Worst restaurants

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I haven't been to the restaurant next to my office in quite a while. The restaurant has gone way downhill from what it used to be and I really don't like it much. The last time I ate there was about six months ago and the food that time was not bad even if we were the only occupied table in the restaurant.

The owner of the restaurant not only had no restaurant experience when he bought it, he had never even been in a restaurant. It really shows.

My nephew is friends with the owner and sometimes helps them out. I had told him once that the town is small enough that having a full menu means that many things will rarely, if ever, be ordered. My suggestion for most local restaurants it to offer four or five items on a fixed menu and have maybe one or two specials daily. The idea on that is that the restaurant could have the ingredients they need and not have to have a bunch of ingredients that rarely sell. Also, they should be able to fix anything they cook really well.

Let's call it "The Mexican Cowboy Cafe" (not it's real name). We had a dinner tonight at it with several people. I had expected to order the smothered enchilada plate or the taco plate but the menu was gone. They had four items:

1) cheeseburger and fries
2) chile colorado with rice and beans
3) chicken fried rice
4) pizza

The food was not good at all. Just about everyone, myself included, got a togo box to take our leftovers home. I'll keep my leftovers in the refrigerator for two or three days until they are past the point at which I would eat them and then I will throw them out.

Since I can't eat cheese, I ordered the chicken fried rice which has no cheese. What does a Mexican restaurant know about cooking Chinese food? I now know the answer -- not a damned thing. That was the worst chicken fried rice I have ever eaten. It was soggy and it had no flavor to speak of. I wonder if they have ever eaten chicken fried rice from a Chinese restaurant. I suspect that they don't even know enough to use a Chinese soy sauce instead of a Japanese soy sauce.

The lady to my left had a cheeseburger and fries. That didn't look bad but they definitely appeared rather greasy. I noticed that every one of the four people who ordered the cheeseburger got a togo box. The only person to finish his meal was my nephew who ordered the pizza which was the worse looking pizza I ever saw and was only about eight inches in diameter.

The only thing that looked almost good was the chile colorado. I should have ordered that but without cheese.

Everything was the same price. I paid $16 for a plate of chicken fried rice. My nephew paid $16 for an 8 inch pizza with hardly any toppings.

The idea behind having four items on the menu in a small town is to play to your strengths. For a Mexican restaurant, that would typically mean maybe a taco plate, an enchilada plate, a hamburger, and a steak. Actually, for Mexican restaurants there is a big advantage that so many of the items are made from the same few ingredients, just in different proportions. So with a few ingredients, they could cover a number of different dishes. Instead, they have four dishes and only one of them plays to their strengths. From my perspective, if they actually knew how to prepare their four dishes, their dishes should have sold for about $8 to $12 depending on the dish. Nothing there was worth $16.

I regret not driving to the next town to the north where I could have gotten an excellent plate of barbecue for about $16 or an excellent catfish plate for about $12. My $16 meal today wasn't worth $4.

There is no restaurant in my town that is worth eating at.

I heard that eating while standing in front of a mirror naked, is a good way to lose weight. So I gave it a try. Which led to me from getting banned from all restaurants across the country.

The other restaurant in my town is also terrible. Like the first restaurant, it used to be pretty decent.

I have been there four times in the last year. In order, I had:
1) barbecue plate -- This turned out to be chopped barbecue and was almost all fat. At the time I ate this meal, I had recently had my gall bladder removed and could tolerate anything that fatty.
2) sliced brisket plate - I figured that this should be pretty good. It turned out that the brisket was real dry and had no flavor. I couldn't finish it
3) chicken fried steak plate -- I've had their chicken fried steak a number of times, but until this time it had been pretty good. Yeah, I can cook a better chicken fried steak, but they were more convenient. This time, the chicken fried stead was clearly the cheapest chicken fried steak they could buy from a restaurant supplier. It had none of the qualities you expect in a chicken fried steak.
4) catfish plate -- I've had their catfish a number of times, too, and it was always good even if the prices were ridiculously high. This order was cooked with really old oil that should have been thrown out long before.

For all of these, the prices are higher than you would expect. Their catfish plate that is not on sale is about $18 to $20. Their Friday special catfish plate is about $16. In comparison, I could go to the next town to the north and get a great catfish plate for about $12 or to the next town to the south and get a very good catfish plate for about $11, but with smaller proportions that are perfect for senior citizens.

Also, the restaurant doesn't charge the correct sales tax. The sales tax rate they use is about 50% higher than he sales tax rate set by the state.

