Olive Garden sells out Pasta For Life coupons

Juliana’s, hard by the Brooklyn Bridge. Some of the best pizza I’ve had.

 

There are any number of places where you can get a real good meal within a short walk of Grand Central. As for moderately unscary prices, it's Manhattan, man. Is it a better deal to spend twice as much for a meal that's five times as good? I think yes, although I understand people who think no. It's just real weird to me that one would visit one of the restaurant capitals of the world and not treat oneself to the food.

 

Living in the East Bay taught me to go for street food if I wanted to economise on all but my evening meal.

 

Never underestimate the obesity of this nation.

 

There are like five restaurants within a three block walk from my son's apartment in Crown Heights in Brooklyn that are better than any restaurant within a 20 minute drive of my house. Those are just neighborhood joints. Within a 10-15 minute walk, there are 2-3 places that are as good or better than any restaurants in all of Boston. Are those latter restaurants expensive? Yeah, but they're cheaper than their Boston (or Manhattan) counterparts. For eating out in NYC, the subway is your friend.

 

I hear you. I avoided chains myself. But good food isn’t the No. 1 priority for every meal. Given the sheer amount of people that visit NYC, I could imagine there’s more than twenty Olive Gardens worth of people hitting the “f— it, let’s just eat” button and settling on a chain to please everyone.

 

If this was done by Texas Roadhouse or Longhorne or Outback, my wife and I would do it in a heartbeat.

Drink water and tip the server $8 every time. Do it twice a week and it pays for itself in a year.

Olive Garden? Meh.

The profit margins on pasta is crazy. Steakhouses have a far less profit margin.

So what other chains would I do this? Oh, they all need to be less than a 10 minute drive from my house.

Cheesecake Factory
Maybe a BBQ place
Arby’s - just fucking with you
Panera just to make the wife happy... nah, fuck that. Panera sucks ass.

 

Eating at chains while traveling fascinates me. I have an old friend who always eats at least one chain that we have here in town while he's traveling. He and his wife went to a freakin' Hooters while while they were in Europe this summer. He's eaten at a KFC in Beijing.

 

I mostly agree with what your saying, but I would hit a cliche American fast food place in a foreign country, just to see the differences.

Surely you'd giggle at a chance to order a Royale with Cheese, for a quick bite on a trip otherwise filled with wonderful dining experiences!

 

I considered hitting a McDonald's for breakfast in Brussels this summer. I walked past it every morning. Instead, I opted for the waffle stand a block away. Spent four Euros for two waffles and it was glorious.

 

In the age of Yelp and the smartphone, there's no excuse for visiting New York City and eating at Olive Garden or Outback, etc.

And as every chowhound knows, you can absolutely eat world-class food on the cheap here.

 

When we traveled to Moscow to adopt our son in 2006, we ate breakfast at McDonald's almost every day. This was pre-Yelp and not knowing the language or the city, it was easy and comfortable. Plus we didn't see a lot of breakfast-type places. Other meals were at traditional restaurants.