Confessions of an Applebee's enthusiast

The flattening dullness—or is it a familiar embrace?—of restaurant monoculture

Last week, my wife and I went to Applebee's. It was my first time in the restaurant, or any of its other locations, in probably 8 years. Were we there as a novelty? As some kind of meta-commentary or social experiment? Not really. For the most part, we (or at least, I) legitimately, unironically wanted an appetizer sampler and some 20-ounce Modelos on draft.

At this point in my life, part of the appeal was undeniably the nostalgia that came as a kind of side dish with my meal. Applebee’s was a regular dinner destination for my family growing up. And although my parents would probably be better-qualified than I to tell you why, I’m guessing it was some combination of the following: it was relatively affordable; the food was pretty good; it felt fancy even if it wasn’t; and maybe most importantly, we knew what we were getting, which I’m gonna assume was a blessing if you’re trying to feed picky teenagers like I was. In this instance, a giant bowl of three-cheese chicken penne for a 13-year-old asshole like me was money in the bank.

This affinity for chain restaurants extended well past my childhood. Applebee’s was a common hang-out spot for me and my high school friends, and I’m quite certain it’s where we dined post-graduation. Even my super-high-class Ivy-League college friends and I patronized the ‘Bees from time to time (see the photo below for evidence, which features me deciding which half-price appetizer I’m least likely to be asked to share with somebody else).

The poorly-dressed author claiming his just reward after dominating a college laser-tag match. March 2011, East Providence, RI.

But there’s another explanation for the success of Applebee’s and its ilk during their heyday (which I would estimate as the 2000s decade, give or take a couple years). At least for awhile, these far-flung restaurant chains aimed to embody a sense of locality and place that was appealing to their customers. In almost all respects, their marketing during this time framed these restaurants as distinctly local.

We saw (and continue to see) this strategy pop up in a few different ways. For example, these chains’ slogans go out of their way not to emphasize the uniformity of their menu across different spaces, which is arguably these restaurants’ biggest value-add. If anything, they seem determined to convince their customers that they are as authentically local has the mom and pop diner down the road. A meal at Applebees means you’re “eatin’ good in the neighborhood.” Starbucks wants to “nurture the human spirit” (with coffee, I guess?) “one neighborhood at a time.” Chili’s slogan insists that it’s “like no place else” — except, of course, its thousand other franchises in the U.S. alone. These restaurants know the area, they like the sports teams you like, and they know you; ergo, you'll feel at home here. You might even feel like family, if Olive Garden is to be believed.

This marketing strategy was intentional. Applebee’s America, a fascinating time capsule of a book by Ron Fournier, Doug Sosnik, and Matthew Dowd, lays out the case for the success of Applebee’s and chains like it at the height of the chain dining boom of the late 2000s. At the turn of the century, America was going through changes like a whipsaw, and although these trends were embraced by many Americans, others craved a little more stability. Particularly in suburbia, Americans were feeling unmoored, unattached to the local places of their youth. Applebee’s, hero that it is, stepped into the breach:

The company go[es] out of its way when a store opens to contact high schools, civic clubs, chambers of commerce, and newspapers in search of "local heroes." Usually firemen, coaches, high school athletes, and the like, these “Navigators'” pictures are prominently displayed on the restaurant's walls.

This kind of marketing has always been a fixture of Applebees’ interior design. The other week, as my partner and I swam in a smorgasbord of mozzarella sticks, tortilla chips, and spinach and artichoke dip, I noted the wall-length mural of the Idaho state capitol building; a suspiciously weathered-looking framed photo of Boise State’s legendary 2007 Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma; and, of course, the trophies, plaques, and portraits from local youth sports teams.

Applebee’s isn’t alone here. It’s not a restaurant, but Trader Joe’s—which advertises itself as a “national chain of local grocery stores”—hires artists to create custom local signage for all 500+ of their locations across the country. In 2022, the Washington Post profiled an artist commissioned by TJ’s for their Athens, GA location, describing murals “that represent the local area, University of Georgia sports teams or the surrounding rural landscape.” Their location in downtown Boise is no exception, and locally-inspired corporate art is not reserved for TJ’s:

Locally-tinged beer salesmanship at the Trader Joe’s on 6th Street, Boise, ID, September 2023.

Localized advertising can be caffeinated, too. Take these mugs I saw at the Starbucks in the Boise State student union recently, part of their “Been There” series:

Would love to know the process they went through to design these. Boise State Student Union Building, August 2023.

There’s something on the surface that these companies are telling us by marketing to us in this way. They understand economically what we understand intuitively and experientially—that people care about having locality and togetherness and a neighborhood of people who understand our shared space. At the height of their market power, the slightly-more-upscale-than-fast-food outfits like Applebee’s did great business by helping their customers see. It was obvious through their actions, and of course their direct advertising:

One ad, based on a true story, showed a small-town Applebee's restaurant closing on a rainy night as local TV news reported the local high school football team's big loss. On cue, the team bus pulled into the parking lot, and the community-minded Applebee's employees re-opened the restaurant for their local heroes. Another sentimental ad showed a local basketball coach being surprised with a plaque in his honor hanging in his neighborhood Applebee's.

