As a food rider, I have spent only years championing places in American life. These places provide welcoming, affordable gatherings. colleagues chains. Red Lobster. thousands of my mom and pop over the last half century. No matter what... the food there. individual sit-down restaurants have in the last 50 years important meeting places for middle class all over the country. that started in the 80s has come to a screeching halt.
As Megan McCarron, one of today's guests on Special Sauce, noted in a terrific story in the New York Times, rapidly growing commercial marvels casual dining chains have most of the and Red Lobster. for bankruptcy out of locations. dining rooms are rare with hundreds of since 2019 that by the way that's all Megan's pros not mine Here to talk about the rise and fall of casual... says about American culture as a whole Food Writer, Gallup, Pulse, and Research.
people come back for service And so there was this real... emphasis on how a restaurant makes you feel and how welcoming it was when these chains were growing. like people kind of acknowledge at the time that the food was not amazing which is also kind of interesting i think we think ourselves so sophisticated now but it's People have different values and long time. of special sauce for journey through the heart of America. and the just published 99% perspiration.
history of the American way of life. was the stand-in for the home kitchen and it was something that it quite as odd to go there. TJF, Friday's, Ruby 2's, all these we're now lamenting the loss of because There were other places. for a good reason. I'm Eb Levine. We'll be right back. Good to have you. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for having me. Time's piece was terrific and one of the things I loved about it was you went into the history of casual dining.
which is something that Adam Chandler has done many times in his writing. Tell us about what you found, Megan, when you looked into it in terms of the history. What I found was these chains are sort of the next phase of the chain restaurant fast food revolution that Adam wrote a really great book about. And basically what happened is in the late 1960s and into the 70s, Restaurants started to open that offer.
casual food, often alcohol, and some of them, and a sit-down dining experience, so you have a server who comes to your table, but everything's relatively affordable. and this had always been like a kind of restaurant in america but before the late 60s you know you would see maybe one or two of these restaurants in a lot of like mid-sized towns they're scattered throughout cities What starts happening is...
Some of these restaurants by accident, others very much by design, are turned into something that looks more like a McDonald's or a Burger King or, you know, a White Castle or Howard Johnson. and howard johnson's has like a little bit more in common with some of these but that was truly a roadside restaurant it was a category where like there were no restaurants anywhere because those roads were not there and then when the roads appeared howard johnson's appeared this is a little different and
So suddenly, especially in the 1980s, you start to see A chainification of the sit-down restaurant and also these chains exploding in popularity, exploding in size, hundreds are opening all around the country. And they are also turfing out those independent restaurants.
And I think there's a combination, when you look at the marketing of some of these restaurants and even the coverage of fast food at the time in places like the New York Times in the 80s, there's this distinction made between fast food being for teenagers. and sort of the teen era of baby boomers. And now they're growing up and they need more grown-up restaurants.
you know so much of american life is just about how old are the baby boomers and how are they dragging our culture in their direction at all times throughout our economic history in the 20th and 21st century and What happened? The 80s' baby boomers are in there.
late 20s 30s maybe starting to get into their 40s they're moving to the suburbs whole new suburban developments are being built for them you know maybe a lot of them grew up in the suburbs like my parents but sort of those closer in ring suburbs and new suburbs are being built, new malls are being built, new shopping centers are being built, and the baby boomers want something more adult to do with their time and so they start going out to these restaurants. And also...
There's a lot of economic transitions that start happening in the 1980s. Corporations are sort of unleash to do a lot more and I don't know how much that exactly played into the ability of these chains to grow but certainly some of them were created by the massive conglomerates of the time Olive Garden was like designed from scratch
to be what it is which is an enormous standardized chain because it was made by general mills i think we forget about that now because general mills spun off darden in the 90s but it's like breakfast cereal but an italian restaurant one of the things that you noted that i know adam has written a lot about when it comes to fast food is this notion that people need a place to gather. They need third places. Places besides work and home that people could congregate.
