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An Italian restaurant called Chateau? Maybe it’s intentional irony. Chosen by kind of person who calls a French bulldog Luigi – just to see who "gets it." And secretly smirks at those who don't.
Or maybe the Chateau's marketing mavens were pushing back against previous pedantry. I'm reliably informed that the Chateau’s predecessor, the Golden Fork, set the table with golden forks.
After settling into a booth, I asked the waitress “what up with the Franco-Italian nomenclature?” Or words to that effect. The server admitted she was as clueless as Cher Horowitz. Or words to that effect.
I ordered steak tips Marsala. A choice no more defensible than dating a fentanyl addict. Why are you looking at me like that? Anyway, gastronomic indignity by any other name would still smell so sweet.
The sweet smell of rotting garbage. Not to put too fina point on it, the dish was disgusting. Charred bits of beef swimming in a sauce resembling nothing so much as snot.
With a few pieces of leftover salad onion floating around aimlessly. Desultorily? Ignominiously? Pointlessly? Yes.
The Chateau should have been called The Heimlich Maneuver. The “steak” was so chewy I choked like Bill Butner.
Cutting the dead cow into survivable pieces was like trying to open the hard-shell plastic case protecting a box-fresh Surefire flashlight.
Taste-wise, I've had beef-flavored potato chips that tasted more like meat than the "steak tips" staking their claim on my digestive system.
After polishing off a salad that might have saved the Titanic (ICEBERG!), my companion asked if I was going to eat my remains. One bite convinced him he would've been better off literally eating my remains.
The food was horrendous but at least it was expensive.
Including a passable meatball appetizer, a slab of un-frozen carrot cake, iced tea, a non-alcoholic Heineken and a [non-steak] tip, the meal dinged my Ridiculously Random Motorcycle Tour debit card $85.
The Chateau's gustatory gag-fest got me thinking. Maybe the chain restaurants at which I've been railing are ubiquitous because they're better.
No question: a Subway oven-roasted turkey sandwich would've been better than the Chateau's overpriced drek. But only relatively speaking.
It's been my experience that chain food sucks, both in terms of taste and nutrition.
Why? Why do tens of millions of people consume chain restaurant food rather than food prepared and sold by people who give a shit about taste and nutrition?
Start with this: we’re not talking about people preparing food. We’re talking about corporations.
Profit-generating conglomerates who make shareholders happy thanks to economy of scale. For example...
Subway operates 19,573 stores and counting. Let’s say they could save $5 a day per store by buying cheaper, less nutritious/healthy turkey meat.
Assuming the cheap meat doesn’t affect sales, it would save the Subway's corporate overlords (Roark Private Equity Group) $100k a day or $35.6m per year, chain-wide.
They could bank the savings to juice their bottom line or keep their "menu options" price competitive.
Depending on location, a six-inch Subway turkey sandwich costs $5.50.
There’s no way you can make a same-size turkey sandwich from store-bought ingredients for less (not including time, fuel and wastage).
Would your homemade turkey sandwich taste better? Not if Subway has anything to say about it!
Would your turkey sandwich be more nutritious that Subway’s? Not unless you spent the extra money on healthier ingredients. Which most people can’t or don’t.
Taste is important for chains. Nutrition not at all, freeing them to addict customers with sugar, fat and salt. But price? Price is everything.
The average American spends ten percent of their annual income on fast food.
The vast majority of Americans (78 percent) live paycheck-to-paycheck. They simply can’t afford to eat tastier, more nutritious, more expensive food at a non-chain restaurant.
Not if they want to pay for all the other stuff. Like clothes, rent, cars and equally cheap and non-nutritious supermarket food and drinks.
During my travels, I’ve eaten exclusively at non-chain restaurants, cafes and coffee shops. They exist, as evidenced by the pics of Eats throughout this post.
The 24-seat Seekonk breakfast-all-day and lunch spot's been in business for 41 years. I asked its owner, the second George Mihailiddes at the helm, how he's stayed in business surrounded by chains.
"Everything's fresh here," he asserted. "We're the best."
Fresh yes. But I’ve had better.
The coffee was drinkable and refilled regularly. Everything arrived quickly. But the two breakfasts (eggs then blueberry pancakes) were just OK. The apple pie wasn't sweet enough and the ice cream accompaniment was glop.
