Grossest American Chain Restaurant

4,301 Calories

can I just what is this I don't even

I'll bet the items on the children's menu at this place are actual children.

Not toddlers, I'm talking fifth-graders.

don't even think my li'l bro wd be 4301 cals

the baked potato (side dish) has more sodium than the meatloaf and mashed potato dinner

o_O

One of those rolled-in-coarse-salt baked potatoes, then.

The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why. The typical entrée is under fifteen dollars. The décor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The waiters are efficient and friendly. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. As for the food—can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?—it was delicious.

The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. And yet nothing smacked of mass production. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).

I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything’s pretty much made from scratch—except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande#ixzz22sJRPuVm

Cheesecake Factory is ironically a factory of everything BUT cheesecake.

Was that written by Marilyn Hagerty?

lol

http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2012/10/25/1226503/093989-denny-039-s.jpg

Denny's has been doing that for a few years now, still makes me lol

Moons Over My Smaugy

This is old and I think was probably posted in a Marilyn Hagerty thread, but it deserves to be memorialized herein:

http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/our-week-with-marilyn

one egg to bind them

nice

Chili's has food that tastes like the crap you'd shovel in your mouth while playing Twisted Metal back in 1996

what were you doing in a Chili's

slowly drifting away

ROSCOE DINER RESTAURANT
Where People Eat Like Kings

Accommodations to over 300 People

So this means the place can seat 10,000, right?

arena style banquet seating

Need to read a Hagerty review of Chili's.

"diner restaurant" reminds of a a funny place i've stayed (twice!) in memphis: The Gen X Inn Hotel

are their flannel robes in the closet

Build your own Hobbit Slam

Build your own Hobbit Slam

Build your own Hobbit Slam

iirc Applebees has better bars

you know, I can actually back you up on that one.

(But not babyback you up.)

I once read a fascinating long form article about the granddaddy of all of these, TGI Friday’s. At least for the first couple decades they cooked their food in house, while their competitors like Applebees or whatever just Microwaved literally everything.

history of TGIF pretty interesting. memphis had the first one outside of the og in nyc. was considered the hotspot. maybe big star gigged there? they certainly drank there.

Applebees had those $2 Long Island Iced Teas for a while, you could get incredibly wasted for ten bucks