So maybe the mom and pop restaurants were the third places at the time and maybe the local tavern. These seemingly odious chains became third places in the absence of other third places, right, Adam? Yeah, it's a great point. The meeting places element of it was always a strange feature of fast food restaurants.
than chain restaurants because the casual restaurant has an inviting atmosphere whereas a fast food restaurant you have these hard plastic booths and this harsh lighting you're really not supposed to hang out there and yet people make it their own space because there's not always a place to go there's not always a place where if you're a teenager you know without a lot of money you want to hang out with your friends or
If you are someone who is a bit older and you don't want to hang out in a senior center or be kind of sectioned off by age, these are places where you can go and be among people. And so there really is a power to these places that... Again, it wasn't really intended for it. A lot of these places were founded on the idea of speed. Sonic, In-N-Out, those are names that are meant to convey speed, not lingering around. I was a child of divorce, and I remember like...
My dad couldn't cook. We went to Bennigan's too, you know, and that was a bit more responsible than him taking me to Taco Bell, which is probably where I wanted to go. But, you know, these conversations are important because Bennigan's was this stand-in for...
home kitchen, and it was something that, you know, it didn't feel quite as odd to go there. TJF, Fridays, Ruby 2's, all these places that we're now lamenting the loss of because There were other places, but these took hold for a good reason. And I think that it plays into people's need for connection. Those needs aren't being met by the internet because people can anonymously connect.
and maybe that will lead to a real friendship or whatever, but maybe not. And so the combination of the fact that these chains are vanishing... the internet's ability to keep us away from each other. has really left the culture in a not altogether good place. Would you say that's true, Megan? Yeah, I think that... something I vaguely worried about before starting to work on this piece and now I worry about somewhat acutely i had grown up in garbage restaurants
you know, inauthentic experiences. My childhood was a wasteland and my adulthood was going to be living authentically, eating great food made for normal people and like the mom and pop was.
my everything and how i was going to orient my life and my career around you know and whether that was you know a more expensive restaurant owned by an ambitious chef but also you know my local taco trucks my local indian restaurants all that stuff you know i live in los angeles for a reason and i wrote about chains for either back in like 2017 where i was a bit harder on them
I'm also a child of divorce. I went to Bennigan's with my dad. And, you know, the difficulty of my relationship with my father, does that boil down to being in these inauthentic restaurants together? You know, it was a bit more... negative and eight years later a pandemic later i've realized that
I didn't have a fake childhood. I had a real childhood. I had a real relationship with my father. That wasn't the worst possible universe we could have been in. I would have rather go... to a sit-down restaurant with my kid that i would like run into you know chipotle and get take out and go and also it was really interesting talking to sociologists who sort of studied foodie culture and studied you know some of the work that we do and and to sort of see that
lacuna in the middle around middle class american dining around chain dining and that even some of like the you know boosterism or nostalgia around these chains like doesn't fully appreciate how these restaurants are a real part of our food culture. In their own way. Yeah, and I think one of the most striking pieces of research I came across is by two researchers, Nathan Wilmers and Maxim Massenkopf.
who found very recently, using sort of anonymized cell phone data, which is a cool and creepy aspect of social science research, they found that one of the few... Places where there was class mixing in America still are at specifically these sit-down chains. And I think... Sometimes the fetishization of the independent restaurant misses the fact that it's a bit of an elite activity in a lot of places. Or they serve such specific populations, which we celebrate. and we should celebrate, but...
You don't lose track of the fact that there also needs to be places where lots of different kinds of people can come together and feel comfortable. Yeah, I know. It's like there was a place called, was it called Barbecue? And it was essentially a chain that just had a few locations. is that you saw every race and every ethnic group. And as you point out, and I think it's important, a lot of... The mom and pop restaurants are hyper local and are mostly visited by people in the neighborhood.
And that's one of the things, right, Adam, that fast food did, right? Is that it cut across class and race lines, right? Yeah, absolutely. It still does, but again, not to the extent that... we see and that was another part of the story that again kind of blew my mind was I used to think about fast food places as being this ultimate meeting place and gathering place and to some extent it is but
I didn't realize that places like Olive Garden and Chili's really hadn't beat on the data. And that's a really interesting development that I think over the last couple of years points to how things have changed. Part of it's the ubiquity of fast food, as you mentioned, but also part of it, I think, is...
