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Where to find a chain restaurant near you

These casual and inexpensive restaurants rule the dine-out scene for many Long Islanders. While you won't find any gourmet fare at these spots, you can count on them to be consistent.

Chain restaurants

These restaurants - casual, inexpensive and consistent - rule the dine-out scene for many Long Islanders

Chew on this: Michael Whiteman, co-creator of Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, had dinner at Applebee's just the other night.

What was a high-powered restaurant consultant doing at a place whose slogan, "Eatin' good in the neighborhood," would give an English teacher agita? Nothing more - or less - than taking advantage of America's casual restaurant chain industry, a force that feeds a nation.

"I was in Queens and it was 10 o'clock at night, and we were hungry and no other place was open," said Whiteman, whose firm, the Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Co., has never consulted for Applebee's. "I had a fairly decent hunk of steak and a barely adequate glass of wine [for me] and a pretty good salad."

"Any port in a storm," restaurant snobs might mutter.

"It's hard to argue with success," business-minded realists might retort, for the economic strength of chains is formidable.

According to Richard Martin, executive editor of Nation's Restaurant News, the aggregate sales of the 200 largest chain restaurants in America are about 41 percent of the entire U.S. food service industry's annual sales, or nearly $200 billion of the industry's $500 billion-plus sales total.

There must be something that keeps Americans chained to chain-style dining.

"What you're getting is a standardized meal in comfortable surroundings," said Whiteman, who has consulted for several casual chains. "They're highly democratic places, and the price is right." This usually means an average check of $10 to $20 a person, according to Chrissy Shott, manager of media relations for the National Restaurant Association.

Charlie Kubelka of Jericho says he has never been less than satisfied with the value at Applebee's. "Any time I see an Applebee's, I know what I'm going to get," said Kubelka, who turned up at the Commack branch after playing golf nearby. "Their food is consistent, there's a good variety, the prices are moderate, and there are enough locations that you can always find one off a major thoroughfare."

John Jacoby of Dix Hills, a regular at T.G.I. Friday's, calls the food there "fairly decent," adding that he could probably get better fare at a privately owned restaurant. At Friday's, though, he knows he likes the meat loaf with mashed potatoes, which is always the same.

And therein lies the draw of so many chain restaurants: reliability. If, as some critics say, that often translates into mediocrity, they may be missing the point.

"The purpose of these chains is to provide you with a meal at what is a relative bargain rate," said Whiteman. To do that, he said, most have found clever ways to eliminate skills from their kitchens, serving what is essentially a mass-produced product. Often, this means that everything has been almost completely readied at a central location. Nobody has to so much as chop an onion or a clove of garlic in a kitchen mainly used for assembling, heating, grilling and frying.

It may not get any more mass-produced - or massive in scale - than Applebee's, which has 1,840 locations nationwide and tops Nation's Restaurant News' list of sales for casual chains. And if the salad dressings there taste as though they came from a bottle or a jar, there are other drawing points. At Applebee's, said spokesman Frank Ybarra, each restaurant pays tribute to neighborhood organizations and heroes, with memorabilia from local teams, marching bands and fire departments. In terms of food, variety and affordability are the watchwords.

Its specialized name notwithstanding, The Cheesecake Factory is all about choices, offering an 18-page menu with more than 200 selections and 50 desserts. Nationwide, there are only 105 Cheesecake Factory restaurants (and seven of its sibling restaurants, Grand Lux Cafes), but the chain still ranked eighth for magnitude of sales among Nation's Restaurant News' top 100. "Among national chains," Martin said, "Cheesecake Factory has the highest annual sales per restaurant."

What makes this success so unusual? "Unlike others, Cheesecake Factory has been able to manage a very large menu with mostly fresh food, and no one else has been able to duplicate that," Whiteman said.

According to Howard Gordon, Cheesecake Factory Inc.'s senior vice president of business development and marketing, every dish (except desserts) is made fresh in the restaurant and may be customized according to taste. Although Cheesecake Factory's prices are higher than Applebee's or T.G.I. Friday's, meals are still moderate in price.

At the recently opened Grand Lux Cafe in Roosevelt Field, Cathy Quiong of East Meadow found herself impressed. "The inside was amazingly beautiful and made me feel very posh. At first, I thought it would be too expensive, but then I saw the menu and looked at the prices and said, 'This is reasonable American fare; whatever I'm in the mood for - pizza, steak, salads - I can get.'"

Although some chains play on their breadth of selections, others have a more narrow focus. At Red Lobster, the forte, not surprisingly, is seafood. According to director of communications Wendy Sperduso, the 38-year-old brand changes its menu twice yearly to stay current with trends and, like many chain restaurants, offers options for the diet-conscious.

"As a person who talks to the public, the impression is that we're largely a frozen fried restaurant and we're not," said Sperduso, adding that all fish is fresh, while shrimp, like virtually all shrimp in the United States, is frozen immediately after being caught. Preconceptions aside, Red Lobster has managed to claw its way close to the top. On Nation's Restaurant News' list of top casual dining chains for systemwide sales, Red Lobster snagged the fourth-largest market share.

Another niche-oriented operation is Friendly's, a regional chain that began 70 years ago in Springfield, Mass. Concentrated mainly in the Northeast, it has branches as far South as Florida and as far West as Ohio. Despite an expanded menu, Friendly's relies mainly on its griddle cooks and ice-cream scoopers. "We're traditionally known for burgers, melts, kids' meals and our famous ice cream," said Joe Vitrano, president and chief executive of J&B Restaurant Partners, which owns franchising rights in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Although several Long Island Friendly's stores have closed, the number of stores has grown from 30 to 35 since J&B acquired the franchise in 2001. Not surprisingly, the target audience of these restaurants is families with young children and groups of teenagers.

Among national chains, the one hardest to characterize is also one of the smallest and, arguably, the least chain-like. Houston's, which has a restaurant in Roosevelt Field, has only 40 branches nationwide. It belongs to the California-based Hillstone Restaurant Group, which is privately owned as opposed to being publicly traded.

The menu at Houston's is small and straightforwardly American, emphasizing burgers, ribs, grilled fish and salads. Each restaurant's menu is individualized according to locality, said Robert Marano, regional manager of the Northeast Region for Hillstone.

"When you're independently owned, you have the luxury of cost being the secondary factor ... everything is brought in fresh daily, chopped and filleted every morning." Produce is sourced from local farmers - which, on Long Island, means the North Fork. "We really run like an independent chef-driven restaurant and try to be consistent in multiple locations," Marano said.

How successful is this enterprise that prefers the term "restaurant group" to "chain?"

"Houston's is very private," said Martin, of Nation's Restaurant News. "They don't really say what they're doing." And because they're not publicly held, they don't have to. Whiteman added, "They haven't grown like crazy. If they were as profitable as their competitors, there would probably be more of them."

Instead, chains like Applebee's, Olive Garden, Chili's and Ruby Tuesday predominate. Still, Whiteman implied, culinary elitists should think twice before jabbing these restaurants with their Henckels knives.

"Judge these places on their own terms," Whiteman said. "If you want to criticize the food for not tasting like the food at Jean Georges, you shouldn't do it with a straight face because Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] is not in their kitchens."