Blogosaurus

Americans ate crappy fast food in the 70s. They got fat. They got more prosperous in the 80s and 90s, and started going to slightly more real places like Bennigan's or Italian Garden or P.F. Chang's or Cheesecake Factory (well, they're more real than Arby's or Taco Bell, anyway). And yet they got fatter. Why am this?

Atkins culties will tell you that the reason is potatoes and bread, and they bear their share of the blame, sure. But one of the problems with all this supposedly more real food that you get at higher-up-the-evolutionary-chain chain restaurants is that it is nevertheless full of sugar-- much, much sweeter than the equivalent dishes at non-chain restaurants.

The main reason (besides the toys) McDonald's is so insanely popular with kids is that everything is sweeter than at a more adult-oriented place like Wendy's-- let alone than at the German bar where your great-grandfather ate a liverwurst sandwich and two pickled eggs for lunch every weekday in 1910. The fries are sprayed with sugar water so they caramelize, the ketchup is sweeter than at other places (that's a taste-test you can perform for yourself with the packets you shoved in that kitchen drawer), the mustard and onions are milder. Basically, you're eating a hamburger candy bar and potato lollipops-- a highly sweetened, harsh-adult-flavor-free version of some archetypal American dishes.

Now this same tactic is put to work at ostensibly more grownup chain restaurants, in order to keep the kids who grew up on McDonald's hooked as grownups who think they're eating better, or at least more civilized. I can think of two meals I've had in the last month at such places where the sweetness factor has been dialed up to noticeably kid-like levels-- and neither were dishes that anyone under puberty would be expected to order.

At Big Bowl, the supposedly Thai coconut curry shrimp was so lacking in any appreciably Thai-seeming stinky fish sauce flavor, and yet so full of a sweet lime-coconut flavor, that it was like eating shrimp cooked in a lime colada, or Pez. Gross after two bites.

And at California Pizza Kitchen, what was once a simple, ever so slightly tart gorgonzola and walnut salad has been tarted up with 1) pear slices and 2) candied walnuts. I wouldn't mind the former, that's a typical enough combination, but the latter brought it much closer to Baskin-Robbins' Praline Crunch ice cream than it had any business being. (At least they haven't felt the urge to put slices of Vidalia onion or Heath Bar or whatever on the pizza of theirs that I order because you'd never guess that it was a Californa Pizza Kitchen pizza, the Rustico. A surprisingly decent combination of capers, black olives, actual Roma tomatoes rather than tomato sauce, and lots of red pepper flakes on a crackly-thin Italian-style crust.)