The Blue Parrot in Louisville, right?
Most of the many mom & pop Greek diners that are everywhere throughout western and central New York are more-or-less interchangeable. Same “little bit of everything” menus, same decor, same suppliers. Most are pretty good when it comes to breakfasts, and some might have a specialty item they’re good at, but for the most part, they’re just … there when you don’t feel like anyplace “too fancy”.
In my hometown, there’s the phenomenon of upscale Greek diners, but otherwise most tend to cater to senior citizens and/or a middle-class blue-collar crowd.
I’ve found local and small regional chains, and chains with a cult following, to be pretty good for the most part.
FWIW, in the United States it’s impossible for a community to ban “formula businesses”, including chain restaurants, thanks to interpretations of the Commerce Clause. However, a growing number of community control them through strict floor area, architecture, signage, landscaping and site planning controls. Many chains won’t locate in communities with what they see are onerous planning requirements. Other chains have an inventory of alternative elevations to use in communities with very strict zoning. Chains will fight to use their “prototype”, but they’ll customize their design if it’s required,
That quote above about Cheesecake Factory says they make the restaurants smaller than they think demand will support.
That isn’t quite the same thing as making people wait when they have tables available (and sufficient staff to work those tables; I’ve been in many places with empty tables they can’t fill because they’re short on staff). Also interesting because all the Cheesecake Factory restaurants I’ve been to have been pretty big.
The thing about chain restaurants I don’t understand is when people eat out all the time, eat out when at home, live in an area with a thriving independent restaurant scene and still never venture beyond the main chains.
I’m ok with my neighbor saying “sometimes it is just easier to go to the Stuart Anderson’s down the road.” I don’t understand that he’s been there 14 times in the last year and still hasn’t even tried any of the four other independent restaurants in the same strip mall.
That does look kind of interesting (scroll down for photo), and I definitely would try it were I in the area. Although, the Google reviews are pretty damning. Still, I kind of like to see what regional interpretations of foreign cuisine bring. I just wouldn’t go into it thinking I’m eating anything that resembles conventional “Italian.”
I wonder if folks mean different things by “travelling.” The overwhelming majority of my road trips last four hours and cover the same particular stretch of I-40. When I eat, I almost always stop at a fast food place along the way. I’m not looking for a culinary experience. I’m looking for the shortest stop that can keep me going for the last leg of the trip without getting sick.
If I’m going somewhere else along an interstate, I’ll generally follow the same rule. I’m not interested in exploring Podunk South Carolina, sorry Podunkians; I’m interested in getting to wherever I’m going. While travelling, I eat fast food. When I’ve deviated from this rule, I’ve had far more failures than successes.
But when I get to my destination, I’ll almost never eat at a chain. Whether I’m on vacation or at a convention, I’ll put my restaurant dollars toward something that looks delicious. And that means something run locally, something that I can’t find along the interstate. It almost always works.
(Notable exception: there’s a diner near Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. It’s the only restaurant within about five hundred miles as near as I can tell. The food could feature in a Call of Cthulhu adventure.)
Nope, you can ask my wife, who (mercifully) endures (and seems to enjoy) my road meal planning. If I’m taking a 4-hour road trip, I damn well look for something interesting along the way if I’m going to stop. This doesn’t mean I don’t end up at a Culver’s or McDonald’s or whatnot from time to time (there are big stretches of culinary wastelands), but my trip to, say, Iowa City is about 3.5 hours, and I like to take a pitstop in the Quad Cities for food when I can. Or possibly in Ladd, Illinois on the way back for some fried chicken. If I can’t afford the hour or so detour, that’s fine, I’ll just eat when I get to Iowa City, or I’ll stop and grab a burger from somewhere. But if I’m going to sit down, then, yeah, I try to find something interesting.