Don't go to the Wagamamas at central station in Amsterdam

The food is about as bad as bad can be and you have to use the train stations bogs where you have to pay and there always a queue

It was the single most worst restaurant I've ever been in

Don't go

I must remember to trust pilot it as well

We used to have another restaurant. At one time, they ran a food truck and it was quite good eating. I always got the hamburgers and enjoyed them even if they were rather greasy. I learned to substitute beans for fries because of how greasy the fries were.

The second restaurant I mentioned used to be in one location and moved to another. The original location was not that big and had maybe about six tables, but they were often occupied. One nice thing about this town is that if one table has an extra space, you are often welcome to have a seat so it wasn't that difficult to find a place to sit.

The newer location is quite a bit larger. They have maybe twenty to twenty five tables that are spread out -- if they wanted to pack in more tables, they could easily do so. However, not once have I ever seen more than four tables occupied. They did more business at the original location and must be really hurting. Consequently, their food has gone downhill.

I used to get the hamburger and fries at the original location. Their hamburgers were not as good as at the former food truck, but their fries were really good. I often considering getting a hamburger at the former food truck and then going over to the other place for the fries.

After binging hell's kitchen a little last year I quickly realised that most of the people who own restaurants really shouldn't. They just see it as an easy venture.

It sucks that you don't have a decent food place locally. Do you have a McDonald's? Subway? These are not outstanding options but at least they are reliable in quality.

Bright side? You didn't get food poisoning from your chicken fried rice (I'm assuming).

Yeah, too many people think that if they like to eat at restaurants, they know how to run a restaurant.

We had one guy and his two sons in this county years ago who made a nice living in the restaurant business.

The father and the two sons each owned a restaurant in a different town. The restaurants were really fine places to eat. They knew everything about the restaurant business. Those restaurants had good menus, food cooked pretty much to perfection, well trains staff, and they were kept clean.

Every one of the restaurants had a "For Sale" sign in the window. Sooner or later, someone would be driving through the town and would stop to eat and who would be quite impressed and want to buy the restaurant. They knew nothing about restaurants -- like many, they thought that eating in restaurants gave them insight into running restaurants -- and everything would be perfect.

The owner would happily sell them the restaurant. They would teach them as much as they could about running restaurants and how to cook every recipe. The sales contract would also bar the seller from opening a new restaurant in competition with the buyer's new restaurant. So the buyer would start out thinking he had hit the ground running.

The seller would then go open a new restaurant in a nearby town. That was actually pretty easy for him because the father and two sons had a backup restaurant pretty much ready to open in every town.

Eventually one of the other two family members would sell his restaurant and then go back to the first town and open up their backup restaurant there. Note that the non-compete was only valid against the family member who had sold the restaurant, not against the other two. The owner of the restaurant was already having troubles because they weren't ready to run a restaurant -- the food was suffering, the restaurant was getting dirtier and dirtier, and the restaurant was losing money. When the family member opened up a new restaurant in competition with him it was only a month or two and the buyer of the previous restaurant would go out of business. There would be an auction to sell the property and the equipment and the family would step in and buy it all for a fraction of what they had sold it.

And sooner or later, someone was be impressed with the new restaurant and buy it repeating the cycle.

The family didn't actually make that much money from running the restaurants, but they made far more selling the restaurants.

The restaurant we ate at on Saturday changes hands every four or five years. This last time that it went up for sale, my niece wanted to buy it. I told her that until she had worked as a cook in a restaurant, a waitress in a restaurant, and a manager of a restaurant for a good ten years or more, she would lose her money running the restaurant and I would categorically refuse to loan her anything to buy it or to keep it open.

Regarding chain restaurants, I think that it is stupid to open one in a rural county like this.

If you open a chain restaurant, you have to pay them quite a percentage of the sales. Subway is reputed to be one of the most expensive for this.

Furthermore, you are limited to their menu and you buy your produce from the chain. The food will be unlikely to be as fresh as what you can get locally. And if you want to offer something else that is popular locally, you are out of luck.

After a couple of weeks or so, everyone in the county is going to quickly find out whether or not it is worth eating there. The name of the chain won't make any difference.

I asked some questions today. It turned out that the dinner last night was supposed to be an "International Dinner" and my nephew chose the menu items to offer.

It bothers me that they would have Chinese food on their menu. After all, they don't have a clue about how to cook it.

Instead of stir frying the bite sized chicken pieces, they appear to have cooked the chicken somehow and then shredded. Usually the rice in a Chinese fried rice is day old rice. I think that they cooked some rice and stirred it in. I don't know if there were any spices or anything else in it. It really had no flavor.

They would have been much better off cooking a boneless chicken breast with Mexican spices and serving it with Mexican fried rice and refried beans along side it on the plate.