Plenty, according to some of my readers. My take on the subject is that chain restaurants aren't bad. They just aren't good, either.
Chain food reduces the volatility of your dining experience. You rarely have a really great meal, a memorable meal, at a chain. (Your date throwing up his Shrimp Fra Diavolo does not count.) But you also rarely have a really bad one. People have forgotten about all the really bad restaurant food there used to be--and still is, in places that don't have the density or income to support chain restaurants. People look at the rich individually owned markets of the few big cities that have them, and the great family owned places in their own area, and conclude that chain restaurants must be dragging America's food tastes down.
I beg to differ. The chains are putting a floor on quality; any family owned restaurant that cannot provide at least as good food and service as a chain has gone out of business. The average family owned restaurant is probably better than a similar chain, but that doesn't mean that if the chains went away, we'd have better food. We'd have a lot of soggy pasta and awful hotel buffets--remember those, small town America? Not an improvement.
And for a more mobile country, chains make a lot of sense. If you travel a lot, search costs start to matter. In other words, there's nothing wrong with chains. Because the best thing about chains is that if you don't like them, you don't have to eat there.
I agree that chains are not outstanding but bring predictability and a floor on how bad the food (and overall experience) can turn out to be. The predictability can be especially valuable when eating out with children - I know that my children like Olive Garden and will always find something to eat there, so I can relax and enjoy the meal, even if it's not the best food I ever ate.
Chaining is also advantageous from the restaurant's point of view, because it helps manage risk in a volatile industry. Besides the obvious economies of scale, there's the aspect of being able to balance income across different regional markets that are probably not be experiencing identical economic conditions simultaneously. A temporary slump that could put one lone restaurant into an unrecoverable loss may be manageable if four other locations are at break-even or better during the same time period.
I'm tellin ya', it's not just small town America where the local independent can be vastly overrated. It has not been infrequent that I've spent thirty or forty dollars on an entree in a restaurant with a huge reputation, in cities with huge restaurant reputations, and have experienced cooking that was inferior to what I've typically experienced for less than half the price at a chain. No, I've never had a great meal at a chain, either, whereas I've had some tremendous dining experiences at a local. Overall, however, I cannot say that the tremendous meals at a high priced independent, counted only as my first experience with the item on the menu, have significantly outnumbered the occasions when I've taken my first bite of the chef's work, and have been tempted to go back to the kitchen to instruct him or her as to the proper execution of the dish.
If you are unfamiliar to a city, it is often quite rational to choose a chain, reputations be damned, and sometimes past experiences be damned. I recently dined at a restaurant I previously had good, albeit not great, luck with. It's reputation is that of being one of the finest restaurants in one of the country's better towns for restaurants. The meals were thoroughly overcooked, ruining some very expensive ingrediants, and we had insufficent time, by the time the entrees were served, to send them back. To add insult to injury, within ten minutes of the entrees arriving, the wait staff quite obviously attempted to hurry us thorugh, so as to turn the table. Well, we didn't want to finish the dreck anyways, so as I paid the exact amount owed, sans tip, of about $140.00, I called the person who appeared to be in charge over, and told him they should just laminate the menus, and leave ketchup bottles on the table, so people would be fooled by the prices as to what they would be receiving.
Eating out is overrated, period.
You are crankeeeee today! (But don't stop!)
"would not be fooled", of course.
Uh-oh. Not Olive Garden again.
"The average family owned restaurant is probably better than a similar chain"
I have to disagree with this one, and the sentence preceding it in your post suggests you do too. The average indie restaurant is not better than a chain, and they have a failure rate to prove it. I agree the survivors generally are. What about when the survivors become chains?
"You rarely have a really great meal, a memorable meal, at a chain"
Many, if not most of the customers at CRs, especially at the lower end of the price range, are there either because logistically they have no choice, or because making dinner and cleaning up at home are time consuming irritants they're willing to pay to avoid. People eating at Denny's aren't after a memorable meal.
I've had many fine experiences in chain restaurants. That was solely a function of the company I kept.
Growing up as a child we took at least three or four long road trips a year. We always ate at local places, except of course at rest stops on the highway. Both of my parents believed why eat at McDonald's or Olive Garden or whatever chain when you can get it at home just as easily. To them it was like going on vacation and watching TV.