It’s not really a regional thing - in fact I’ve never seen anything else like it anywhere in the country. It’s just a place that has been around forever, it probably was one of the first “sit-down” places in the city when it opened, and it just persisted. In a way, it reminds me of the numerous “Supper Clubs” especially in Northern Wisconsin. People get all excited talking about them and rave about the food, but when you get there the menu looks like it was written in 1965 and the food is really not very good. I think it’s a nostalgia thing - people remember going there when they were kids spending a week at the cabin “Up Nort” and getting to go there on the last night, ordering off a menu. Nowadays they get a warm and fuzzy feeling being back there, and they don’t even notice the bad food. The Blue Parrot is like that.
If you were in that part of Colorado and asked for recommendations from the locals, you’ll hear The Blue Parrot mentioned. And if you go there, you’ll be disappointed. You would have rather gone to Chili’s.
This. When actually doing the “traveling” part, it’s exclusively chains. I want a known quantity of fuel, not an experience. Once I get to where I’m going the exact opposite applies. I will seek out the hole-in-the-wall places with killer food no matter how hard they are to find. But not while I am in transit.
You’ve never been to Klamath Falls. 
We drove 20 minutes to the nearest restaurant. I had fried chicken strips that were a dark dark brown, like they were fried in motor oil. The T.V. was airing wrestling. The cook had a grease soaked t-shirt on. I’m still a little traumatized.
I’m sure that’s part of it. Heck, I’ve driven more than 4 hours just to eat at a restaurant and drive home.
For me, “traveling” is the process of getting somewhere. I often don’t care where I am going so long as I’m traveling. It isn’t an uncommon weekend for me and my wife to wake up on a Saturday morning, get in the car and just start driving, taking whatever random whim strikes us, just so long as we’re home in time for work on Monday.
She has said at 8am in the morning “let’s go to Fry’s” (20 miles away) and I’ve said great, let’s go now and find a way to get that doesn’t get us there before dinner.
Fortunately, there are now so many ways to find the good stuff and avoid the bad, even if you don’t know where you’ll be until you get there, that eating at chains while traveling isn’t often needed any more.
Yup. Shoulda known someone would figure that out.
Hoo-boy, that’s some BAD pasta.
See, the thing with me is, there’s plenty of places along the way I would never stop at otherwise. Like fried chicken at Ripp’s in Ladd, Illinois, or one of the places in Barberton, Ohio. Or the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich in St. Olaf, Iowa. There’s no way I would ever find myself with those spots as destinations. Or the best pulled pork I ever had – at Morris Grocery in Eads, Tennessee. We took a detour there on our way from Memphis to Owesnboro, and oh boy am I ever happy I did. (OK, it’s not a big trip from Memphis, only about 40 minutes, so I might have stopped by there anyway.) I’ve never had pulled pork that good. Of course, I had my leads for all these places, and they weren’t just a random stop.
I am morbidly curious. Of course, I’m also the guy who got excited when he saw pickled turkey gizzards at a bar up in Wisconsin and had to try some to sate his curiosity. I discovered turkey gizzards are huge.
Good analogy.
I think there are good supper clubs around (they have 'em here in da UP too) but you describe the bulk of them correctly. The last one in my town closed several years ago, and it was sad to see it go, but it did have to go. It was in an absolutely stunning location and building, and my parents tell me the food was excellent in the 50s and 60s and even a little into the 70s (I remember going there as a kid), but even the locals stopped going. The food was horrible, and the kitchen was downright filthy (I toured it after it closed. Truly scary).
I actually looked into having a party there for my parents 50th anniversary, a few years before it closed, until they showed me their banquet room. It not only looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since the early 70s, but it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since then, either. The menu they showed me was miserable as well - a smattering of dull things like shrimp and cocktail sauce along with WTF? kind of stuff like chicken fingers and fried mozzarella sticks. I don’t know what the owners were thinking.
Luckily, there were other local places that had their act together. I can say with all honesty, an Applebee’s, Red Lobster, or Chilis would have been a much better meal than the cool historic local place that had been open for 50 years, and I pity the tourist who thought they were getting something special by going there.
This thread reminded me to go back and catch up on Kitchen Nightmares, and then I ended up staying up til 3 AM watching episodes. Thanks guys!
