirt cheap. If I want to go to a non-branded non-chain restaurant and order a real steak, well that’s easily going to run me $30. Sure, that’s worth it, but for casual dining a few times a week that gets expensive.
How do you feel about places like Outback, Steak and Ale, or Ruth’s Chris?
I love Steak and Ale’s atmosphere, their salad bar, and their French onion soup is to die for. Outback is pretty good too, I think.
I’ve never been to Ruth’s Chris, because if I’m paying $45 for a steak I’m not going to pay an extra $7 for a baked potato.