I can only recall two times we weren't happy with our food. They have both become legendary events in my family.
I don't know if this was a result of my mother having some sixth sense for good restaurants by looking at the outside, or we just got incredibly lucky for 15 years all over the country.
Luckily for me I seem to have inherited/learned this same skill.
In summary:
Going to Chili's when in Midtown Manhattan is stupid
Going to Chili's while in the suburbs is a reasonable choice
The panning of chains is flat out silly, and certainly done by people without small children (because you can go to a Macaroni Grille with your three-year-old who's up past her bedtime and wacky, and order here a kid's meal fer cheap and still sort of pretend you and your wife are at a "real" adult place).
BUT there's another side to the coin, neatly discussed by joe Queenan in "Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon" -- the chain restaurant has an anooying tendency to pretend it's something other than what you say above. I mean, there's really people who think, dude, the Olive Garden, that's pretty high class.....
the chain restaurant has an anooying tendency to pretend it's something other than what you say above.
Yeah, wouldn't it be better if they lined us all up in front of the trough on rough-hewn milk stools and slopped the goods with surly waitstaff?
One reason why the Olive Garden seems to be at the flashpoint of the Chain Hater Brigade, IMO, is that they actually have made a measureable attempt to upscale the experience. The restaurant furniture is usually large and comfortable, the decor uses the Tuscan themes without being blandly uniform across all restaurants, the kitchen staff has persons with actual chef training, and all of the waitstaff I have dealt with are well-trained and polite. This must be absolutely infuriating to anyone who thinks that a large, visible chain must necessarily be evil somehow, or at least 'lacking' some magical panache that the Gentrified Class regards as necessary for a good dining experience.
Also, the families-with-children aspect carries another angle: $20-30/person including drinks, tax, and tip is about the most many growing families can ever afford for a meal out, save for the rare and truly luxurious splurge. Thus, the Olive Garden is about the most upscale dining experience they will be able to partake with any frequency, and it serves well enough, even if soft whitebread isn't a particularly Italian offering.
A prior comment quite aptly noted the economies of scale which chains enjoy. Prices at chains seem to be somewhat more reasonable than at comparable independent places. I also appreciate the way that Outback Steakhouse has a pretty much all-inclusive price for most selections. Most independent steakhouses have this inexplicable habit of charging extra for everything (salad, potato, etc.)
I have little invested in this argument, but it is important to note that it partially undoes itself halfway through:
The chains are putting a floor on quality; any family owned restaurant that cannot provide at least as good food and service as a chain has gone out of business. The average family owned restaurant is probably better than a similar chain, but that doesn't mean that if the chains went away, we'd have better food. We'd have a lot of soggy pasta and awful hotel buffets...And for a more mobile country, chains make a lot of sense. If you travel a lot, search costs start to matter. In other words, there's nothing wrong with chains.
If there are "search costs", then chains are not only "putting a floor on quality"; they are taking some customers away from local restaurants that might be better, but are not familiar. "Search costs" are one of the bases of the arguments made by those who think there is, in fact, something wrong with chains.
I believe Megan is familiar with Nha Tho St. in Hanoi, the street next to St. Joseph's Church. It's got the cutest assemblage of atmospheric individual-restaurateur Euro restaurants in town: Mocha Cafe, La Salsa, Mediterraneo, La Place. (Also Paris Deli, but that place has a bad vibe.) Anyway, an eight-story glass/steel/concrete faux-colonial high rise just went up on the far corner of Nha Tho, and the ground floor is going to be a Highlands Coffee -- an upscale coffee chain run by a Vietnamese-American guy that's pursuing a Starbucks-style strategy of market saturation. Due to brand recognition, as well as, um, brand-ish recognition (a Highlands looks/feels like a Starbucks in red, guaranteeing familiarity), this franchise will likely pull in enough customers, especially tourists, to knock out one of the four locally run restaurants on the street -- even though all of those places have better food.
There are some pretty big chunks of the country where restaurants better than the Olive Garden don't exist. They might not be the best in the country, but when they're the best in the town that makes it high class.
If there are "search costs", then chains are not only "putting a floor on quality"; they are taking some customers away from local restaurants that might be better, but are not familiar.
