Why I Love Going To Chain Restaurants

Growing up, I lived in a fairly small town in the Rust Belt. Now, there are way more locally owned restaurants, but back in my day, the best choices around for food were chain restaurants. Like seriously, any chain you can think of—we had it.

Now that I’m in my 20s and live in a Big City, I delight in visiting as many local spots as I can and rarely go to the same restaurant twice. I like seeing new places popping up on my block and my boyfriend and I both despair when a restaurant in our neighborhood closes before we could try it.

I try to do the same when I go back home, too. I follow a ton of talented Pittsburgh food bloggers and I pin restaurants I want to try on my map. But I rarely try any of them. Part of that is because my grandmother and mom make me so much food that I could pop at any moment, but the other part is that when I’m home, I just want to eat at chains.

People love to hate on chains and I guess there is good reason for that. I don’t love giving money to a big corporation over a small business. Oftentimes, their food is made in large quantities and is made to be served the same way in many different places. Simply put, it’s technically *not as good* as fancy food. And yet, I still love it.

As much as we roll our eyes, there is something magical about chain food. There is something comforting about knowing that, for the most part, you can find something familiar at any time, in nearly any place. Chains will always be there to welcome you home.

Chain food is comfort food. No, it’s not like what your grandma makes or what you like to eat when you’re sick. It’s typically kind of greasy, served in a place with novelty sports signs around, and smothered in cheese. It tastes like salt and sugar and preservatives and all the things I’m supposed to hate now that I’ve moved six hours down the turnpike.

…It also tastes like a late night snack after Friday night football games, reunions with friends on a break from college, road trips, and first dates. It has a lot of happy memories tucked into it.

Part of the reason I think chain food gets a bad rep is because, simply put, people are snobs. Dining out solely at fancy or indie establishments gives you the social cache to tell your friends about it, post about it, feel good and worthy of this fancy experience. But at the end of the day, you’re just eating food, you’re not, like, gaining morality. You are no better of a person because you eat beef tartare than I, a plebe who ate spicy chicken nuggets twice on my last road trip. And in a world where we’re all trying to make ourselves look healthier, more fun, richer, and just generally different online, this is refreshing.

I know this post will end up in one of those Facebook groups about people ruining society or whatever, but I suspect a lot of people secretly feel the same, especially those of us who grew up in more rural areas. This was our childhood, because other than our parents’ cooking, it was often all we had. And we loved it. Many of us still do.

And that’s the reason so many people get so excited about chicken sandwiches, no? That’s why on a recent college alumni bar crawl our group singlehandedly wiped the Hoboken, New Jersey, Jimmy John’s out of bread. It’s what we’ve always known and what we’ve always loved.

Call me trashy, tasteless, or crazy (you wouldn’t be the first!), but I think we as humans were meant to find a balance between the old and the new, the familiar and the different. We don’t have to hate something just because we’ve been told it’s basic or inferior.

So the next time I’m home, you can catch me eating a plate of my grandma’s spaghetti before drinking a $1 Applebee’s drink, and finishing it off at the Wendy’s drive-thru. It’s just the way I’m wired.