I love food. More importantly than that I love good food. Food that has been thoughtfully and laboriously prepared with fresh ingredients. Food that has been plated to achieve top aesthetic value. Meals that encompass all of your senses. I love being confused by menus that have selections that sound more like haikus than an actual entree. Auriccio picante, microgreens, dashi, Gochujang. Give me something delicious and obscure and I'll give you too much money for it (if I have it).
That being said. I fucking love Chili's.
Before I write any further I want to clarifying that I am not getting paid by these people. (Although if they want to, I'll sell out faster than Metallica after the black album). I'm not shilling for a massive restaurant corporation, I just think that Chilis and similar restaurants represents an important part of American culture and to be honest it's just fun.
I had a pretty solid childhood. I Grew up in the Northeast suburbs in a middle-class neighborhood where the kids raced bikes and played baseball. It honestly was kind of like the Wonder Years except we had paintball guns and we weren't total wimps like that Kevin Arnold kid. Every couple of weeks or so my grandparents would visit and take us out to lunch. They always ended up taking us to Chili's. Now you have to remember. This is the late 90's. This is before food reached it's current artisanal peak, where sriracha is meme condiment served at Wendys and it's not uncommon to find pomegranate green tea next to the fountain drinks. Back then you went to Chili's to talk and eat fajitas. It was barely Tex-mex. You went there because you could feed the whole family for 30 bucks. The food was always decent and reproducible. Were the ingredients the freshest? Probably not. Was a lot of it frozen and fried? Most definitely. As a kid I specifically remember going there for the honey-chipotle chicken tenders and their corn on the cob. (Authentico, arriba!) However, the truth is that it was consistent and it really wasn't that bad. You could probably make a lot of it at home with a way less sodium, but the point was that you weren't. It was a break from the humdrum of everyday life.
Almost everybody in America could afford to eat there. Even today it remains pretty affordable. This is where I think some people begin to have problems with restaurants like this. There are literally all sorts of people in Chili's. Before I go on here, I should note that my family is brutal. Christmas with us consist of drinking beer and full on roasting each other. Wearing a somewhat edgy but fashionable outfit? Get out the hazmat suit because you're going to get nuked. So when I say that there all sorts of people at Chili's I don't say this in some sort of hoity-toity WASP-iness. We do this to each other too. I still believe that the most sure-fire way to find out if someone is your friend is if they can rip on you to your face. But I digress, at Chili's it's entirely possible that you are directly next to a family that looks like they have survived the past year relying on Jerry Springer, cigarettes and Crisco. It's also possible that you're next to a well to do family, passing through looking for a reasonable place to eat before they ship off to their "cottage" in Newport for the summer. It's totally diverse.
This diversity is even more concentrated at the bar. If you want to meet some real people go to the Chili's bar at 2:30pm on a Wednesday. Just try it once. You don't even have to be the outgoing type. They'll talk to you if it's busy enough. Hope you smoke cigarettes.
However, if you were to find the regular, turn-of-the-mill Chili's restaurant customers they probably would look a lot like my family: Middle class, family oriented, likes kitschy mexican stuff hanging on the walls. Visiting Chili's today has a totally different feel. The clientele is similar but the menu has had to evolve to popular standards. If you're not doing something flashy, new or exciting you're dead in the water. If Chili's was to exist in it's former state today, it would be done for. This might seem arbitrary and just an example of changing culture, but I really think it's more than that. Back in the day, Chili's was a place the middle class ate mediocre food at a mediocre price. It's a good thing that the food got better, but if you analyze the trend it's way bigger than that. If you were to eat in the current day establishment back in 1999 it would have been like eating at one of the hotter restaurants in town. This is exciting. What we are seeing is not only the elevation but the formation of American food culture. Some people have a sense of disdain for these type of restuarants because in emulating higher end restaurants and maybe cutting some corners they are "faking it". I say so what.
The reality is that the middle class is shrinking. In a certain sense, our societal standards of what a restaurant should serve are being raised higher than our pay checks are. These types of restaurants would have to adjust, but the fact that diners now know and demand higher end ingredients and some thought in their food is promising. In the end, the diner ends up winning. Same price, better food. So every time you see someone talk shit about Chili's you can tell them to stuff it, because they're witnessing the evolution and elevation of culinary culture in America. And to the pretentious, horn-rimmed glasses wearing, hipster chefs I say: Keep it up. keep making food weird. You dorks making my fajitas better down the road.
Then again maybe I'm just cheap and like margaritas. Your call.
PS: Don't eat at TGI Fridays. That place is a dumpster kingdom and my friend shit his pants after eating there once.
