What I don’t get is why go to a chain at all. Yes, they are safe in that you get exactly the same old unexciting fatty salty sweet stodge you got last time you went there. Why is that a good thing?
It’s like people who drink, say, Coke and nothing else. Why? Does the 10,000th can really still taste so good you never want anything else? At least with, say, boutique wine or beer (or ginger ale or lemonade, if that’s your thing) you can get brilliant while risking bad - either way you get an experience, something to talk about.
Do people really want their lives to be solely composed of such unremarkable experiences? Does anyone ever say: “I’ve GOT to tell you about the McD’s I went to last night! It was utterly indistinguishable from every other one I’ve ever been to!”.
In east Texas where my parents live, they have at least two mom-n-pop cafes that are pretty good. All fresh made and, if you like that sort of thing, down home comfort food. Everything else though, is crap. Same goes for the smallish town I live in outside north Dallas, except we only have one that’s decent. The rest that have been recommended to us have completely sucked. There’s a Mexican restaurant here that makes the blandest food I’ve ever tastes, and that includes in school or the hospital.
So overall, we prefer cooking at home to anything else (plus, that’s all we can afford these days). But back when we still ate out, I truly enjoyed the occasional Cheesecake Factory for their nice Shepherd’s Pie or Olive Garden for their remarkable Ravioli di Portobello. Also, Chili’s fares well on their shrimp tacos and I never complain about one of our Texas based chains, Posados. They have the best queso outside of Austin and I really enjoy their chicken fajitas, as well as the husband loving the tamales.
Are the fine cuisine? Nope, not even close to a Michelin rated dining experience. But they season their food well, it never blows like these unique places do, the service is above average, they didn’t break the bank and you shouldn’t have to wait forever. And I say all this as someone who’ll try almost anything and looks forward to new dishes and styles. I am incredibly adventurous.
Regardless, since I long for something that’s delicious whenever I spend our limited funds, I have no desire to waste that on mediocre, tasteless or instant, prepackaged shit. I’m not looking for it to be exactly the same the twentieth go 'round as the first, but I certainly don’t want to regret I picked that place. Therefore, sometimes it’s better to choose Joe’s Crab Shack. Others can risk Angelina’s only to be disappointed.
Like everyone else in this thread said - sometimes unexciting fatty salty sweet stodge is better than the alternative.
I eat at chains while on the road, for two reasons:
I don’t have time to check the Interwebz to find the good local places, or the town is so small the Interwebz doesn’t have much to offer. Occasionally I’ll see a local place that I’ll take a chance on, but I’ve been disappointed/scared more often than I’ve found that great undiscovered jewel. And yes, Scared. Small towns are remarkably OK with a level of filth in their local restaurants.
I live in a small town, and I know how small-town restaurants are. Some are good, but there’s plenty that either an outsider wouldn’t like or are downright bad. By “outsider wouldn’t like” I mean this tendency for small/medium towns to sometimes have odd tastes. I’ve lived in more than one where there’s some restaurant that’s been there forever that the locals loooooove but serves downright weird food. It’s similar to the comfort food you grow up with - you spent your whole life eating XX, so even as an adult, knowing it’s not really all that good of food, you still sorta like it.
One town I lived in had a semi-Italian restaurant that was known for their spaghetti. I went there once and ordered it, seeing as so may of the locals could not stop talking about how great it was. When it came, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen called spaghetti. The noodles were thick, REALLY thick, more like long spaetzl than spaghetti noodles, and really super doughy. The sauce was thin & sweet, sort of like warm tomato juice.
I have no doubt that if I go back to that town, the locals would still tell me how great that place is. But I want nothing to do with it.
There’s a handful of those kinds of places around my hometown as well. I live here now, and I grew up with these places, and I have to admit, as a local, there’s a certain appeal that they have. But I’m always careful sending outsiders to these places - I can’t say “Oh, it’s a great Italian place!” I always say “It’s a decent restaurant if you order XX or YY, but stay away from the ZZ, and if you order the BB, be warned that it’s not what you’d normally expect.”
And two Subways and a Pizza Hut. But that’s the entire list of chain fast food outlets. Hardee’s and Applebee’s closed down and KFC went away 20 years ago. Even some chain steak houses bit the dust.
Almost forgot…Culver’s exists, but they’re actually good.
It’s not cheaper. These places use prepackaged food because they don’t have or can’t get anyone who actually knows how to cook. A properly run kitchen using fresh ingredients will always be cheaper than one that simply reheats pre-prepared packaged food.
It’s just a personal preference. Some people like routine and consistency, eating what they know they like, and some people like exploration and variety, with the occasional bum meal, when they go out to eat.
No matter where I go, I almost always research the local food; I look for interesting food stops along the way; I walk into random restaurants that look interesting. But that’s because that’s fun to me, and I place a priority on it. I’m also an adventurous eater, and while I can be critical, I’m not picky and will find some enjoyment from the food, no matter what is put in front of me. I can totally understand those who don’t give a shit or want something predictable, which is what chains are good at. It’s just food, right?
For me, it’s because, in my experience, chains are better. Not all chains, but the more expensive ones usually are, as they don’t shoot the bottom of the barrel to get lower prices. Give me Applebee’s steak over any mom-and-pop steakhouse. The fact that it’s more expensive and still actually able to become a chain means the food is of a fairly high quality.
In fact, when I hear people claim that chains universally suck, I honestly wonder, if they got the chain stuff from a restaurant that pretended to be a mom-and-pop, would the food suddenly taste better? Did they get their idea about chains from places like McDonald’s, which really is just about the cheapest possible food?
I’d honestly say your best bet is not the mom-and-pop stores but the small chains, followed by the more expensive large chains I mentioned above, like Applebees or Outback or similar. Only go to a mom-and-pop’s if you have other data–like a word-of-mouth from a friend or praise from an Internet site–or if you are so bored with the other available offerings that you don’t mind the high risk.
