Dining in the Wilderness

Dining on the Road:

The New York Times apparently believes that it constitutes a great adventure to eat in a chain restaurant. Places like Chilis, Outback Steakhouse, and the Olive Garden are written about as if the reporters were amateur anthropologists writing from a 19th-century expedition to Polynesia:

You go out the back of the sprawling Westchester mall and across a narrow street lighted by the dull glow of a Crowne Plaza Hotel and there it is, a ground-floor box sandwiched between entrance ramps to the parking garage for the smaller Westchester Pavilion mall....

On a recent Saturday night, a companion and I threaded our way through the crowded holding pen beside the host’s station. Table for two? The teenagers staffing the post slid their eyes down the long list of names as though working a particularly difficult problem on an AP statistics test. “Ummm, 70 to 75 minutes,” one finally said. I’m not sure what was more unnerving, the length of the wait or the precision of the estimate.

We were handed one of those coasterlike disks that light up when your table has been called. There were no seats in the bar or waiting area, of course. They had long been snared by people who appeared to have taken up semipermanent residence and were perhaps even having their mail forwarded.

We tried the hotel bar across the street. Would the beeper signal reach? One nursed beer later, only 45 minutes had passed, but as we wandered back to within reach of the restaurant door, the beeper erupted in a mini-Vegas light show.
Exciting stuff, no doubt, when you are the sort of person who nurses a beer for 45 minutes, and is willing to admit it in public.

What struck me most about the reviews was how often they mention the children. A couple of the reviewers had children of their own, and brought them along; but all the reviews mention that, man, there are a lot of children here. I guess I've been to about half the restaurants on the list at one time or another, and a couple of them multiple times, but I don't remember being struck by the presence of children. One wonders what these poor folk would do if they were required to eat in a McDonald's or Chick-Fil-A, complete with plastic playground.

We don't do a lot of eating in restaurants, both for health reasons and because -- with a little practice -- you can make better food than you can buy in a restaurant. But especially on cross-country road trips, we do eat in chain restaurants by the highway. Here's my recommendations for any hipsters who may find themselves forced out on the road:

1) The Texas Roadhouse: good chili, good burgers, good steaks. Not so good beer, but if you're driving, you're not drinking.

2) Longhorn: The Texas Cheese Fries are good. Their take on taquitos are good. The steaks are fine. The beer selection is better, so if you've reached the end of your trip and have a hotel to hand, stop here for the last meal of the day.

3) Cracker Barrel: Beans and greens, sweet tea anywhere in the USA. Their biscuits and cornbread vary by region, which is interesting -- you'll get sweet cornbread and drop biscuits in some places, and proper biscuits and salty cornbread in more civilized regions. Warm fires in the winter, and checkers.

4) Ruby Tuesday's: Used to be better. However, the buffalo burgers are still OK. I like buffalo meat better than beef, and around the Hall, that's what we keep on hand.

5) Applebee's: The only one of these restaurants reviewed by the Times. I can't think of any of their food I really care about one way or the other; but somehow, whenever we go there, we seem to have a good time.

Two kinds of food that no nationwide highway chain knows how to make well: barbecue, and pizza. If you want a good meal of either one of those, you'll have to ask the locals what's all right where you are.

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