Only for transient visitors; if you live there, you probably know where the good places are.
Having driven myself completely across the US four times now to move, (I've got it down to about 900 mile/day), I can't help but appreciate upscale chains as compared to some of the horrifying greasy spoons lurking out there. I've also discovered, however, that uniformity isn't all its cracked up to be; I've gotten Uncle Ben's from a Panda Express in one of the rectangular states.
Of course, when in a hurry, I mostly eat free motel breakfasts and Subway for lunch and dinner on my lap going 75.
My biggest beef with Olive Garden is that they don't seem to have discovered garlic, which just maybe would be forgivable in, say, a Swedish restaurant, but is a mortal sin in an Italian one. It reminds me of the other Italian restaurant in the Big Night. But even though I've seen Mark Bittman make a chicken fried steak that looked absoutely delicious, the few times I've actually them one in little local places in Port Arthur, Texas and somewhere in the wilds of West Texas, oh man, the Olive Garden would have been so much better.
There are a lot of REALLY GOOD chain restaurants. Half of the near-top restaurants in Vegas are also in Manhattan.
It's a total myth that chains are only in the burbs.
Daniel Boulud, Strip House, Smith & Wollensky, Nobu, etc.
If you have a formula for a spectacular restaurant... Why not repeat the formula a few more times? Form a "chain".
You can split hairs... Perhaps Nobu is not a "chain" in your eyes.
I love the comment that "the chain restaurant has an anooying tendency to pretend it's something other than what you say above. I mean, there's really people who think, dude, the Olive Garden, that's pretty high class..... "
Yeah dude, it really gets my goat when people who go to chains have the gall to enjoy themselves as much as I do at a nicer independent place. I mean, I see nothing wrong with the proletariat having a fun little night out every once in a while, but they should really be considerate enough to recognize that they're eating bland swill and maybe feel a little inadequacy about the whole thing. I mean, would it kill them to envy me a little?
Jack, to be fair to Queenan's book, his point about Red Lobster was not that Red Lobster was so terrible, but that it was annoying to be given the eye by other customers for having the temerity to show up at Red Lobster in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals. Now, the book is about 10 years old now, but it appears to me these days that there are a lot of people who wouldn't hesitate to show up anywhere in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals.
Ray Kroc started McDonald's (or expanded it, whatever) to cater to traveling salesmen that wanted a dependable meal while on the road. Of course, back then there was no way to know whether the random diner in the town you were driving through was even sanitary or safe to eat at. Now we have safeguards again this, and chain restaurants are just a way to cut costs.
Having worked with a number of restaurant companies in a banking/consulting capacity, I try to avoid them to the extent possible. The quality of ingredients is just not good, nor is the food remotely healthy.
Because the best thing about chains is that if you don't like them, you don't have to eat there.
See, that was my point in the other thread: you DO have to eat there. I don't eat alone, McCardle. I frequently have to abide by the decisions of my fellow diners, and when they tell me they want chicken quesadillas from Chili's for the 8th time in the last two weeks, it grates. Oh, it grates!
Like I said, yes, I could solve this problem by getting some new friends/coworkers, but in the meantime I will continue to decry Chili's at every opportunity in the hopes that this will influence my dining associates (friends and family) and I will be subjected to it on a less frequent basis.
So burn your Chili's. Trash your Olive Garden. Hang your TGI Friday's managers. Bulldoze your Red Lobster. I've had enough!
I have this discussion with other libertarians a lot.
Many libertarians see restaurant chains [and big-box stores] as expressions of the marketplace, and therefore feel compelled to defend them whenever they are slighted.
This centers the discussion in the wrong place. The fact of the matter is that the chain restaurants, as well as the giant fast-food chains, along with the malls and Wal-Mart and hell, while we're at it, the national brands of any number of consumer products, are only partially expressions of the marketplace. They're also significantly expressions of US federal, state and local transportation and land-use policy.
McDonald's and Wal-Mart are creatures of the interstate highway system. Chain restaurants are creatures of the strip mall, which has deep roots in transportation and zoning policy. It's absurd to claim that the market "prefers" a certain type of development when that development is catered to by our land-use laws.
