Anthony Bourdain’s Resignation Letter From Applebee’s
“An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.”
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must peer into the gaping maw, choose a path, and step blindly into the inky black uncertainty.
This, my friends, is one of those times.
Applebee’s is a place of contradictions.
Fast casual dining served at a reasonable price to every Tom, Sharon, Joe, and Jane from Sacramento to Sangerville. But, at its core, an indictment of modern America.
A two-thousand-calorie salad with sugar-dusted donut dippers, double-glazed baby back ribs, and a triple chocolate meltdown with parmesan butter sauce.
Two for twenty entrees plus an appetizer. Ice-cold domestic beer served with a dead-eyed smile by a high school grad who just wants to go home. Whatever that means anymore.
Places like Applebee’s make us simultaneously weep and salivate like Pavlov’s beaten dogs. One bite of the blackened Cajun salmon, a dish swimming in inconsistencies like deep-fried Malaysian penguin, and we long, not for a better place, but for a different time.
A time before the towers fell and snatched our innocence. A time before an idealistic schoolteacher boarded a space shuttle…
