When do chain restaurants become teh suxxorz?

As seen here and on many other online venues, there’s a widespread belief that chain restaurants are always inferior to independently owned equivalents, either because the food sucks, or because it’s not “authentic.”

With some exceptions, such as the restaurant concepts of Darden (Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, etc.), most chains start off as local mom and pop businesses. The food at those mom-and-pops probably had to be good; it had to be to reach the point where they could open a second location, a third, a fourth, and eventually expand outside of their home region. They must not have sucked that bad if they were able to expand nationally, right?

DiBella’s Subs is an expanding sandwich/sub shain that got its start in Rochester, New York. There’s a new DiBella’s Subs store several miles from my house - in Cleveland, Ohio.

[ul][li]Should I think that DiBella’s now sucks because it’s an expanding chain? [/li][li]Should I think DiBella’s sucks because it’s not local to Cleveland? [/li][li]Should I think DiBella’s sucks after they open more than a certain amount of stores?[/li][li]Should I think DiBella’s is great just because it’s from my home turf of Western New York? [/li][li]Should I like DiBella’s because they have good subs, regardless of its growing national presence?[/ul][/li]
Basically, when and from what perspective does a restaurant chain start to “suck”, even if the food is unchanged from the time they first opened their doors as a mom-and-pop? Do you think the chains originating from your city don’t suck, while those that do are great?

My WAG is that a local restaurant may be buying fresh and/or local ingredients. As a restaurant expands and becomes a chain, it may become more cost effective to have more things made in a central location and shipped to the individual restaurants in various states of put-togetherness. I could see that as having an effect on the quality of the food.

Dibella’s is a chain? I know there were a couple in Rochester, but I had no idea they expanded to other cities.

As for the suck, I haven’t had a DiBella’s sub in a few years, but I remember it being very good.

[QUOTE=elmwood]
[li]Should I like DiBella’s because they have good subs, regardless of its growing national presence?[/LIST][/li][/QUOTE]

Absolutely.

Typo:

“Do you think the chains originating from your city don’t suck, while those that do are great?”

means:

“Do you think the chains originating from your city don’t suck, while those that don’t do?”

Chain’s start to suck when quality controls goes below ones individual standard. The Applebee’s by my house was great when it first opened. 10 yrs later, it sucks. May as well be a Denny’s.

If I were a perpetual traveller, I’d probably favor original-to-the-area food, not only because it’s a treat to eat at a new place (along with some ideas of authenticness,) but also because there’s a limited theoretical capcity for restaurants and more chains means less variety.

But that doesn’t mean that I judge individual chains based on their permeation through America. I judge them based on their crappy, pre-cooked food.

Except Subway, which is still around in my hometown when The Bomber House is no more. When I go back there I will not set foot in that Subway, when it’s still around and the best cheesesteak place in the world closed.

For franchise operations, a lot of it has to do with the willingness and ability of the franchisor to impose and enforce standards on the franchisees. If they are more interested in selling franchises than maintaining standards, things can go to hell rather quickly.

Just using one local-place-grown-into-chain as an example, there was a definite turning point where Ruby Tuesday’s went from local buyers (who presumably cared) supplying restaurants with local produce and meats, to crates of stuff being trucked in from Bumfuck, Oklahoma, which was going to probably spell a step back in quality for all the Ruby Tuesdays not located in Bumfuck.

The reasons nationwide chains can suck to beat all Hell on the local level are many:
[ul]
[li]Managed by an employee rather than an owner[/li][li]Supply source - trucked in from compnay distribution/processing center rather than fresh local sources[/li][li]Menu selections based on national availability rather than local[/li][li]Corporate bean counters forcing product related decisions in order to pacify investors[/li][/ul]

:confused: Can you translate that into English for us?

You may find this article entertaining. It mainly uses restaurant chains as an analogy for software development, but there are some insights about the left-hand side of the analogy as well.

It’s pretty much what has already been said by several posters in this thread: the best cooks and restaurant managers will open their own restaurant rather than join a chain, so the franchises outside of the chain’s home town (where the restaurant may still be run by the original owners) are going to be operated by second-rate people who can execute decisions made by the franchise management, but who lack the creativity to respond to local circumstances.

