Five Cent's a Joke "The American Restaurant"

by DJ Tijerina

The American Restaurant landscape is truly a thing to behold. Nowhere else in the world or in all of history could a person go to so many different locations and get the exact same cheeseburger. If you enjoy a Big Mouth Burger from Chili’s, you need only seek one out in any corner of suburbia you choose. And that Big Mouth Burger will be exactly the same in Frisco, Texas as it will in Natick, Mass. With any luck the delicate hands of an undocumented immigrant has made them both.

The major chain restaurant’s ability to provide large portions for an exceptionally low price is, in a word, miraculous. If you want quality, make it yourself. If you are anything like the majority of restaurant goers in America (God’s greatest country), quantity is your one and only concern. It shouldn’t bother you that while enjoying a meal at any of hundreds of Thank Goodness It’s Friday’s Restaurants, a great portion of your Jack Daniels Burger patty is non-animal filler. There is still over a pound of food product on that plate, enough to satisfy even the largest of appetites. Throw in a delicious deep fried appetizer and a mouth-watering previously frozen dessert to complete this masterful cuisine.

How do these casual dining geniuses manage to keep everything exactly the same, despite their restaurants being scattered all over the US, Canada, and Utah? Well the advent of frozen food processing and refrigerated transport vehicles for one. This way, the cooks need merely to reheat, rather than actually cook. But aside from the food it is really the attitude of the employees at these places that keep us hungry for more. When you go into an Olive Garden, a true taste of Italy is desired. And that can’t happen if your server, the Pi Phi from OSU, hasn’t been properly trained and tested on the complex culture of Italian American norms. Luckily this training process has been developed by the college-graduating, food-loving, and oh-so-enthusiastic-suburbanite, The Vice President of Marketing and Research. What wine goes well with my pasta? Red or white? Pi Phi responds, “Glad you asked. The Charles Shaw Cabaret would be perfect. It is $5.95 for a bottle.” (with optional Italian accent)

Any and all of the crucial information for working at one of these glorious eateries is passed down from the corporate honchos (after exhaustive research of course) through the management hierarchy like a game of telephone. Only instead of second graders playing, where the phrase, “the sleepy bear dreams” becomes “the poopy bear pees,” it is adults penning such sellable phrases as “the delicious new shrimp and scallop mixed grill skewer at Outback Steakhouse.” The smartest people at the top meticulously drilling how to sell the new twelve-adjective phrase to the increasingly less educated soldiers of your casual dining experience. The Corporate VP’s pass it down to regional management, who then pass it to in store managers, who then impart their wisdom to the waitstaff and line cooks. There our Pi Phi waitress learns her tricks. As the VP crosses her carefully manicured fingers hoping their perfectly chosen verbiage makes it all the way through the game of telephone to the table, we the customer get to cram down as much flash frozen seafood as possible. A perfect system.

Isn’t it the moderately priced quantity that keeps us coming back to these places again and again? Absolutely.