22 thoughts on “Hungry?”

    • That’s up to you. After all, most of the options do include meat of some kind.

      You could always limit your viewing options to the coffee, fries, and onion rings. 😊

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  4. Reading the Fast Food Awards made me laugh out loud! I make almost all my food from scratch. I just bagged and froze 25 pounds each of corn tortilla masa, whole grain rice, hard red wheat (yes, I grind my own bread flour). I make my own cheese, ferment sauerkraut, marinade beef brisket in a homemade spice blend, for 10 days on the way to sumptuous corned beef, etc., etc.,

    But some days what I wouldn’t give for a big and nasty fast food cheese burger with lots and lots of greasy fries!

    Nan must be the devil tempting all the obsessive-compulsive food neurotics out here in the Bible Belt!

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  5. Don’t eat much fast food these days. But two weeks ago shared our first DQ Beltbuster w/cheese in a very long time (with fries). DQ was 13th on the ‘awards’ list. But it was excellent that day.

    Recently read this by Larry McMurtry (paraphrased) — Texas hamburgers are thick as a sandal and taste about the same. He had a point.

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  7. Fast food? Best of? That’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one. I passed on looking, but read the comments anyways. How does SOM have time for Word Press if he is so busy stocking his freezer with healthy food? Healthy body, unheslthy mind? Seems like yet another oxymoron to me…

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  9. I tend to avoid fast food places like the plague… Hmm, that’s probably a touchy phrase to use these days considering we’re still in the middle of a plague, but let me go on…

    About the only one of the restaurants I’m personally familiar with that was mentioned is Culver’s. That’s not a national chain like the others, though, so I’m not sure it should even be included, but whatever. The food there is — decent? It’s at least edible, which is more than I can say for any of the others. McDonalds? Really? About once a year I go to McD’s just to see if, by some happy chance, they might be producing something edible. They don’t. There isn’t a single thing on a McD’s menu that I would consider to be actually food.

    When I’m out traveling I always avoid the fast food joints and I look for the little mom and pop independent places in towns too small to to host one of the chains. The prices are generally not much more than the fast food joints, sometimes less, and the food is almost always good, or at least decent. Often it’s excellent.

    Best breakfast I can remember was in a tiny little restaurant in Kentucky in a town near the Mammoth Caves. The food was good but the highlight of the place was sitting there listening to a bunch of guys in their 70s or older talking about where they were going to bury their wives when they died. Seriously. It was hilarious! My wife still thinks they were actors who were hired to sit there and spin stories all day.

    Best burger.. I’ve had a lot of great ones but the best is a place called Krolls in Green Bay. Not something you want to eat often because it is fried in butter, with more butter laid on top right before they bring it out. Crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, with a crusty bun made locally.

    Best Italian restaurant would be one in Jamestown, NY. Alas I heard it was closed now. We’d been on the road all day and it was late when we got to the hotel and they sent us a short walk down the street to an Italian place that they said was the best Italian restaurant in town and I suspect they were right. We were the last ones served at the restaurant but they urged us to just sit and hang around as long as we wanted if we didn’t mind the starting to clean up. When the owner/chef heard we’d traveled all the way from Wisconsin he came out with a couple of bottles of wine and we sat there with him and a couple of the staff drinking wine and laughing and talking and telling stories for another two hours before we teetered off home.

    Avoid fast food. Find the little mom and pop places, the real independent places. It’s worth it.

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    • I’m with you, GF. I rarely do fast food. Not only because I don’t find it all that appealing, but I tend to see a very close connection between the overweight problem in this country and the proliferation of fast food joints.

      The very few times we do a “hamburger and fries,” we tend to visit Carl’s Jr. However, #2 on the list (In-N-Out) recently opened in this area and people seem to “rave” over their hamburgers, so I suppose I’ll have to visit there at least once.

      Like you, we much prefer “fine dining” as opposed to grab-and-go. 😊

      P.S. We had a similar experience at a local Italian restaurant a few years back. I wonder if it has anything to do with the owners being Italian?

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      • One of the disadvantages of where I live is that I’m about 25 – 30 miles away from any fairly large city so while I’ve heard of most of the places in that list, I’ve never been in most of them, except for McD’s, Culvers and Dairy Queen.

        Back in the 90s I was an electronics technician and among other things I serviced point of sale systems and some of my clients were restaurants, so I spent a lot of time in the back of the house at some of the big chains and after what I saw going on back there, well, let’s just say that a lot of these places are less than appetizing behind the scenes.

        If I have to eat fast food I’ll pick Culver’s any day. Amazingly broad menu. The one in Appleton has walleye on the menu, for heaven’s sake, or did the last time I was there. And I’ve been in the back of the house at several Culvers and every single one was spotlessly clean, even the floors.

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    • Ever been up to Winnipeg, gf? There was a small fast food place there, owned by a series of Greek cooks, working in the tiniest little space, take-out only. All they made were burgers, fries, and chili. The chili ended up on both the burgers and the fries. For a hole-in-the-wall operation in a run-of-the-mill city at least 5 cooks made their millions there, sold the operation to a younger up-and-coming Greek entrepreneur, and toddled on back to Greece. There were long line-ups there every night.
      Then someone decided to make it into a local chain, with more offerings than burgers and fries. They were okay, but not up to the quality of the original. The original is still right where it always was, last time I was in Winnipeg maybe 5 years ago, and still serving long line-ups every night. Only, other owners than Greeks have taken over. But they still use the original recipes, and they are still fantastic.
      Just bragging about my hometown. Worth visiting, not so great for living there, though.
      But why I really chose to reply to your comment, I used to love mom and pop restaurants. But the big chains have put a lot of them out of business. They are getting harder to find, even in small towns. And the ones that still exist have changed their menus to compete with the fast food outlets. The worst thing they ever did, in my mind. I love home-style cooked meals, but their days seem to be numbered. A great loss.

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      • You are, alas, correct in that a lot of mom and pop places have been pushed out of business. It’s really sad. When McD’s opened up in Brillion, a little town where I used to work, I was afraid it would put Rudy’s out of business. It’s a tiny little place that’s been in business for something like 75 years under various owners. I remember Rudy, the original Rudy, from when I was a kid. My father and I stopped there when we had to go to the town to get parts. He was a crusty old guy by that time, a real character. It’s had a half dozen different owners since then I think, but the character has remained the same. I think they still have the same stools at the counter that were there when I was a kid.

        When I travel I deliberately avoid the freeways and interstate highways and stick with the state and county roads because, well, everything has become so generic, hasn’t it? On one trip we were pressed for time and were traveling along a freeway and one morning we woke up and couldn’t remember what town we were in because they were all pretty much exactly the same, a cluster of exactly the same franchise gas stations and restaurants crowded around the exits. We might as well have not bothered to go anywhere and stayed home.

        The Greek place sounds amazing 🙂 I’ve never been in Winnipeg but it’s on my “to see” list in the next few years.

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        • I hope it is still there when you get there. On Main St. half a block off Broadway, northwest corner. It does not face Main St. but is sideways to the street facing the back lane. Really easy to miss. Name might be changed. Look for picnic tables in a parking lot. Prices reasonable. Value great.

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  11. I will confess I like Five Guys. They….try. Their fries are not made from frozen things. The burgers are decent and have good toppings

    As a 30 year Californian I am supposed to be enamored with In NOut it I just don’t get it. Their burgers are…ok….but the fries are awful.

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