 |
 |
 |
| previous column | next column |
Food, Fun, Atmosphere, it's all here! Come to Chotchkie's [sic]!
06/22/06
by Shaw
When I was a kid, I thought "eating out" meant going to McDonald's, and any "going out" that didn't involve McDonald's was subpar. Eddie Murphy described this phenomenon in detail in Raw, and mentioned the McDonald's hamburger as the main draw. When I was a kid, I only ate Chicken McNuggets, which have a kind of unique plastic flavor to them. I don't know, maybe I was just trying to equal the first high I got off of paste, because when I eat Chicken McNuggets now, I start to hear voices in my head telling me to stop.
Once I got a little bit older it became clear to me in a big way that McDonald's is not "going out to eat," it's "fast food", and as noted by the sign on the register at the Pier 1 Pizza in Boothbay Harbor, ME:
Good food isn't fast.
Fast food isn't good.
So it was time for a step up in outing quality. But at the same time, why would my parents want to waste a $20 meal on me? I was 10 when I recognized that Mickey D's, or "M-Doc's," as it is called by E. Pierce and his gang of plexiglass hooligans, and I can't imagine taking a 10 year old to a nice restaurant: kids ruin everything. You see the dilemna, in a nutshell... you need a place where the food is kind of cheap, kind of fast, and (most importantly) is a chain, so the menu is the same in any city. In 1990 in Kingston-ish, NY, the answer was simple:
Basically, Friendly's is McDonald's quality food with a waitress that you have to tip... but at least you're sitting down. In the past few years, there has been a credible phenomenon afoot--the strip mall craze has brought with it the proliferation of the midlevel chain restaurant, that specializes in cheesy happy hour specials, huge portions of crappy food, and, most importantly, mind-numbingly bad commercials. They're all just Friendly's with a slightly different and less ice cream-oriented menu, and with a bar. Different regions of the country have different brands, but I assure you they're all the same everywhere you go.
A slight step up from Friendly's is TGI Friday's, where the concept of flair in its true Office Space sense was first begotten. When I first started going to GW in 1997 I lived right across the street from a TGI Friday's, and had never seen one before. My initial fright at the sight of the color coordinated awnings/tablecloths/uniforms did nothing to dispel me from trying it out. It also didn't deter any of the other 30 people who were all waiting for tables... in fact this is probably part of every GW student's memory from school there. I recognized one of the waitresses as living in our dorm, and I almost said hello to her, when something stopped me. Actually, it was 30 little somethings... she was wearing upwards of 30 different buttons, a few on her hat, a few on her shirt, and some on her suspenders (why did they have the waitresses wear suspenders???) I thought, surely this is person is in a situation where she does not want to be recognized publicly. She would probably like to forget every moment spent in this place. A few months later (and before I had ever seen Office Space), I was at a party with her and I asked her how she got 30 buttons to put on, and she told me they just had a big tray. Naive as I was, this was the first time I realized that they probably made the employees wear the stupid buttons. What a horrible thing to do to a human being with dignity.
This guy's whole hat counts as flair!
Okay, so I have to explain this photo--I can hardly believe it myself. I saw this picture and just assumed it was a photo from Friday's taken 10 years ago and iconically preserved on someone's website... then I read the article and saw that this picture was from an awards certificate for "Best Kid-friendly restaurant in Kyiv"... Kyiv? Kyiv, Kyiv, in the Ukraine? Yes. Kyiv, Ukraine. I can't believe that we actually exported TGI Friday's.
Hot on the heels of Friday's comes:
Can you smell the strip mall?
I have eaten in precisely one Ruby Tuesday, one time. I had Jack Daniel's chicken or steak or a Spicy Mexican Quesadilla, I can't remember which. Or maybe it was a Southwest Chipotle Wrap, or a Big Bacon Tuna Melt. Whatever. They basically took the Friday's menu and changed the puns from Friday puns to Tuesday puns. How they got away with this, I'll never know/care.