Our transportation policy broke the connection between the residents of communities and the businesses that arise in those communities. Our land use and zoning policies delivered those disconnected consumers into standardized commercial districts accessible only by car. Chain restaurants are just as much a product of this social engineering as anything else.
So don't feel obligated to defend chain restaurants just because you're a libertarian and corporations own them. And don't allow your more left-wing culture critics to point at Applebee's [and Wal-Mart] and say, "Look at these soulless creations of the late capitalist marketplace!" They're soulless creations of communitarian planning, bub.
Your date throwing up his Shrimp Fra Diavolo does not count.
Funny you should mention this, because I believe the stats on people getting food poisoning at chain restaurants are quite disturbingly high. I'm not sure how they compare to other restaurants, but it wouldn't surprise me if relying on local teens working part time on a high-turnover basis led to lots of food poisoning.
I have to disagree with this one, and the sentence preceding it in your post suggests you do too. The average indie restaurant is not better than a chain, and they have a failure rate to prove it. I agree the survivors generally are. What about when the survivors become chains?
That completely depends on what probability measure you're using, or in other words, what you mean by "average." Are you averaging over the number of restaurants, or are you talking about picking a restaurant from those that exist at a particular time, or what?
E.g., suppose in year 1 you have restaurant A and B, and A is good and B is bad. B goes out of business and is replaced in year 2 by C, which is also bad. Ditto for year 3 and D. What is the "average" restaurant? Is A one-fourth of the restaurants or one-half, since at any time half the restaurants are A?
In other words, at any one given time, the average indie restaurant that's around is better than a chain, since the bad ones don't last very long but the good ones do. In a larger interval, the average indie restaurant counted by numbers alone looks worse, because more bad restaurants start up and then fail in that interval, even if they don't survive for very long.
It matters very much how you weight the probabilities.
Jeff: I'm just saying--it could be worse.
Brian: I'm with you on zoning. But the fact is, people seem to like Olive Garden, even though I don't. Who am I to tell them they're wrong?
In spite of the proprietriss's vigilant fight against all things snobbish, not to mention the help afforded her by some fo the commenters, it still seems that there is a third rail of this discussion that none dare go near. So I will.
Many of these chains feature food that is quite good. As in, tasty.
The single thing that menu items at chain restaurants absolutely must feature is reproducibility. Not blandness, not inauthenticity. In fact, employees of said evil restaurant corporations work very hard to make their food taste good. Because people like food that tastes good. And it is not extraordinarily difficult to produce recipes that are reproducible by minimally trained workers. Does anyone really believe that if the food at Olive Garden didn't taste good that people, even the unwashed masses with their uneducated palates, would go there?
I think much of what we enjoy about local, non-chain, family-run, singular, unique restaurants is that we aren't sure what our meal will look like, or taste like, or whether the chef will use a lof of garlic or a little, whether the lasagna will have mostly ricotta, or a broader blend of cheeses, whether the salad will be arugula, endive, etc., or just iceberg. It's the discovery element that is largely missing from chain restaurants. I think if there were blind taste tests set up between Mama's Indo-Italian Barbecue Bistro and some chain serving the same stuff, the results would be, uh, surprising a large percentage of the time. Exactly what built-in advantage is it do you think Mama's has that makes you think it will likely be superior for the price? Do you think the guys cooking in the back are that much more experienced? Becasue some of them used to work at Olive Garden, and some of them will in the future. Laugh if you will, cry if you must, but while I'd rather go to Mama's, it's not becasue I'm at all sure the food will be better. It's becasue the experience will be more interesting.
Mmm, yeah, didn't mean to seem snooty, I do have to eat at some chains occasionally as I said (children, doncha know) and have moved from sunny Berkeley to a part of the country where the chains are haute cuisine. Will Allen got it right: the problem with the Olive Garden (which OK, I _don't_ like) pretending to be more _haute cuisine_ than it is, is exactly that: look, man, I'm showing up with my kid in her fun clothes and my wife and I dressed nice enough for public, but not to the nines. You got a problem with that?
