Two years ago this week, I married my lovely bride. Luckily for me, she hasn’t gnawed through the ropes and realized she could do oh-so-much-better. I’ll spare the details of our wedding day, other than to say the afternoon service was lovely, the reception was fun, and the post-reception cocktail service was frenetic. When the festivities finally began to settle down towards 11pm, we looked at each other and realized we were half-drunk, worn-out, and friggin’ hungry. Our hotel’s room service had shut down for the night, but the Chili’s just down the street was open late. After an order of chicken crispers, a burger and some fried cheese, we were feeling somewhat human again. Was it the most romantic dinner a freshly-married couple could enjoy? No. Not one bit. Was it the most *needed* dinner in the history of ever? Yes. Yes it was.
While neither of us are big fans of chain restaurants, Chili’s holds a special place in our family’s lore. Not only was it our first dinner as husband and wife, it was the restaurant I worked for back in the early 2000s. I’d gone from being a sales engineer for a brash young telecom company in 2001 to being serially unemployed in 2002, just like many of my peers. Dotcoms were bailing, telecoms were failing, and I was lucky to have some savings in the bank to survive the market correction. I had no trouble finding other jobs; it was holding them for more than a couple of weeks until that company then would have to “restate earnings” or “right-size” their head count. I worked for one tech firm for a month before realizing the paycheck wasn’t happening; another one went out of business on my first day of work. I sold cars for a month until I realized what a soul-sucking, back-stabbing enterprise that is. (Seriously, every time I think back to that horrid time in my life, I root that much harder for Elon Musk and his fight against the established dealership model. Car dealerships make me yearn for the morality of the Mafia). I went to work for one company that hired such horrid people, one of them asked me, with a completely straight face, scant hours after I learned that my father had passed away at the age of 49, “are you going to put money in his coffin so he can buy his way into heaven?” Needless to say, I didn’t stick around there, and, quite frankly, I should have punched him in the face. Rapidly running out of savings and options, and ultimately, pride, I moved back home with my mom and took the first job I could find – waiting tables at the Chili’s in Annapolis.
I was not a terribly good waiter in my previous stints in the restaurant industry. In fact, I was pretty lousy. I had worked for a deli in Northwest Baltimore part-time while in college, and while I developed a keen taste for a good matzo ball soup, I never learned how to ensure my tables were given the soup before the main courses arrived. I figured that Chili’s would be yet-another distaster in my horrible 2002. Except…it wasn’t bad at all. I mean, I wasn’t making crazy stupid tech 1999 money, but I was doing much better in tips than I imagined, and my coworkers weren’t little jerkface hateballs. The store in Annapolis had a good lunch crowd, and was usually packed on weekends. Chili’s kept me financially solvent throughout 2003 and gave me a nice little second career in the restaurant industry, eventually becoming a bartender, a cook, and then an assistant manager at another restaurant. So, while I’m the first to say Ruby Tuesdays is below mediocre and that TGIFridays spends millions of dollars renovating their stores every few years but still has that same lousy Jack Daniels’ menu, and that, really, Applebee’s has no reason to exist in the 21st Century, I’ve still got a fondess for Chili’s.
My wife’s family has a different view on Chili’s thanks to a couple of elderly relatives. As anybody who has seen a Chili’s commercial or driven past a restaurant will note, that company loves the hell out that chili pepper logo. It’s on *everything* – signage, corporate manuals, uniforms, menus, to-go boxes. And, it clearly looks like a chili pepper…unless you’re close to 90 with poor eyesight. Then, it looks like a pickle. So, when my wife’s family asked the older grande dames in the family where they wanted to eat, one of them loudly exclaimed “Pickles!” After trying to figure out where a restaurant named “Pickles” was in the tri-state area, and coming up empty, the family members asked “Pickles?” “Yeah” the elderly aunt replied. “Pickles, they have the pickles outside the doors.” The lightbulb went off. Pickles… Chili’s…Pickles.. eh, close enough. When you get to 90, you’ll be lucky to remember that there was a fine dining trend related to “foam,” let alone the name of yet-another place that sells buffalo wings. As a result, Chili’s was renamed “Pickles” in my wife’s family, and now, even my mom calls it Pickles in honor of my wife’s great aunt. Not only that, but Pickles just sounds like it should be the name of a chain restaurant, which makes me wonder why it’s not…
Back to this past week. For our two year anniversary, we went to the restaurant chain that started us off – Pickl…er, I mean, Chili’s. We went to the location in Rockville (North Bethesda if you’re a real estate agent), across from what used to be White Flint Mall and the late, still-beloved Eatzi’s. Just walking into the door, I was immediately struck by the sense that this store looks essentially the same as it did 12 years ago when I worked for the same franchise group, and we’d run products over to stores with low inventory; it’s that same older Chili’s design that’s straight out of the 1980s. Tile tables, wood framing. Even though my career now involves the testing of medical examination equipment, I instantly felt like I needed to do sidework. Cleaning utensils, dusting, refilling the salt and pepper shakers. I was hit with the fear that I needed to tip-out the bartender and the bussers, and, did I get honey mustard to table 44?
Our dinner was exactly what we wanted – calories that bring back memories rather than igniting new ones. We reminisced over what a whirlwind that Saturday two years ago was like – the freakishly warm weather, the fun of the reception, the lovely speech her father gave, the way we absolutely devoured those Chicken Crispers. So, on this night, just like that night, the fries were a little too salty. The margaritas, always pretty decent for a chain restaurant, and certainly better than the ones offered by sister restaurant On the Border, were fine. The entrees were fine, and goodness knows they give you plenty of food, and even the gooey cake for dessert was fine. It was, in a word, fine. Not “fine dining,” but, “Hey, things aren’t bad! They’re fine. Could be better, could be a lot worse.”
But a closer look at the Pi..Chili’s in Rockville gave me some pause. The design is older and hardly in vogue anymore, but the restaurant is showing some age beyond that. The dark green walls usually hide dirt pretty well, but you can see the stains mounting over years of sizzling hot fajitas spewing hot grease and bored children using crayons on everything but the coloring book. There’s dried ketchup in the grout and on their new touchscreen entertainment / billing tablets. The banquettes are torn, some holes patched up with electrical tape. Chairs which have seen better years are casually thrown into a pile by the bathroom. Overall, the place just looks tired, sloppy and dirty, but in the way that comes from being hit the same… sameness every day. The kind of dirt one can overlook when looking at it all the time. It appears, quite simply, dated. Old. It’s beginning to look pickled.
Maybe that’s why TGIFridays is always redecorating. Perhaps it’s less a distraction from the food and more akin to getting Botox and plastic surgery in your 40s. Just holding off the Grim Reaper one nip and tuck at a time, or at least, telling yourself that’s what’s happening.
-Ray