What greater honor could there be?

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Applebee’s America was originally published in 2006; the following year, Applebee’s was acquired by IHOP for $2.1 billion. At the time, Applebee’s had more than 3,000 locations worldwide.

Since that time, things haven’t been going so great for chain restaurants. As of this year, the number of Applebee’s operating worldwide is down to half of its 2007 peak, and they’re not alone. People aren’t visiting Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden as much. TGI Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, Chili’s, and other casual-dining chains are apparently in a grim-sounding “restaurant death trap.”

So what happened? It may not shock you to learn that much of the blame for the vicious “killing off” of chain restaurants is falling squarely on those pesky Millennials and their unpredictable tastes.¹ And for once, there may be something to the tired trope of Millennials destroying beloved American cultural institutions. As we get older (I’m 34), we tend to become less mobile, more rooted in particular areas, and look to have culturally richer experiences in our local places.

And Millennials are, admittedly, a bit unique: We’re having kids later than our parents (if at all), but we still for the most part have jobs and income. This means more time and money to spend on “finer things”, or at least the things we’ve decided are “finer.” Food is no exception; why settle for Panera when spending a couple extra bucks will get you a sandwich from the boutique deli on the corner that your co-worker has been raving about?

There’s also a more meaningful anti-capitalist critique of these kinds of outfits that has, I think, become increasingly common among progressive, upwardly-mobile Millennials. Anne Helen Petersen, of the always-fabulous

Culture Study

newsletter, articulates this perspective wonderfully in a recent post:

I’m sure MOD Pizza, the latest upstart in the pizza world, makes a lot more money. It’s slicker, faster, easier. But it’s not a place, it’s a product — a profit center. You can always tell, can’t you, when a restaurant’s primary purpose is to make a bunch of people who’d probably never eat there a whole bunch of money.

And so there’s a moral element to the backlash against semi-fast-casual dining; that for all of Applebee’s advertised neighborliness, their locally-oriented marketing choices are a not so much an authentic effort to become part of the community, but a strategy to flatten our culture while profiting off our deeply-rooted preferences for food that’s (figuratively, at least) homegrown. In Applebees America, one of the company’s executives notes earnestly that for Applebees—which, I must reiterate, had a $2 billion valuation at the time— “the trick is to feel small.”

There’s also a looming sense that, by dining at fast food or fast-casual chains, we might also be saying something not that flattering about ourselves personally. Here’s a revealing anecdote from Jenny O’Dell’s lovely 2019 book How to Do Nothing:

I once dated someone whose very intelligent brother only ate at chain restaurants when he traveled, his reasoning being that he wanted to know what he was getting and that he didn't want to waste time risking something he wouldn't like. This used to infuriate my then-boyfriend whenever he visited, since we lived in a part of San Francisco famous for its Mexican, Salvadorian, and Ecuadorian food. The idea of eating at Chipotle instead of La Palma Mexicatessen or Los Panchos, especially when you were only going to be in San Francisco for a few days, seemed absurd. Food-wise, this man had achieved the strange feat of going somewhere without actually going anywhere.

There is undeniably some level of social capital and moralistic value that comes with having the most unique and culturally authentic culinary experience possible. By getting your meals locally, and from those with the ethnic and cultural backgrounds responsible for them originally, you’re doing the right thing by those cultures and by the local place, all while having (we assume) a tastier meal that would obviously be preferred, all else equal (See O’Dell’s bewilderment over the “absurd” choice the subject of her story makes to eat at Chipotle rather than a local option despite being “very intelligent”). Applebee’s is local, sure—it is spatially close to many of us. But because it’s a chain, it’s the polar opposite of authentically local: homegrown, unique, and special. It may be that no amount of marketing can make us feel truly at home there.

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So, is there any value in the dulling uniformity of a chain restaurant? I mean, aside from the incredible value of getting two filling, high-quality entrees for a mere $25.

I think there is; or at least, that the role these types of establishments play in our culture is more complex than we think. There’s no doubt that chain restaurants offer us (by definition) a “flat experience.” Despite the localized marketing they attempt, everyone going to the Applebee’s in Boise understands it serves the same food as the Applebee’s in Terra Haute, Indiana or Paramus, New Jersey. A flat experience in this case is what Jenny O’Dell described earlier: a dulling, uninteresting, and inauthentic attempt to “go somewhere without actually going anywhere.”