That’s probably a fair assessment. The other thing I like is to eat food that a region is known for, or that is hard to find where I live. For example, when I go visit my friend in Iowa City, I try to pop into the Quad Cities for some Quad City style pizza (although Chicago did just get its first Quad Cities pizza restaurant.) In Iowa in general, I’m always on the lookout for a good pork tenderloin sandwich, among other things. If I head on south, I explore barbecue and southern-style cooking. Detroit? Lebanese, Detroit-style pizza, coney dogs, etc. Ohio? If I’m in the area, pop into Barberton for some of their local fried chicken, or stop into Tony Packo’s if I’m near the Toledo area. Or check out various styles of Cincinnati Chili in that area. Find a Hungarian restaurant in Cleveland. On the coasts, I look for fresh seafood. That sort of thing. Every region seems to have a food they’re known for, and that’s part of how I like to learn a little bit about various parts of the country.
Of course, doing this does require some time, effort, and research, and, like I said, not everyone gives a damn. Oddly enough, I generally only find myself at chains when I’m in the Chicago area (usually, because I just want a beer and a burger), or when I’m in the middle of nowhere late at night when little else is open.
I once read that Louisiana is the only state where you can reasonably expect to eat good food at ANY Mom and Pop place you go. The other 49 states - not so much.
I also like to try eating at non-chain places, and travel quite a bit in Indiana. So far, I’ve hit 3 really good places (one, in Portland, Indiana, had the best fried chicken I have ever tasted - by a mile) and countless numbers of mediocre to horrible.
I don’t know about Louisiana as a whole (although it wouldn’t surprise me), but the couple of times I’ve been to New Orleans, it seemed like every restaurant I ate it had very good food. I would gain about forty pounds if I lived there.
Yeah, Indiana is a bit of a toughie. There’s a few places I like on I-94 along the lake, but the interior is a mystery to me. Though I do remember a wonderful breakfast at some place in Goshen, whose name is forever lost to me.
By the way, roadfood.com is another good resource for travelers who like the food hunt. It’s hardly exhaustive, but along with chow.com and a local message board called lthforum.com which has a forum for areas beyond Chicago, it gives one a good idea of what to look out for. Yelp can be good, but you really do have to read through all the reviews to get a sense of whether it’s a place worth exploring. Some places are inexplicably rated highly (at least to my tastes), and some places that I think are among the best in the US rate at 3.5-4 stars (like Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, rated 4 stars over 652 reviews, which has the best pizza I’ve had in America. When you read the reviews, the negative ones seem to be from people expecting a different style of pizza than what Pizzeria Bianco serves, which is basically a Neopolitan style.)
Not always. The one and only time my husband and I went to the Cheesecake Factory, we were thoroughly unimpressed. My husband had a pasta dish that I think was called “Spicy Chipotle Pasta” (or something along those lines), and afterwards, he got to quote The Simpsons by saying, “I can think of two things wrong with that title.”* It wasn’t spicy and didn’t taste of chipotle.
That’s not to say you can’t get crappy food at mom-and-pop or even “upper scale” restaurants. The last place I just stopped eating my food because I didn’t find it that appealing was at a new gastropub that was charging me ~$15 for maybe 1 cup worth of a roasted root vegetable shepherd’s pie. I told the waiter I didn’t want it comped, I just didn’t find it interesting. It tasted bland and dried out.
New Orleans is the only Louisiana city I’ve ever been to, so I can’t and won’t speak to the state as a whole.
But Louisiana-born conservative writer Rod Dreher (who’s normally a HUGE advocate of localized shopping and dining) says that visitors to small towns in Louisiana tend to be VERY disappointed by the food, because actual blue collar Cajuns are more likely to eat at McDonald’s than at the kinds of quaint, down-home joints you’d expect.
It’s counterintuitive, Rod says, but nowadays you’re unlikely to get quality Cajun or Creole food in rural Louisiana, because locals don’t appreciate that cuisine nearly as much as outsiders and tourists.
There are people who eat like those audiophiles who will claim their ears are bleeding unless the sound is at the highest possible quality. Every morsel that goes into the mouth is a quest for heaven.
Most people don’t eat that way. I know people who don’t actually even particualrly enjoy eating. It is just something they have to do to stay alive. They’d prefer it not suck, but they don’t particularly notice the different between middling and pretty good and it isn’t worth effort.
Plus, when I was a kid we ate out at a real restaurant maybe once a month. The joy of eating out was not finding great food as opposed to ok food, it was for my parents in not having to clean up and deal with at least one kid every night whining about whatever had been made. For us kids it was about being able to pick what we wanted and not having to eat the same thing as everybody else, and then not having to clean up afterward.
In that type of situation there is a lot more value placed on the food not sucking than on it being great. With a chain (or the local restaurant they’d been going to for 30 years) you knew sucking wasn’t going to happen (or how to avoid the suck on the menu).
When we’re traveling, we do try to avoid known entities since that is the fun of traveling for us (I don’t understand people who take the same vacation every year). And the modern technological age has really helped with that. But back in the day, on day 4 of driving through the rural midwest, not having had a decent restaurant meal in that whole time, the certainty of a basic middling breakfast at Denny’s takes no a certain appeal.
Well, for example, when I was on a road trip years ago, we stopped in a little local burger joint. Got sick as a dog, spent most of the rest of the trip with either our asses or our heads in a toilet bowl. Made the trip living hell. Now, if we had stopped at a chain (our local fave is In&out) we would have gotten nice tasty fresh food, no food poisoning. Now sure, sometimes we have found treasures, too. But on some trips the risk is not worth the possible reward.