The food isn’t what sets Eats apart from the Denny’s and IHOP’s of this world. It’s George and his crew.
In a part of the world where friendliness requires well-established history or some kind of catalyst, Eats offers its customers both.
George and his workers know most of their customers by name and the waypoints in their life journey: kids, health challenges, the works.
Sometimes they schmooze. Sometimes they don't. Either way, Eats is what internet info providers call "hyper-local."
Some corporate chains try to replicate this "where everybody knows your name" vibe.
Even the best of them pale in comparison to locally owned and operated establishments, where the man or woman in charge see customers and employees as people, rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.
Owner-operated upmarket local restaurants also do the George thing, kicking the chains' collective ass in the food quality and taste department. All of which leaves us with...
Two Americas
The average American’s chain/fast food/supermarket diet means our country isn't just politically bifurcated. It’s also food bifurcated.
A split that's saddled the majority of our population with life-threatening obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression. To name just a few conditions linked to poor diet.
The Answer?
Chains have a tendency to expand too quickly (to pump up the stock price) and collapse (eleven casualties here). Even so, they're still everywhere.
The only dark cloud hanging over their fortunes I can see: the invention of insulin-boosting, hunger-killing GLP-1 injections. But only in terms of average order value.
Consumers may eat less food, but they’re not going to eat better food. Sugar, fat and salt are more addictive than crack cocaine and more deadly to more people.
Leaving us with Darwinism.
If diet-related death reconfigures consumer preferences – a shift that hasn't shown-up yet – the chains will change accordingly.
As for the Chateau, I can only hope it follows The Golden Fork into the file marked lost in the mists of time. For me and everyone else.
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Robert, as others have alluded to eat where the locals go, ask the ladybird the front desk of your Hampton Inn where her family eats out. You won’t always be successful with finding the best but some times good is good enough. It’s like in New Orleans there are good restaurants in the Quarter but the best are in the neighborhoods. Or Chicago I am sure your readers will chime in where the best local places are and they are most likely not in The Loop. As you ride around all the back roads if your travels look for the places in small towns where the parking lot is full, there is usually a reason… Best
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Speaking of chains that I hunt for when I'm on the road... Are you familiar with Jersey Mike's?
One of my best friends, a right wing, gun-loving, Jewish lawyer who grew up in Jersey, turned me on to Jersey Mike's which has spread all the way to the West Coast.
On his advice, I ordered the #13, an Italian sub served "Mike's Way" which means drenched with oil and balsamic vinegar. I'm addicted to it now and never order anything else when I visit Jersey Mike's.
If you want great espresso, the best I've had in the last 7 years was at Mocha Joe's in Brattleboro, VT. The most recent one I've had was still tasting great, despite having cooled down over the 60 miles driving west west from Brattleboro, on my way to my best friend's in Niskayuna NY outside of Albany.
As for diet, I no longer eat anything with sugar (including no fruit ***juice*** which is basically no different from flavored sugar water), saturated fat, or salt. Which means that I eat plants (multiple kinds of all of the following: nuts, leafy greens, vegetables, root vegetables, fruits, berries,), legumes (mainly in the form of unadulterated peanut butter--no other ingredients than peanuts, but sometimes…
Robert, can I mention 2 exceptions to your generalizations? Here in Eugene, Oregon there is actually healthy food at local restaurants, in particular, our favorite, which is called Morning glory. Everything is fresh, organic, and healthy. It’s vegetarian so you might not like that. As far as chain restaurants: my daughter worked for In-N-Out Burger for several years. All the ingredients are fresh, the owners are super Christian and they follow their beliefs by treating the employees super well. They pay good wages and they promote people who show initiative. And again, their food is made fresh,
Part of me wonders if your experience at the Chateau - while adhering to your general experience with chains and fast food - may have been made worse by the simple fact that the restaurant is located west of Boston in Massachusetts.
I spent quite a few years traveling through Western Mass because of the racing I did in nearby Lime Rock, Connecticut, and the presence of relatives in Southern Vermont. And, for the life of me, I could never find a restaurant in the Berkshires and adjacent environs that knew what it was doing.
Not even diners. You’d expect that you could enjoy certain reliable dishes like eggs and hamburgers. Nope. It was bologna sandwiches on white bread w…