Over on r/Asknyc someone made post about recommendations for chain restaurants in New York City. They had been hearing about them all their lives and wanted to know what places like Taco Bell, Cheesecake Factory, Texas Roadhouse, and Applebees were like. The posters there made a point that if you are in search of chain restaurants, NYC isn’t the best place to go. But it begs the question, what is the best city for a European curious about US fast food and chain restaurants? Where would it be fairly easy to try lots of them with a minimal amount of driving?
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Columbus, OH just because it is a test city for a lot of chain restaurants. They try out new menu items there.
That said, why on God’s green earth would you spend all the money to come to the US and eat at fucking Applebees or the Cheesecake Factory.
I just have to completely reject the premise here.
We have so many amazing restaurants with local ingredients, high end cooking, decent prices, interesting menu items, and you want to go to not one Applebees but many chain restaurants in a short a drive as possible!?
The mind recoils.
I cannot quite describe how much this disturbs me.
You can find all 3 of those in NYC, but note that Taco Bell isn’t a restaurant. It’s a fast food place.
People are steering you away from doing that when you visit New York because there’s literally thousands upon thousands of better places there to eat at.
I couldn’t imagine crossing the Atlantic to eat at…Cheesecake Factory. Especially in New York. Hell, I’m from a town of ~3500 and *we* have better options than all of 3 of those.
Probably Dallas, Atlanta, or Chicago.
Dallas and Atlanta will be harder to do on public transit.
I think a lot of chains also choose location intentionally build for suburban life too. As someone who lives in Europe, driving in the US is less stressful anyway.
Most towns and cities with 100K or more people will have a wide selection of chain restaurants for you to choose from.
But why would you want to spend thousands of dollars coming here for food that is at best mediocre? The US is in the middle of a culinary revolution, and amazing restaurants are popping up all over the country selling delicious, farm fresh cuisines from around the world. If you come here, please try the best we have to offer!
Where else but The Cheesecake Factory can you get chicken fettuccine alfredo with 2180 calories and a slice of ultimate red velvet cheesecake at 1580 calories for a total of 3760 calories. Don’t forget a salad and drinks to approach 5000 calories for one meal.
For comparison there are 563 calories in one big Mac
Yeah, i refuse to answer this out of principle.
I will never understand why people get so worked up, as they are in this thread, about tourists not splurging on 5 star restaurants the entire time they’re here. Eat wherever you want. You owe these self-important food snobs nothing.
However, “lots of chain restaurants” and “minimal driving” are sort of mutually exclusive. Public transport doesn’t really… *exist* outside of large cities in most of the US, and suburbs tend to not be very walkable either. Basically if you’re outside of a large city you *have* to drive… but large cities are also where you’re going to find a higher concentration of family owned/non-chain stuff.
If eating at those locations is the specific goal, NYC is still a practical choice. You can get around most places by walking or public transport. Using Taco Bell as an example, there are about 20 locations in Manhattan alone. Some chains are regional, so it’s possible that a specific chain might not operate in NYC, but overall there are many fast food and chain restaurants in the city.
Chain restaurants are everywhere. IF for some reason you really do want to visit NYC and visit chain restaurants, you can do that. The Olive Garden is right there in Times Square, as is McDonalds.
But you’ll be paying a lot of money (especially in tourist zones) for medicore food. If you want to eat mediocre food, you can go to your local airport and eat food there, and save yourself the airline fare.
A lot of American chain restaurants are also available abroad and aren’t really exclusive to the US.
Orlando
Chain restaurants are specifically targeted to the suburbs, so they are easy to find in the outer ring of most cities. Usually, if you find one, you find them all, but suburbs are specifically designed around driving a lot.
A mid to large suburban city (100k+ people) would be your best option. But without driving that would be difficult, still possible but very difficult. America was specifically designed for cars and when you think about the size of the country it makes sense. Unless you’re in a big urban city walking ain’t really an option and you gotta use a car. However you’re not really gonna find a place where you can just go to really experience all the chains in a big city.
I really would not advise visiting the US to eat fast food and chain restaurants. We have so much better food to offer!
Be prepared to be disappointed in the food. Cheesecake Factory can be good, but Applebees is total trash. Idk how they are still in business.
Why would you waste a trip on chain restaurants?
I can’t fathom wanting to travel across an ocean to eat bad food.
Most of these restaurants are found, by design, in suburban areas or directly off of highways and major roads. They’re not located in walkable downtown areas in most cities. NYC would be the exception. Washington DC also has great transit but less of these style of restaurants, as they’re focused on suburban locations which are focused on cars.
Have one or two of these experiences and you’ll figure out really fast that there’s not much of a difference between Chilis, Applebees, and Ruby Tuesday’s.
Their menus are virtually identical, they’re highly focused on branding. Each one will have a “Dr Pepper BBQ Sauce Southwest MONSTER BURGER with LOADED Franks’ Hot Sauce FRIES” and “SkinnyLicious® Crispy Chicken Sandwich with Sriracha Mayo”. It’s all the same. It’s an overwhelming menu of poorly made food. After day 3 of eating this stuff every day you’re probably not going to feel great.