The price of fast food keeps going up. Chili's is an example of a chain that's now marketing itself as being just as... expensive as McDonald's or just as affordable as McDonald's depending on how you look at it and for that experience you get something that is theoretically a bit more wholesome and a bit more fulfilling. And you get taken care of. But that's part of the appeal, isn't it? Absolutely.
That's why we chose that lead that we chose. And I should credit my editor, Brian Gallagher, at the Times. He was like, what about this guy you talked to where you talked about how the waitress remembered his family? And I was like, yeah, that's it. And I think that's why, because it was also emphasizing the personal. connection that you form when there is table service. What's interesting also about all the research I did in the 1980s about these restaurants,
is that the service was really the most appealing to people at the time. I found a review from a morning show, I believe in the Twin Cities area. where the hosts, it was like this beloved local morning show. There's so much lore about them that I later discovered. You know, they went and they reviewed Olive Garden.
And, you know, it had just opened up. There was running, like, 45-minute waits on a Monday night. I believe it was, like, 1987, which is, like, impossible to imagine now, but was very much the case.
and what's interesting is like it was a very friendly segment i swear to god like the first minute of it it's just like beautiful beauty shots of olive garden food with like the low low prices you know but then when they actually got into it they were like yeah we'd give the food like a two out of four stars it was okay but we give service four stars and the new york times also ran a story about red lobster in the late 80s about how
They were competing on service, like all their training was around service. Gallup polls have recently shown that people come back for service, not food. And so there was this real emphasis on how a restaurant made you feel and how welcoming it was when these chains were growing. And like some people, like people kind of acknowledge at the time that the food was not amazing, which is also kind of interesting. I think we think ourselves so sophisticated now, but people have different values.
One of the things I loved about it was you interviewed someone who said that people are looking for responsibly raised cattle or whatever, you know, that Chipotle was really successful selling. when they've tried to do that at fast food places, they're like... Don't really care. Right? Isn't that true, Adam? That was never a thing.
Absolutely. And it seems inauthentic when fast food places try to do it. But then again, it's kind of inauthentic in and of itself. I mean, Chipotle ran into this food born. illness scandal and what did they do? They hired the CEO of Taco Bell to help them turn around their company. It's never actually been as authentic as you want it to be. But I really love what both of you are saying about the values issue and the matter of service.
My kind of entrance to the market, to the workplace as an adult out of college was bartending. And I bartended from the era before smartphones into the era of smartphones. And during that gap... serving drinks but also having conversations and introducing people and just chatting idly became less and less important the more that the screens kind of introduced themselves into the equation and so i see that as part of the perhaps some of the issue around
casual dining not being seen as perhaps worth it to some people or meaningful because it's slower but we're not as focused on the interactions with our servers in the way that i think we once were and there's this you know nascent hostility to tipping that I think factors into that and some of that's you know the devices but also
just the reality that it's expensive and if you're not really focused on what the service gives to you or or you're not looking for that it becomes less important and now like the next iteration is fast casual right which is Chipotle and Shake Shack. And it's basically elevated fast food with no additional service. Adam has pointed out to me in the past that
He still goes to White Castle on, don't you, on Valentine's Day, where they do offer waiter service. It's my Valentine's Day tradition that my partner gratefully still participates in without actually she enjoys it even though she's a culinary school grad with a much higher ceiling for her the nuances of food however you see in these rare moments these experiences especially on a thing like valentine's day at white castle where they have table service and
red tablecloths and this really fun kind of inclusive experience for everyone who doesn't want a stuffy traditional valentine's day or you know a rushed hurried fast food version of it it's a nice experience that i think people
pine for people miss this the special occasions of dining that i think have been supplanted by all these other things whether it's the luxury and leisure of eating your, you know... if eating your dinner while you are streaming something on your couch is something that is bad for us socially but is also relaxing as hell. Like, I will do it. I will absolutely do it. I know that I could stand to be out in the world a little bit more, but some days, especially these days, I want to stay home.
