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We used to have the southern chicken biscuit breakfast at McD's in Los Angeles, but no more. Sausage and egg biscuits only. But Carl's Jr (which is the same as Hardee's in the South) has a really decent biscuit and gravy at breakfast.
Was hard to find a decent Breakfast/Brunch place in the South until we discovered Eggs Up Grill in SC, we give it 4 stars, food is great no matter what you order .
McDonald's offers a green chile cheeseburger here in New Mexico, where we are somewhat infatuated with green chile and kind of obsess over green chile cheeseburgers. Their version is pretty good. Is it the best? No, but it is pretty good in its own right.
There was a mild uproar recently during our State Fair here in Albuquerque where an umpteenth green chile cheeseburger contest was held. Fuddrucker's actually won with its version of a green chile cheeseburger. All the locavore and anti-chain snobs were all in a tizzy that a national chain could possibly have the best green chile cheeseburger in New Mexico.
But the area manager for Fuddrucker's pointed out that they use only authentic New Mexico green chile in their version of the concoction and that everybody involved in making it is from New Mexico.
We even put green chile on pizza here and I think Papa John's has the absolute best version of that. Their pepperoni pizza with green chile is heaven on earth. Even better than the versions at the smaller, local pizza chains and single restaurants in town.
I shudder to think what would ever happen if we had a best green chile pizza contest and Papa John's ever won. Those snobs would absolutely flip their wigs.
As to the McDonald's Southern-style chicken sandwich, I remember a couple of years back receiving a coupon in the mail to try it out for free. I tried it and liked it well enough, but I've stuck to the spicy chicken sandwich, which is my favorite offering at McDonald's.
Dammit I love green chiles...Sounds like Albuquerque is chile paradise.
Chain restaurants were once the mom-and-pop places of older generations. They provided a decent enough product to grow. Now, that doesn't mean that quality remains as good as when it was a single-shop operation, because almost always, quality suffers greatly. That's the problem with chains. They simply don't maintain the same standards they once had.
That doesn't mean it's wrong to like a chain's food. There's nothing bad about that. It may not always be the healthiest or highest quality, but the chain must've done something right to attract all those people to keep coming.
I've never understood why people are so smug and condescending about chains. It seems the implication is that independent restaurants always offer a sublime dining experience. Maybe you've had incredible luck, but I've eaten in plenty of lousy independent restaurants.
Local restaurants can be great, and I try to seek them out. However, there are chains that provide pretty good quality food. If I just want a decent meal and can't find a local place that's supposed to be decent, I would rather just go to one of the chains that I like.
I've never understood why people are so smug and condescending about chains. It seems the implication is that independent restaurants always offer a sublime dining experience. Maybe you've had incredible luck, but I've eaten in plenty of lousy independent restaurants.
Local restaurants can be great, and I try to seek them out. However, there are chains that provide pretty good quality food. If I just want a decent meal and can't find a local place that's supposed to be decent, I would rather just go to one of the chains that I like.
It is not that independent restaurants are automatically better, but that -good- ones are better than chains, even good chains.
In large part this is because chains are restricted to menu options developed and approved by a central authority. Even if a chain has an outstanding head cook, he can never make exective decisions to change recipes. Chains spend a lot of money developing menus that can be replicated by moderately skilled kitchen personel to recreate the same dining experience whether you are in North Carolina or California.
In order to maintain this consistant menu, they are reliant upon using ingredients that are supplied to the franchise locations fom central distribution warehouses in order to maintain uniformity between such geographically dispersed dining locations. This relies a lot on pre-prepared ingredients like boil-in-a bag sauces, frozen meats, etc. Exceptions like In-N-Out which uses fresh ingredients are ultimately restricted in their ability to franchise out over a larger area in exchange for creating a fanatical, more local following.
Now an independent restaurant can have a bad chef who can't develop decent recipes, can't run a kitchen, and orders mayonaisse by the 5-gallon bucket, but on the other hand, an independent restaurant can hire a competent and innovative chef who can train cooks and run a kitchen and source fresher ingredients, make more stuff from scratch, adapt to changes in the market's taste, etc.
So it is not that chains a bad, per se, but they have built-in limitations that mitigate descent into mediocrity (by the chain's standards), but also don't let the individual franchise leverage their potential.
Independent restaurants, on the other hand are free to be as good or as horrible as they want (or can be) and the market will decide whether they sink or swim.
The only chain restaurants that I feel have decent food is Ruth'c Chris, Morton's Steak House and Cheesecake Factory. . .
Places like Chilis, TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesday, Bahama Breeze, Applebees is crap in my honest opinion. Absolute crap. I like to call it "corporate food"
If you can't find an appreciably better meal at less than 1/2 the cost of eating at Cheescake Factory, you aren't trying very hard. I think that's what baffles some of us here - why would you choose an inferior meal at double the cost when there's really no reason to do so, because every city with a Cheesecake Factory also has dozens and dozens of alternatives?
Most people don't like culinary exploration or "surprises," the end.
I'm at least sure for these 2 chains, that you got the state of their first location wrong. The first location of Hardee's actually was in Greenville, NC. As for Krystal, their very 1st location was in Chattanooga, TN.
For Hardee's, I can see how you guessed that one wrong. For a little while(not sure if that's still the case today), the eastern division of the CKE company (parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's) was based somewhere in the Saint Louis area. Not sure if that's still the case, today.
And page 58 of this thead and seeing that youtube video, was interesting. As I never was sure how to pronounce the town name of Havre de Grace(MD), till now!
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