Traveling to NY to eat at Cheesecake Factory and Applebee’s is really sad. The food generally sucks, it’s overpriced, it’s like a theme park of a restaurant every time you dine. But you do you.
As a punishment for your request, im going to send you to breezewood, PA.
It’ll have everything you are looking for, all within 2 or 3 blocks.
25+ years ago, a friend told me Laurel, MD had the most chain restaurants per capita than any other US “city” (it’s a suburb midway between DC and Baltimore).
This will probably get lost, but I want to add my two cents since I think I’m a little less against this than most of the other comments. I think I get it: you hear a lot about this experience and you can’t get it where you are, so you want to try these chain places even though there’s better food out there.
What I would say is this: every city in America has this big chain places, so just visit wherever you want to visit and know that there will be chain restaurants nearby. No need to try to find the “best city” since most cities will have the same national chains plus some few regional ones. There are cool regional ones anywhere so I think it would be hard to argue for one particular city over any other.
That said, I would plan on just going to a couple fast food places, a bad chain restaurant (like Applebee’s, Chili’s), and a better chain restaurant (like Cheesecake Factory, Texas Roadhouse). Get the experience and call it a day; the food is better elsewhere. You’d be wasting your time going to Applebee’s twice, or Applebee’s and Southwest Theme Applebee’s (Chili’s), or Southwest Theme Applebee’s and Australian Theme Applebee’s (Outback) since it’s all the same shit. Just pick one, try it, and never return.
My final suggestion is to try different styles of fast food if you’re going to do multiple fast food places. Broadly, we have terrible national burger chains (McDicks, Burger King, Jack in the Box, etc), more reputable and slightly less common burger chains with simple menus and the ability to actually make a decent burger (In-N-Out, Five Guys, Whataburger), fried chicken chains (KFC, Popeyes, Chick-fil-A), and Taco Bell.
Taco Bell exists as it’s own category. There are other “Mexican” fast food chains, but I’m convinced that they exist solely as a front for some type of drug operation because I’ve lived near a Del Taco my whole life and I’ve never met a single person who has so much as tried it. Anyway, Taco Bell is worth a try, but also get some actual Mexican food while you’re here. Taco Bell is great, but it’s like somebody made Mexican food having never tried it, but having been given a vague description of what it is.
Go to New York City. Skip the chains. Eat at actual restaurants. Also, 7/11/insert corner bodega is not where we all buy our groceries.
Any city outside of the largest American cities. Basically, you can go to any city in flyover country and find tons of chain restaurant.
Any suburb?
Literally you’ll find 70% of the same stores and restaurants in your typical American suburb.
Just don’t expect public transportation.
Also, don’t be surprised when you find out chains tend to be lower quality and bland than local restaurants.
Chain restaurants are gross. You can find them in any city. Check out the unique locally owned spots. What a bizarre thing to want to do…
My guy, just because those types of restaurants show up a lot in movies and shit doesn’t mean they worth coming from another country to eat at them.
Washington DC
This is microwave food. Do better please.
What a terrible premise for a vacation. Those places are all crap, and Applebee’s is the worst of them all.
And we all know they’ll go back to wherever they’re from and will say how bad American food is. 😂😂
Albuquerque, New Mexico
And forget about public transit, rent a car, it’s less expensive than you think. Especially if you rent something small.
You’ll find all the chain restaurants, but you’ll also have a chance to eat some very good New Mexican food.
Some of the best chains are regional, I’m from California and we swear by In-N-Out Burger, where elsewhere they have Whataburger. If you came to California, you want breakfast at IHOP, but in the SouthEast it would be Waffle House. So decide which names you want to try and make sure you are in the correct region of the country to find them.
Any medium sized city will have Uber and or Lyft, sometimes also a local taxi app, so it can be done without renting a car. But you will spend a lot on transportation.
Regarding chain restaurants, there are two areas I recommend: burgers and steaks.
For burgers, yeah, start with a national fast food chain, step up to a better chain (In-N-Out, Five Guys, Whataburger), then try one at a sit-down chain that specializes in burgers, like Fuddruckers or Red Robin. Compare and contrast.
For steaks, the best ones will definitely be private local places that will highlight local cuisine the best. But they’re also expensive. Chains won’t be as high quality, but they are less expensive. These will have much more regional concentration (except for Ruth’s Chris and Outback, but Outback isn’t really a steakhouse).
I recommend a steakhouse because it’s much more American in character and presentation than you’ll find in most places.
Go to one of the newer sprawl big cities like Atlanta, Dallas, or Phoenix
Vegas
NYC is perhaps not the best example, but as other people are saying, you can find Applebees and Texas Roadhouse and Cheesecake Factory etc etc basically anywhere, including some other cities with fine public transit like Portland and Chicago and Boston. I think SF is the only big city with good transit that doesn’t have a lot of these, because they have a more strict ban on chain businesses, but even there I think there’s a couple of these places.
Best bet is to pick a handful of cities that you know have good transit, and then just go to google maps and search each of them for the restaurants you might be interested in.