And, in the kid case, it's an issue. Yeah, my kid better not scream and annoy other diners. Yeah, she should keep her food at her table. But if she sings a little bit (in an "indoor voice") or eats a little messily or whatever and some ass at the next table over wants to shoot me a dirty look because, dude, this is the frickin _Olive Garden_, how dare you take your uncivilized brood here? -- that person is a twit. And the chain shouldn't encourage it (and to their credit most actively promote family friendliness, but the staff will occasionally stupidly indulge the delusions of whiny patrons on this score.
@eriver -- oh, yeah, I believe that if the food's not that good, people will go there if the "classy" hype is good enough. (_That_, really, is the point of Queenan's "Red Lobster..."). I mean, why do people buy Kenny G albums? Because they _like_ the stuff? Why do people go see _Cats_?
I'm with you on zoning. But the fact is, people seem to like Olive Garden, even though I don't. Who am I to tell them they're wrong?
Although I certainly acknowledge that there is no right or wrong in taste in food, I think you have to remember that people make their choices among a range of available options, and that if social engineers support one range of options for a very, very long time, that has an impact on the success of that option.
Gene wrote: My biggest beef with Olive Garden is that they don't seem to have discovered garlic, which just maybe would be forgivable in, say, a Swedish restaurant, but is a mortal sin in an Italian one.
That would depend on which Italian restaurant:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11795704
flippantangel wrote: Funny you should mention this, because I believe the stats on people getting food poisoning at chain restaurants are quite disturbingly high. I'm not sure how they compare to other restaurants
Depends on which part of the country you're traveling through at the time. In some parts of New Mexico, for example, you might be safer chewing on the sage brush if you don't have a local contact available to steer you away from the five of eight local eateries that are on Montezuma's payroll.
Our transportation policy broke the connection between the residents of communities and the businesses that arise in those communities.
What policy is that? The policy of building roads between towns instead of surrounding "communities" by unbridged moats?
I'll grant that zoning and interstates and suburbanization have all had big impacts, but the the connection you're referring to was broken by the car, not the government.
When I was a kid, and my family would go on vacation, my dad was all about finding the "local 'treasures'" that "no one knows about."
I ate some pretty horrible restaurant food while traveling as a kid. (And it's worse when you're a kid - if you're an adult and order a grilled-cheese sandwich and it unexpectedly comes with a slice of tomato grilled in it, and you don't like tomato, it's a disappointment, but when you're a kid, it's a tragedy).
About one out of ten of the restaurants we stopped in while traveling was good. Maybe one out of 20 was really good. But the rest were by and large dreadful.
Another benefit to the chains, as I'm now learning with older relatives who are on restricted diets, is that they tend to be more immediately knowledgeable about what dishes are OK if you are, say, on a restricted-salt diet. Or, for that matter, many of the chains are more prone to even HAVE "heart-healthy" or "diabetic-friendly" food than the indie places. (And yeah, I know, there are those who believe that if you're on a restricted diet you should stay home and not sully others' dining experiences with your special needs, but I think that's a remarkably unsympathetic attitude. I hope they never develop salt-sensitive hypertension.)
What's with this whole 'search cost' myth?
Helloo, Internet, anybody?
Noone familiar with Citysearch or its hundreds of competitors?
Or, sans Web..
Noone ever stopped at the local F.D. to ask the boys where the Feed's at? the peep manning the Front Desk at the Hotel? etal., etc. ?
I'd like to know of one town where OliveLobster, RedGarden or TGI Don'tHave2EatTHERE, really is most popular place..
Jeff,
We don't eat there because we want to, either! Get a clue!
What's with this whole 'search cost' myth?
Evidently you've never tried to go from Charlottesville to Seattle in 3 days, or grab dinner before driving three hours from a meeting to home. Nor actually asked a hotel clerk about restaurants: "There's an Olive Garden down the street."
Or had a local recommended to you, subsequently getting screwed with a large check and a terrible meal.
Jeff,
We don't eat there because we want to, either!
Get a clue!
I don't want to be friends with you anymore.
"I'd like to know of one town where OliveLobster, RedGarden or TGI Don'tHave2EatTHERE, really is most popular place.."
No offense, but that's a really elitist and revealing attitude. For what I dare say is a very large portion of the country, restaurants such as those are the most upscale and tastiest places in town.