But the thing about a flat experience is that you can see what’s in front of you. It’s also easier not to fall flat on your face. Thus, “flat”, in this case, can also mean “universal, trusted, and familiar.” In a world that seems to get more complicated, frustrating, economically uncertain, politically volcanic, and climate change-y with each passing year, a little predictability can go a long way.

Again, this familiarity doesn’t come without any meaningful compromise. Here’s Anne Helen Petersen again:

I don’t hate The Olive Garden for dinner or Panera for lunch or Starbucks for breakfast. I love a Spinach Feta Wrap! I also [dislike] the impulse that drives me towards it — as the least joyful, most optimizing part of myself… Spinach Feta Wrap Me gets a lot of shit done and does her ab routine every day and tracks her steps and HAS NO FUN AT ALL.

I don’t think there’s any denying that most people “feel better” after dining at an authentically-Italian pizzeria, presumably with recipes of fresh ingredients passed down from generation to generation, than they do after eating an entire stuffed crust pie from Pizza Hut (not that I’d know anything about that personally). Authentically local experiences matter, and so does not getting taken advantage of by ostensibly “local” marketing that isn’t actually local at all.

Still, it can also be true that for many, the reliability and predictability of chains can take the anxiety out of getting a meal. They also offer valuable options for those unable or unwilling to take infinite bites at the apple (and the paycheck) to sample local cuisine. While we’re on the subject of anxiety, how about spending 40 increasingly-hungry minutes on Google Maps or Yelp looking for the local “diamond in the rough” that has at least a 4.7-star rating, a recommendation from an appropriately-hip friend, and which doesn’t have an hour-and-a-half wait time for a table? In these moments, my envy overflows for people who have proudly eaten the same thing for lunch every day for years, and are admirably convinced that they’ve got things well figured out.

The author is unashamed of having enjoyed this lunch immensely. The trick is to dip the sandwich in the mac and cheese.

There’s also some recent evidence suggesting that chain restaurants might just be our last line of defense against all-encompassing social polarization—that is, the stifling sense that huge swaths of our fellow Americans share none of our values, political beliefs, or physical spaces. In “Rubbing Shoulders: Class Segregation in Daily Activities,” Maxim Massenkoff and Nathan Wilmers identify the dwindling collection of geographic places where Americans of different cultures—and in this case, socioeconomic strata—actually encounter one another in the real world.

Applebee’s, yet again, is ready to step into the breach. “Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee's,” the authors find, “have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors.” Chain stores are also “more class diverse than independent stores,” which, I hate to admit, rings true with my own experience. Independent bookshops, for example, are among my most favorite places in the world. I would literally live in one if I could. There is also no denying that time (and money) spent in these shops is increasingly becoming a boutique experience not available to everyone; closer in cultural association to a winery than, say, a library.

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I’ve just overstated things majorly. Chain restaurants and their ilk are obviously not the panacea for our chasmic cultural divisions and economic inequalities. If anything, Massenkoff and Wilmers’s paper demonstrates that Applebee’s is the exception that proves the rule—among the last remaining physical places where mixing of lower- and higher-income Americans still happens, which itself is on its way out. Plus, it doesn’t appear that their data (or anyone’s, to my knowledge) can demonstrate that meaningful cultural exchanges, conversations, or mutual understanding actually happens in these places.

I also think—at the risk of insulting these chain restaurants that I genuinely do enjoy—that as a culture we can do better than just ordering a “Dollarita” or two with the vain hope of a chance encounter with somebody different from us. If we ever hope to have truly unifying institutions, my much stronger preference is that they be truly public places like schools, parks, and libraries: places not driven by a profit motive, which instead exist to serve all residents of a community, purposely blind to whether they can “afford” to inhabit the place.

This is also a conundrum that goes beyond the dining experience. The last century has been one continuous backslide towards undifferentiated, non-localized mass culture that has made it undeniably easier to intersect with the like-minded and like-cultured. But plurality, diversity, and genuine confronted differences between people are crucial for any functioning world society. Here’s the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, from his excellent posthumously-released book Walking in Wonder:

There is an incredible difficulty for individual places and individual experiences to assert their own uniqueness and individuality. It is very difficult in mass culture to argue for a unique space for what is individual and different. Yet one of the most important conversations in any life remains the conversation with what is other than you.

In other words, if we’re ever to have a fighting chance at a life of meaning in the midst of gaping chasms of wealth, culture, and political ideology, we need to at least try to dine together peaceably. We need real investments (economic, cultural, and spiritual) in lasting, trusted public institutions that create well-loved spaces—actual, physical spaces, and not metaverses or depraved social media platforms—for different kinds of people to mingle, meet, and learn about each other.

In the meantime, I guess we’ll have to settle for a trip to Outback to talk things out over a bloomin’ onion. I’ll see you there.

1. Our previous victims include the movie business, Friends, mayonnaise, and the napkin industry Will nothing slake our thirst for blood?