I get it. I'm with you, man. I know it's true. It's like I was a food writer. I'm all about, you know, mom and pop restaurants. And I'm all about keeping traditions alive. And... and turning people on to these small places. And it's not that I'm going to spend the rest of my days turning people on to Chili's. That's not the point of this conversation. And that's what I think Megan has... done such a good job articulating
And Adam has, in all of his work, really, in the new book, in 99% Perspiration, it's sort of subtext, isn't it, Adam? That it's wrong to judge. places in a very myopic way. I do think that there is something about these traditions and you know it travels all the way up the food chain and travels into places like Achilles which
I can look back fondly on high school days as a meeting place for me in addition to the fast food places. Chili's was like a special, special occasion, whereas like a Whataburger or a McDonald's or something was. was a place we went for lunch or late night and thinking about what the height of sophistication it was to have sizzling fajitas come out and drinks and enormous mugs you know this was
This, for me, seemed like the hype of luxury, right? This is the great life. Again, wide accessibility and people are just out to have a good time and it's not stuffy or pretentious. those are important things that i think some of the nicer places have not done a great job of fostering in terms of bringing people in or having food than the opening for everyone. What's next? Adam, right after this quick
casual sit-down restaurants, I have to get my term straight, have responded, right? Chili's apparently, I know, uh, Nathaniel Meyerson over at CNN who does a lot of great retail reporting.
wrote a great piece about this that Chili's you know they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix this right? Yeah his reporting was so valuable when I was working on this piece he owns the Chili's revival be and I am just in awe from you know talking to industry analysts and market researchers A lot of people see Chili's as a bright spot and What was interesting is nobody could agree why. I literally, I think I had one source tell me
Chili's is succeeding because they're not doing discounts and then I had another source tell me like oh they ran that burger discount and that was really helpful. I think unfortunately people don't exactly know what's working and what's not working. Chili's has also, I guess, historically been more on the value end of casual dining. It's always been Sia's little
a little bit more recession-proof. They're smaller restaurants. But it does seem that Chili's has done a couple things that were helpful, one of which is almost Making sure the consumers don't see them as a luxury experience by emphasizing value. A lot of market researchers I've spoke to have said you know, post-pandemic, post-restaurant inflation, which it's real. I mean, I... Restaurants are, by one group's estimate, 30-35% more expensive than they were in 2019, which is wild.
So what Chili's has done is to make sure that people are looking for value, but value is so fuzzy because what you want it to feel like is that it was worth it. And increasingly more and more people in America who don't even have that extra $30 or $50 to go out to dinner. But also there's a lot of people who maybe do, but they're not sure if they want to, you know, if they want to spend that limited resource on something that doesn't feel worth it. And so Chili's did a very good job.
It seems, you know, offering things that are both feel like a great value, like what they're doing, I believe they're burgers, and also doing things that feel fun, and which could also do well on TikTok. This didn't make it into the story at all, but when I was trying to think through... the story i went to a chili's in encino and um yeah i got the triple dipper and it's like it's freaking fun like was my guacamole like a little brown in one part yes but you know i got an enormous plate of
fried chicken strips and three dips and it was pretty affordable and that was fun yeah so i think also that sense of fun is important yeah and it also differentiates it from more high-end dining experiences or even places that just feel like they're for an upper middle class. college or professionally school educated kind of person or maybe other people are not sure if they're going to do the right thing or know what to do. I love this paragraph that Nathaniel wrote.
Or he talks about Brinker, the parent company of Chili's, has poured more than $400 million into simplifying Chili's menu, adding more servers and bussers. That gets back to our service and being taken care of and renovating restaurants. That investment has allowed Chili's to upgrade its French fry and chicken tender recipes. I don't know if you noticed that, Megan. And offer fast food-like prices. It's subsequently gone viral on TikTok for videos of customers.
pulling apart its gooey mozzarella sticks like that's that sort of summarizes it perfectly Yes, I did have several people sort of say that Brinker has stood out because they're so pretty independent.