I live in a town in Georgia with almost 100k population, and most everyone here is *thrilled* about the Olive Garden currently being built. We don't HAVE another Italian restaurant in town. Same with everything else: seafood choices are Captain D's, Long John Silver's, or the infinitely better Red Lobster. Steak is Outback, Longhorn's, or something worse.
What local places exist are dirty, expensive, and have bad food. It'd be pretty great to live in a city where there are numerous unique eateries equivalent to or better than these homogenous chains, but short of moving many of us just don't have those options.
Actually indie restaurants often suck.
It depends on whether they have attained the aura of "localness" or not. If a restaurant is sufficiently local, its quality doesn't matter. Some of the blandest most mediocre meals I've eaten came from highly respected local restaurants. Local coffee bars are especially prone to being overrated.
Some local restaurants could probably serve fried cat turds and a significant portion of the population would still defend its excellence.
So its not all black and white. (Many indie places are fabulous though, not denying that).
I think if there were blind taste tests set up between Mama's Indo-Italian Barbecue Bistro and some chain serving the same stuff, the results would be, uh, surprising a large percentage of the time.
Bingo. Many/most people dislike chain restaurants for reasons that ultimately have nothing to do with the taste or quality of the food.
As Megan has told us many times, it's really not that hard to cook a tasty meal. But having that tasty meal cooked by the chef at the Olive Garden really rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
Wow. Megan, you have finally made a post that I both agree with (somewhat rare), and also addresses an issue in a way that I hadn't considered. Thank you.
Indeed, reducing the volatility of the dining experience is critically important to those with a limited budget for dining out. In fact, it explains why I generally take my parents to Red Lobster when they're in town.
my friend was a health inspector in orlando florida
she said chains were cleaner. they had standard procedures. they had less motive to cut corners.
"Are you averaging over the number of restaurants, or are you talking about picking a restaurant from those that exist at a particular time"
I'm averaging over the number of restaurants, i.e., picking a restaurant from those that exist at a particular time.
"Is A one-fourth of the restaurants or one-half, since at any time half the restaurants are A?"
One half, since at any time half the restaurants are, per your example, A. Though to clarify, I don't think anything approaching half of indie restaurants are better than comparable chains; in that sense, any distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't matter.
"In other words, at any one given time, the average indie restaurant that's around is better than a chain, since the bad ones don't last very long but the good ones do"
That would assume a static supply of restaurants, and that good ones never close. If it helps, the highest falure rate for restaurants is in year three; a lot of lousy restaurants hang on for awhile, and good ones succumb to poor location (a threat I'm pretty sure chains have far less exposure to, for a variety of reasons) or other factors. These things tend to push the quality of indies, both average and median, down.
It depends on whether they have attained the aura of "localness" or not. If a restaurant is sufficiently local, its quality doesn't matter. Some of the blandest most mediocre meals I've eaten came from highly respected local restaurants. Local coffee bars are especially prone to being overrated.
Very true.
Those Primanti Brothers sandwiches they show on television during timeouts every time there's a Monday Night Football game in Pittsburgh are a prime example. You know, the one's where they put the fries and coleslaw on the sandwich?
I went to college in Pittsburgh, and I've had several of those sandwiches; bottom line is they're pretty lousy. In fact, I don't even think most 'burghers are all that crazy about them, but it's a local landmark, so people continue to eat them, anyway.
Re: Our transportation policy broke the connection between the residents of communities and the businesses that arise in those communities.
Our transportation policy? Or just modern tranportation in general? I suspect the latter is more the case and no matter how people were getting around chain resturants would find their niche simply due to the fact that people were getting around and not chained to one locale. Recall that years before the automobile Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward and their mail-order catalogues did a serious hit on the local general store.
Re: it wouldn't surprise me if relying on local teens working part time on a high-turnover basis led to lots of food poisoning.
And indie resturants don't draw employees from the same demographics?
Our transportation policy? Or just modern tranportation in general? - JonF
Given that there are chain restaurants in every country in the world, it seems the answer would be the latter. That said, the US seems to me to have more of them. And taking the national slant out of it, there's a global war taking place within just about every culture between people who are eager to compose their private cultural identity out of pieces manufactured by large for-profit corporations, and people who want to compose their private cultural identities out of pieces of something less inflected by the profit motive.