In Cincinnati, having been disappointed by every single thing about our trip (cf Clay's column), but particularly food, we endeavored to get a good dinner for our last night in town, so we asked the concierge where to go. He recommended:
Za sounded like it might have been some kind of ethnic cuisine, so we were all pretty psyched about it on our way, our first cultural experience in Cincinnati... well as it turns out, disappointingly enough, Za is just short for Pizza. When we walked in the door, I pointed out that the second page is just all kinds of "Za", like get the "Hawaiian Za" or "Pepperoni Za." Can you sense the brain damage that went into the financial backing of this project? Incredibly, our time in the restaurant managed to mar the purported reputation of the Za brand even more. First of all, it was a Friday night, and there was NO ONE there. We had the second floor completely to ourselves, and there were waiters and waitresses all over the place. Yet despite the obviuos overstaffing, our waiter was gone for a half hour at a time after even the simplest request. An example of the kind of reasonable request Jason made:
Waiter: Here are your menus.
Jason [aside]: Man, this menu is terrible. I'm not even hungry anymore.
[Half hour passes. Waiter arrives]
Waiter: What would you like?
Jason: Actually nothing to eat, just a ginger ale please.
Waiter: Sure, no problem.
[Half hour passes]
Waiter: Here's your ginger ale, sir.
[Half hour passes]
Jason: Excuse me, this, uh, soda, isn't really ginger ale. It kind of tastes, and looks, like it's just watered down coke.
Waiter: Oh! That's because we make our own ginger ale here. You mix coke and sprite.
Jason: I think there's probably more to it than that.
Waiter: Let me grab that from you, I'll go make another one with a better mix.
Jason: I'll just have a sprite, actually.
In fairness, I think our waiter may have had a recent lobotomy. I shall not be frequenting Za again very soon.
The Chili's in Laurel, MD used to be famous for having the most ridiculous happy hour special I have ever seen: free wings and $5 pitchers of beer. I don't know why they did this, or how they stayed in business, but aside from that, the only time I have ever seen cars parked in the parking lot of that Chili's is when there is a big drug deal going on. They have since cancelled that happy hour special, but for a time, we really took advantage of it. We would go with 12 people, and half of them would actually just be going for the free wings, and would bring no money for anything else, including tipping. This really says a lot about the math grad student way: "if I don't have any money, I can't tip you." This usually meant that we would walk in, get a table for 12, stay for 2 hours, drink 30 glasses of water, and have a $20 dollar tab at the end. I salute them for ending that special as a business decision, but all things considered, there is absolutely no other reason to eat at Chili's.
Applebee's makes me tear my hair out... it's not that I don't like the idea of Applebee's hopping on the midlevel chain bandwagon, but they seem to go out of their way to out-annoy the competition. Their ubiquitous parody commercials, with those two annoying guys playing the guitar in the water... I hoped maybe Applebee's would have at least some shame about this horrible promotion, but no, they have an official press release (linked here), where they tout the annoying assholes in the following language:
John Cywinski, chief marketing officer, said, "The new campaign is an evolution of our popular commercials featuring fun, parody lyrics, and will feature two recurring characters, simply known as 'The Applebee's Guys.' The musical duo will appear in new ads for each promotion as they draw guests' attention to craveable food served in a friendly, neighborhood setting."
Poor John Cywinski... he doesn't know that I'm on my way to his house right now with a tower of speakers and an audio copy of the Gilligan's Island commercial:
Just sit right back and grab some tails
The tails of some tasty shrimp
Sensations now at Applebee's
Are really worth the trip
Sauteed, crisp fried or fire-grilled,
Served on a handy skewer
So many shrimp you'll want to plan
A three-hour tour, a three-hour tour.
So join us here this week my friends
It's time for eatin' good.
Shrimp sensation new at Applebee's
In your neighborhood!
With any luck, I'll be able to play the song 200 times before the cops come and take me down.
There are tons more of these abominations all over the place, too many to name. I just can't believe they didn't cut and run when Brian from Chotchkie's [sic] made his first appearance on syndication.
So
can I get you gentlemen something more to drink? Or maybe something to nibble
on? Some Pizza Shooters, Shrimp Poppers, or Extreme Fajitas?
_______________________________________
Discuss this and any other column deadlyhippos.com column at our message board.