They are not dealing with any kind of private equity or activist investors because Both Red Lobster and TGI Fridays went bankrupt in 2024, and both of them, that was in part due because they were acquired at some point by private equity in both cases, and they took on a lot of debt because they used to own a lot of real estate and private equity.
sold it off and so there is also this issue of you know have the owners of these brands been stewards of them have they set them up for success have they thought about innovation or is there sort of more of an extractive mindset or like a you know cutting corners kind of mindset in the ownership and the leadership there. But I think that these chains are even vulnerable to that because their economic position was starting to slip.
a little tricky is like these chains aren't going to disappear overnight and a lot of them are doing fine but compared to the engines of growth and power that they were in the latter half of the 20th century. Most people seem to agree that it's sort of more of a zero-sum game now. And that the growth is happening.
Basically, fast food has won in America and has won for a long time. And that's actually where most of our dining dollars go. So sort of talking on these chains is talking about a smaller slice of the pie to begin with. But when you talk about growth in the industry and where things are going, it's moving toward counter service. It's moving toward more of an elevated fast food model. What's the future hold for both? Gathering places?
and casual sit-down restaurants. I do think that there's a return to in-person dining that's going to happen on the table level in people's apartments and communities. You're seeing the rise of a lot of interesting apps, and I mean digital apps, not appetizers, that are focused on getting people together for meals at home that I think resemble... what you would get at a restaurant in the days of old.
you know, reinvigorates us as social creatures and perhaps feeds the desire to go out into the world a little bit more and be festive and celebrate things in public because The fast casual boom has really, I think, disrupted the patterns that we have around dining in ways that
are kind of hard to unmake. It almost feels like the way that people don't want to go to offices anymore because they know how easy it is to work from home. You really cut a lot of time and energy out of dining out when you can just grab something really quickly. And presumably it's high quality enough to, you know, to be considered a dining experience worth investing in as opposed to sort of like...
the sad nachos that are going to be really hard to eat in five minutes after you leave the drive-thru lane. So there are those things that I think... We have to kind of unlearn, and I think it's going to happen on the ground level with people as opposed to something that's led by casual dining. But the piece raises such good questions about who, you know.
who we are as diners and as a society that is so easily reflected through food. And Megan, I'd love to get your thoughts. You wrote, you know, you were in charge of a really great package about dining in Paris. which has its own sort of casual experience that I think is so different from ours. Did that come up while you were reporting this? Did you think at all about what dining means in terms of casual life or expectation when thinking about it the way Americans do?
That's a really interesting question. So I edited a Guide to Paris in 2016, right when Paris was really changing. It was a really interesting, cool time. But I remember what I was really charmed by and what I was electrified by in Paris was the much more casual dining scene. evolving around wine bars and you know i think when we as americans think about oh the bistro and like the casual sit down meal that is that preserved an amber in Paris and preserved an amber for tourists.
And also there's been so much, oh my gosh, so much ink spilled in English and French about how many of those bistros are actually bringing in frozen entrees and reheating them. There's a loss of skill. That's been a big issue in France for a long time. A lot of the energy in French dining. is around small plates. the Neo Bistro movement, but also the Weimar movement.
and what is eating at a wine bar but like going up to the bar getting a glass of wine ordering little snacks all night very casual there's not necessarily often that table service and you know I do think that there is a freedom and that kind of eating. And it's super convivial. You know, because it's France, there are so many laws about what you can and can't do on the street. You know, it just spills into the neighborhood. There's something really warm and lovely about.
that and also i mean there is a whole culture at least in paris as well if if you're going to go to restaurant you need a reservation in advance so that's also something that we don't really have in the states so that is an interesting thing to think about and i think again why like i didn't have a major Suspicion of counter service?
Because in a lot of ways, it seemed like a way... to get really good food at a more affordable price and also for ambitious people to do something interesting with food even if they couldn't afford a full sit-down restaurant you know i think especially working so long at eater You get to know the chef side of things so well. Also, I started my career in Austin, Texas, which is the best dining there is casual dining. It's barbecue. It's tacos. It's all stuff from the counter.
Yeah, and I think, even when you look back at the long history of restaurants, like... ancient rome was full of takeout joints with like chafing dishes basically like that is how maybe how we're supposed to eat in urban life as humans you know like that might be it it might end up being this sort of like unusual bubble of prosperity.
that America experienced post-war and that the baby boom generation benefited from the most that allowed for this mass leisure activity of sitting down to eat for an hour and a half. you know, for a relatively affordable price but still that many people had so much disposable income. I think the loss of that economic comfort and stability is such a tragedy and probably even a preventable tragedy. And, you know... at least the developed world that I don't like to see it go.