I went to a Passover seder this year with a bunch of other Americans. A conversation began around where one could find good Chinese food in Hanoi -- surprisingly rare. The conversation quickly turned into a discussion of the virtues of different chain restaurants in the US. Such a conversation can only develop among Americans, among newly wealthy Asians (Thai and Chinese), and among children in any country.
the peep manning the Front Desk at the Hotel? etal., etc. ?
I was the guy manning the front desk at the hotel, and I can tell you - I had no idea where the good "local" restaurants nearby were, because I lived two suburbs over; and I'd only lived there for a couple of months as it was.
The chains were the only restaurants I knew about, because they were on the Chamber of Commerce maps. And I didn't get paid nearly enough to do restaurant research on my time off (not that I had any time off, anyway.)
So, if you asked me, you got directed to the Culver's across the street.
One exception to the "chain restaurants don't necessarily suck" is pizza. The difference between chain pizza and local pizza is night and day. This is probably analogous to the reason staph infections in hospitals are so nasty--you need to be good to survive. Also w/r/t your more upscale experience, here in Pasadena, by far the best "American Food" restaurants are The Parkway Grill, The Arroyo Chop House, and Smitty's. They are all owned by the same people so they are a chain ;-). The difference in quality and especially service between these places and your typical chain is remarkable.
You know, where I live (college town ~100,000 people), no one would care if a PF Chang's opened -- we have at least two local Chinese restaurants which are clearly better, and a bunch which are about the same.
Where I grew up and my parents still live, the recent opening of a PF Chang's 40 minutes' drive away was exciting news. When I was growing up, we used to drive thirty minutes and cross into Canada to get the best nearby Chinese food -- and it still wasn't as good as Chang's is today.
Not just small town America! I've had some memorably good food and memorably bad in mom-and-pop-hole-in-the-wall places in NYC.
Yes, yes! I can't tell you how many horrible experiences I've had at non-chain restaurants. Bad food, bad service, AND expensive. (I've pretty much given up on non-chains in DC, with few exceptions) You can sort out the good from the bad ones locally, because you live there and have the time. But chains will give you a reliable, affordable dining experience, even if it isn't an iron chef grade meal.
she said chains were cleaner. they had standard procedures. they had less motive to cut corners.
Yep. I worked in the kitchen of a chain (Steak & Ale) in the 70s doing general scut work and also washing dishes. I have a brother-in-law that is a regional manager for a smallish chain. Both were/are fanatical about cleanliness. I remember a fire drill we had to do each week at S&A: We took everything out of the walk-in-cooler, sprayed the walls down with high pressure scalding water, rubbed them down with sanitizer, and put it all back in 5 minutes. Every surface had to be cleaned and sanitized on a regular schedule. Expiration dates on incoming food items were marked and adhered to. Hairnets/hats were required.
Once in a while we weighed every steak in the weekend delivery, and if they were 1/4 oz or more too low in weight we sent them back.
Look closely at the manager of a well run sit-down chain - they almost always have a thermometer in their pocket for checking food temperatures. Also, lots of their food is cooked elsewhere and is simply warmed up on site for service - especially at hotels, btw.
One of our local stations had a consumer reporter that had a well developed schtick on reporting the food inspection results. His "Sliiiiiime in the Ice Machine!" cry was made into a song. While some of the places he reported on for unsanitary practices were national chains, most were local places.
brooksfoe -
Or your could say there is a war going on between people who want to impose their own opinions on food and other aspects of our lives, and people who want to let others freely decided what they will choose to produce, sell and consume.
Chains are for convenience. You know that each restaurant will be roughly the same. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Fajitas at Chili's? Good. Soup, Salad, Breadsticks at Olive Garden? Check. Grand Slam at Dennys? Yup, quick and easy.
But then you have the elites. Ruth's Chris? Butter on steak? What are they trying to hide?
Morton's? Usually good, unless, they are busy.
And that $22 Hudson Valley Foie Gras? Oooh, 20 seconds too long and it's GOO. What if the high priced chef isn't there that day?
Find your local places and support them. If you are in the Los Angeles area, try Cafe Montclair, about 25 miles east on Central Avenue. Looks like a Coco's but the lamb osso bucco tells you it ain't a Coco's.