The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ranking chain restaurants
How good is the food at America’s 10 biggest full-service eateries?
People love to pick on chain restaurants. Like used car salesmen, the mass feeders are easy targets. Their uniformity and ubiquity seem to go against a culture increasingly bent on personal customization.
But not all chains are created equal. That’s why I spent several months grazing through the menus of the 10 casual, full-service restaurant chains that have the highest sales, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. (For the record, Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar is No. 1, with $4.4 billion in annual domestic sales) Just as I would for a starrated critique, I visited each chain multiple times.
Lessons learned: Mashed potatoes are almost always better than french fries and “lite” applied to a dish might as well be a stop sign. Here’s how I ranked the chains, in order from least favorite to most, along with letter grades.
10. Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar
Grade: F
The saddest meals of my entire year? Nothing can touch lunch and dinner at the sports bar that can’t even get its signature dish right. I’m not sure which is more of a travesty, the scrawny wings (pick your poison: traditional or boneless) or the woody carrot sticks that accompany them. Cuisine: Wings and beer.
Best of the bunch: Getting the check.
Steer clear of: Everything but the beer.
9. IHOP
Grade: D
Probably the best that can be said about the food in one of the most generic backdrops around is that the pancakes are fluffy (if a dash salty); the vegetable omelet is as green with fresh spinach as it is yellow from eggs; and marbled rye bread can turn even an unfortunate beef patty and barely melted cheese into a fair-enough sandwich. Cuisine: American. Best of the bunch: Patty melt, spinach-mushroom omelet (hold the flat hollandaise). Steer clear of: Burgers, fried fish tacos, country-fried steak.
8. Outback Steakhouse
Grade: D
People come here for steak. They shouldn’t. While the beef looks the part of steak you want to slice in to, the cuts I try taste tame. The alternatives to beef here are almost as sad. An exception to the rule is chicken.
Cuisine: Steak, and a pretend notion of what’s cooking Down Under. Best of the bunch: Garlicky mashed potatoes, Parmesan-herbed chicken, spiced carrot cake.
Steer clear of: Crab cakes, fish tacos, pork ribs, not-so-hot and batter-heavy “volcano” shrimp.
7. Red Lobster
Grade: CLobster can be found scattered on a thin but doughy pizza and steamed and split to reveal seafood that tastes like … not much without melted butter, lots of it. Exceptions give me hope. Yucatan shrimp benefit from diced caramelized pineapple and the heat of jalapeños. But the choice parts of a meal are apt to be the warm and fluffy biscuits. Cuisine: Seafood.
Best of the bunch: Cheese biscuits, Yucatan shrimp, coconut shrimp, crab legs.
Steer clear of: Lobster pizza, fried clams, maple-glazed chicken, steamed lobster, Key lime pie.
6. Chili’s Grill & Bar
Grade: CIf all you were to eat were the ribs that spawned one of the most popular restaurant jingles of all time, you would wonder what all the fuss is about. No amount of barbecue sauce hides the fact that the flesh is dry. Elsewhere on the menu, Chili’s tries and fails to deliver on a few food fashions. Simple is better. Rib-eye comes with a nice beefiness and a scoop of mashed potatoes loaded with bacon, cheese and scallions.
Cuisine: American with a Southwest touch. Best of the bunch: Southwestern egg rolls, mini-burgers, panko onion rings, rib-eye.
Steer clear of: Caribbean salad, Cajun pasta, salted caramel cake.
5. Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar
Grade: C
Eat out in enough full-service chains, and the similarities become clear: None of them can cook broccoli right. Salmon is almost always overdone. Bigger is often perceived as better. All of that is true at Applebee’s, which nevertheless offers sufficient choices on its multiple plastic menus in its rec-roomdressed dining rooms to keep the brand interesting for discerning eaters. Cuisine: American.
Best of the bunch: Sriracha shrimp, crunchy-spicy chicken wings, steak quesadillas, skin-on mashed potatoes, grilled chicken with quinoa and cranberries.
Steer clear of: Ribs, salmon, apple chimicheesecake.
4. Olive Garden
Grade: C
The popular breadsticks — pillowy wands seasoned with garlic salt, brushed with margarine and palatable only when warm — are wholly American, as is the kitchen’s tendency to overcook its pastas. Steer clear of the three-dishes-on-one-platter Tour of Italy, whose chicken parmigiana and gloppy fettuccine Alfredo taste like nothing I’ve encountered in the Old World.
Cuisine: Italian.
Best of the bunch: Gratis wine tastes, minestrone, spaghetti with meatballs, tiramisu.
Steer clear of: Sangria that tastes like Kool-Aid for adults, Tour of Italy.
3. Texas Roadhouse
Grade: B
Beef is your friend here, be it in a bowl of zippy chili, chopped steak under a cover of cheese and caramelized onions or an agreeable rib-eye cooked the color you ask and best paired with mashed potatoes cratered with cream gravy. The initial bear hug of hospitality, which includes a drop-off of fresh-baked, butter-brushed, slightly sweet rolls, can’t mask some flaws, among them stiff catfish and dry pulled pork. Cuisine: Steaks with a Western theme. Best of the bunch: Most anything starring beef, mashed potatoes, Cactus Blossom. Steer clear of: Pulled pork and catfish.
2. Denny’s
Grade: B
The cheeseburger? It’s a whopper. The piping-hot fries are memorable more for their churro-like ridges than any potato flavor, but that means you might have room for the brownielike chocolate lava cake. I’m partial to the fluffy pancakes and I’d like the “loaded” breakfast sandwich more if its shaved ham was less salty and the swollen package was easier to tackle.
Cuisine: American.
Best of the bunch: Pancakes, hash browns, spaghetti and meatballs, warm chocolate lava cake.
Steer clear of: Seasonal specials.
1. Cracker Barrel Old Country Store
Grade: A
No other chain restaurant in my months-long survey comes as close to home cooking as this operation. If the chicken dumplings are a little doughy, just about everything else that crossed my lips in this barn-size dining room is something I’d be happy to try again. Every bite of those thin, well-seasoned pork chops, part of a “country boy” platter with fried apples and cheesy hash browns, makes me think of my grandmother — a feat matched by no other chain in my survey.
Cuisine: Southern-focused comfort food. Best of the bunch: Meatloaf, pork chops, trout, macaroni and cheese, pecan pie. Steer clear of: Pasty chicken and dumplings.