Back in 2015, I wrote like a year end piece where I said the future is fancy chains. And what I meant by that was. these fancy fast casual chains things like sweet green you know david chang at the time was trying to do fuku and i think i was pretty correct in that so i do think for the future you know i i hope that You know, especially people in the upper middle class who are, you know, people who are very highly educated.
drop some of that snobbery around these casual dining chains and sort of take a second look at that knee-jerk reaction that they're not worth time or patronizing or oh that's one place we won't go Because I think otherwise they will continue to kind of slip away. Also, I think a lot of the future is in chains that are maybe coming over from Japan and China. My go-to sit-down family restaurant is a free ramen.
which is, you know, a big Japanese chain. I think they've completely rethought it for the U.S. You know, they developed a whole menu in Portland, and now they're going to export it to every obnoxious hipster city in the country. But, like, we sit down. They have high chairs. They even now have an arcade game for the older kids. My son loves his noodles, and my partner and I get our noodles. Yeah, we also left a garlic orange and titty in place.
i love to go out with my frontage around k-town with our babies like you know you can you can also patronize mom and pops this way but you know i think we're gonna see chains coming out from china from japan i think we're gonna see homegrown chains built around like new kinds of food traditions and also you know maybe there will be still see some olive gardens but i think unless We start valuing communal dining again. We're going to see a lot more of people just being in their homes.
or seeing restaurants as a place to acquire food rather than a place to be around people. And yet, it didn't take Alice Waters telling us that the family table was important to know that And by the family table, families in quotations, because it's extended families, it's the family you choose, or however you want to say it. Those kinds of experiences are invaluable for all of our development as human beings. The thing I do the most to dine with friends is I go over to my friend Angie's house.
We do Hot Pot. It's like a rotating cast of people who always come over. I bring my son, her kids are there, her kids go to bed. You know, it's lovely and it's super community building. And I think I used to think that's what we had to strive for in America and we had it. But I think we don't also want to lose track of the incredible privilege we currently have of
Having all these places where we can form those kind of weaker social ties or just rub shoulders with other people who we don't know or aren't choosing. Yeah. And we don't want to lose track of that either. You know, we look back on the luxury of time that we had. in earlier generations and think about how that's slipping away from us.
we do work longer hours than we used to and there was recently data released about how more americans have two jobs or multiple jobs than have previously ever on record been documented you know that that's really points to both an absence of time but a financial precarity that i think is keeping us from
being out in the world because we don't have the time or or the money to be social but also you know there's there's a struggle that's going on that i think makes us less less apt to be social people too when we feel like we're falling behind and that's a big part of this, you know, broadly loneliness epidemic and social cohesion issues that we're having. And there's always been some kind of value placed on what it means to dine and how that changes throughout the generations and thinking about.
the way that people knock historically have not casual dining or now not casual dining but I'm sure when diners and drive-ins became popular in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, People were decrying how people weren't eating at home anymore at the table around their families. There's always been some kind of... traditionalists push back to something but but really those are just social forces that are creating and economic forces creating new ways for us to gather and
The people aren't necessarily to blame. I mean, those issues are systemic and those issues are bigger than what people individually can necessarily control. If you can get yourself out to, you know, to a Chili's. or to an olive garden, and that does it for you, God bless. We should be happy. We should be happy for people to do that. I think that really was one of the things I learned from Megan's piece.
And from all of your writing, Adam, that the point is gathering and the point is sharing a meal and the point is looking at one another. so well we could talk about this all day but i have to go so Megan McCarran and Adam Chandler thanks for sharing your special sauce with us Adam's new book is the provocative and thoughtful 99% a working history of the American Get a friend to share their article with you really important thing That's all the time. again, Adam, Megan, it was really a pleasure.
thank you thank you so much Harry Gregory of prx specialsaucepodcast.com And find me. on Instagram. serious eaters See you next time. PRX.