The key word is “franchisees”. These are almost always people with money with no skills in food selection, preparation, etc. They look at the place as just a store. Bring in product at wholesale prices, send out the door at retail prices. Object: minimize cost of doing that. (They can’t really raise prices much to make more money at the other end.) E.g., you know that lettuce that’s been in the back one day too long? Don’t throw it out, that’s just throwing money away.

Franchisees are also notorious at thinking that minimum wage new hire employees save you money over well paid experienced employees.

Quality is immaterial. Only $ counts (but of course they are lousy at judging real costs).

10-15 years ago Red Lobster was actually a decent place to get seafood. I’m not saying it was gourmet food but it was decent enough. Sometime between then and now the quality of their food really went down hill to the point where I certainly won’t eat there.

Marc

I think that it is just an idea of trying something new. The chain restaurants certainly aren’t hurting for business, as they are usually successful. It is just the fact that familiarity breeds contempt.

If I am 500 miles from home, I want to try the local restaurant. Worst case scenario, I am puking in the parking lot, and can go through the Wendy’s drive-thru on the way back to the hotel.

And speaking of hotels, most people, on the flip-side, love chain hotels versus the local mom and pop joints. You ever notice that the mom and pop joints are places for adulterous couples to hook up, complete with dirty sheets and stains on the mattress, whereas if you go to a Sheraton or Marriott, you usually don’t go wrong?

It’s easier to go with a screwed up meal than getting killed in a crack neighborhood from a hotel chain. Although in recent years, some chains are letting their name go to anyone with two forms of ID.

Holiday Inn has always been a good medium range hotel, but Motel 6, Super 8, Days Inn, and Econo Lodge varies wildy. I have stayed at some of these places and they are BETTER than their higher counterparts. Some of them are crackhouses next to the whorehouses that the adulterous couples stay at…

I don’t think that franchising is the key word. After, some of the McDonald’s restaurants are corporate-owned, and it’s not like they’re noticeably different from the franchised stores. (And there are no franchised Starbuck’s stores.) As the linked article explains quite well, the chain restaurants have formal processes for making everything, which extend to franchised and corporate stores.

The problem is that you’re more likely to get microwaved entrees from the freezer, ingredients and even whole courses pushed to the very edge of the “safe to eat” range to save a buck, and an inadequately trained staff, the bigger a chain is.

My dad’s great-uncle (or some such thing, I can never get those straight) owned a very successful restaurant in LA for a while. He never advertised and he never expanded. All he did was hire a chef he trusted and say, basically, “You give me a list of ingredients to get, which brand you prefer, and tell me how much you need. I’ll keep you stocked. Make people happy.” You don’t get that kind of stuff at a big chain restaurant, even though he made a killing and a half–you should see this guy’s house in Palm Springs!.

But in chains, corporate HQ mandates the recipes, which are generally going to be the exact same at every single location. Preparation time is strictly decreed. Training time has a rigid maximum, but doesn’t necessarily have a minimum, in practice; when it’s crunch time and they need to get people working, people get undertrained. Problem employees can take a long time to get fired because the person who makes those decisions is in charge of 10 locations and won’t be at yours any time in the next month. Individual employees can’t cut you a deal on the price for being courteous, tipping big or bringing in lots of business. Ingredients are probably old and may come from somewhere far away–why should I go to McDonald’s in California, the largest dairy-producing state in the Union, and pay them to ship shitty cheese in from Wisconsin? The manager is 25 years old, more often incompetent than not, and not quite sure of what decisions s/he can and can’t make. The promotions are lame and result in poorly-thought-out menu changes which leave shitty ingredients and food sitting around unsold, which puts pressure on each location to sell it to gullible customers.

Every single one of these problems was constant at the chain coffee shop I worked at. (No, not Starbucks.) I’m not saying they’re all present at every chain restaurant, but they certainly run through my mind when the prospect of eating at a chain restaurant comes up.

This is where I reach for my guns…

Are you saying that McDonald’s cheese is the pinnacle of Wisconsin’s dairy abilities? That wasn’t what I was saying at all, but now I’m starting to wonder.

Anyway, guns aren’t allowed in my neck of the woods, and I ain’t comin’ to yours, so good luck fixing your aim from over there.

:wink:

Our cheese is better. Deal with it.

As for chains vs. local restaurants, I think there are good chains and bad independents. The best food I’ve eaten has been at independents, but there are some shitty dives out there too. Most chains are at least mediocre. Most are no better than mediocre, I suppose, but I’ll take that over a plate of crap.