(Every bad restaurant trait being described here is a mainstay of that show.)
The American version is called Restaurant Impossible. I like the Brit show including the episodes where Ramsey goes to American places. His passion for good food always come through. Unfortunately a quick google of the restaurant’s name afterwards often reveals they didn’t follow a word of his advice and went out of business.
Yep. The sole cafe in my town managed to stay open for 30 years serving a limited menu of very basic items. The food was cheap and service was fast. If you were lost and drove through town at lunch time, you’d think you’d found something special. But you’d never go out of your way to eat there a second time.
In another very small town about 30 miles away (Thor, a few miles south of highway 3 and west of 17 if you’re ever in the area), the owner of Unkie’s worked for months to develop the menu. Ribeyes, prime rib, seafood, interesting sandwiches, amazing hash browns fried in real butter, and a surprisingly tasty salad that’s simply lettuce with a couple slices of cucumber.
Prices are reasonable, service is fast, and the food is great. If you arrive after 5 p.m. on a weekend, be prepared to wait (in the bar next door). The owner has done well enough that he takes his staff to a theme park in Florida every year. A larger town nearby has all the chain places so you’d think Unkie’s would be struggling, but they’re thriving. They don’t take credit cards but there’s an ATM, and they’ll take a check.
I agree – you can’t tell by the number of cars in front if a place is any good. Truck stops always having the best food is also a myth.
Quite right-a LOT of “Ma and Pa” restaurants serve lousy food. The only conclusion I can make-a lot of people are happy with mediocre food. This is particularly evident in rural areas-I had an awful meatloaf dinner in a town in upstate Maine-how do you screw up meatloaf?And a lot of “Italian” restaurants stink-they are now in the hands of the third genertion-and canned sauces and precooked pasta is all they know. If the local clientele keeps buying-how are they to know? The real depths are reached when they start substituting synthetics for real ingredients-like that fake mozzarella cheese (made with lard and milk solids), tomato sauces loaded with cornsyrup fillers, and “veal” cutlets made of pink slime.
I’m happier at the “Olive Garden”-at least I won’t be poisoned.
No doubt on both counts. A loose rule that does usually work is that if you’re looking for an ethnic restaurant, and there are a lot of people of that ethnicity dining in there, or if it’s heavily skewed to people of that ethnicity, it’s probably pretty reasonable, in terms of trying to replicate the taste of that ethnic food and not adapting to American tastes. It’s not hard-and-fast, and just because a Vietnamese restaurant has a lot of Vietnamese in it, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “authentic” or “good,” but it’s much more likely to be so.
I hit chain restaurants - usually - if my husband and I are driving cross-country and we’re in a hurry. We’re just stopping at whatever rest stop is convenient, and you’re almost certainly going to get a chain there. (There was this one wraps-and-sandwiches place at a big rest stop on I-90 in NY State that if it’s a chain, I’d never heard of it before, and we liked the food.) We’re eating on the run, we need something portable, and because I’m a vegetarian I’m usually getting a veggie burger at Burger King.
I can completely understand the appeal for families, too, for any kind of chain - big menus, food geared to various kinds of picky eaters, you know it’ll be like the food back home, etc.
In a way, I used to be similar in that if I knew I liked a particular dish, I wouldn’t want to try something else because what if I didn’t like the other thing? (Like my tendency to only get Pad Thai at Thai restaurants.) And especially if you don’t go out much, reliability helps.
My husband and I went to a particular Italian-American restaurant that my sister’s then-fiancé (now ex-) swore up and down was the best Italian food he’d ever had. It was some small restaurant that didn’t really seem to know how to make Italian food, and nothing tasted very good. My husband swore that he thought they’d tried to deep-fry his pasta, judging by the texture. (I horrifiedly thought of the mostly-joking comment repeated by various cooks and waiters in my experience - and by me - that no germs on dropped food would survive the deep fryer. :eek: )
Yep, they may just have the waitresses with the shortest skirts or most cleavage. 