Originally Posted by TMOliver

I, no fan of "eating chains" (over many years, including a chunk as the weekly restaurant critic for a newspaper of modest circulation), have learned to largely disregard the harsh criticism of US "chain" restaurants levied upon /leveled at them in FT. Before granting any of the critics credibility, I'd want to eat food from their own kitchens.

Amusingly, over time it's my experience that the harshest critics of the chains are folks themselves condemned to eat some of the worst home cooking imaginable. On the other hand, were they to accuse their spouse cook housemates in the fashion they reserve for criticism of "OlAple Friday GarBarrels" et al, the spouses would likely answer them with meat cleavers.

The chains (adjusted for a bit of profit) prepare and serve food designed and priced to appeal to their particular niche (hopefully swelling) in the vast market of restaurant patrons. Success is easy to measure for outside observers....the joint remains open with a steady crowd of cars in the parking lot or drive-thru. Just maybe, your discriminating palate eliminates you from the mass of diners they are attempting to entice.

But then, given some of the home cooking forced upon me from the kitchens of some of the harsh critics I've known, it's more likely that they have no palates at all, only the pretentiously elitist view that the slicker the publication in which they read about a place, the more celebrated the name of the chef above the door (but unlikely to be in the kitchen), the more foreign language terms on its menu, and the elevation to canonical status of it prices, the better it is.

Old enough to have scraped beans from an older C-Ration can, I reserve to right to be frankly critical of chains, but to findi some things, among them the old lettuce wraps - now gone? - at "Chilis" palatable when the alternative was some cafe, it's windows painted to advertise "Grub, 6 bits a plate. Tums free!." or one of those con-jobs, some celebrity's name emblazoned in neon over the door, where prices higher than a helium balloon a'loose in Colorado were matched by steaks that tasted of having been dropped amongst the "patties" littering the ground when the cowboys gather at the chuckwagon after a hard day rounding up the dogies.