Dining local or corporate?

We are all familiar with the sheen and shine of corporate restaurants.

Between their campy television ads and their arms, like snakes reaching across this great country in the form of multiple franchise locations, it has become very hard to miss an opportunity to dine at these places.

Their tables are always clean, the food is always prepared behind a brick wall, leaving you with the comfort of pretending your meal isn’t being finished off in a microwave.

Their uniform service is the finishing touch in the experience of dining at said locations.

I am not trying to attack these Applebee’s or the Olive Gardens, or the good and hard-working people who make their living there. 

I just wanted to inform you of a decision I made, and never looked back. With the exception of a bi-monthly trip to T.G.I. Fridays (those guys really know how to create a home-town feel), I have committed myself to only dining, drinking and deserting local.

Yes, I lost Buffalo Wild Wings and Texas Roadhouse and all those other places I love dearly, but the experience of dining local trumps every moment I’ve ever spent inside their cloned infrastructures.

When you dine local, you help out a small business in a major way. To purchase prime rib from the local tavern over O’Charlie’s, or to share a hot plate of lasagna at the local trattoria instead of Olive Garden is to resist the urge to hand your hard earned money over to a corporation, to stick with something familiar instead of experiencing something new that is, in a great way, part of your home.

Yes, on the surface your local steakhouse doesn’t seem that much different than an Outback or a Lone Star, but when you look closely you start to see the chasm between the little business and the big man.

And when it comes down to it, I really miss those chain-restaurants. Although, it does bother me that I can miss eating at any place involving the word chain.

But the decision I’ve made to only spend my money at local infrastructures is a decision that I’m glad I made.

This kind of decision may not be for you. Hell, you might actually like eating once-frozen bread sticks and filets that have been chalked full of preservatives.

But if, when they say “to each his own,” they mean  “my own” includes the ability to walk into the bar and shake hands with the man responsible for the meal I’m eating and the time I’m having (the owner, silly) then that’s a cliché I’m happy to live my life by.