A few years ago, urban sprawl invaded our south end of the county. When MSD (Metropolitan Sewer District) installed sewers all along Dixie Highway (the main road in this area) restaurants started popping up overnight it seemed. O'Charley's, Logan's Steakhouse and Texas Roadhouse are a few of the most popular places that opened. Besides having great food and reasonable prices, these restaurants share another common denominator: free dinner rolls.
I'm not a naive person, and not alot surprises me any more. But this blows my mind: you're talking about restaurants and say "Texas Roadhouse is good", and the response you will get is 'I love Texas Roadhouse. They have the best rolls." Ohhhhkay. I always want to respond with "Oh, I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. We're talking about a STEAK place, not a bakery." But come on -- they're just rolls.
The part that irritates me the most is that these restaurants always bring you the bread before your meal, and we just shove it in like we haven't eaten in a month. A couple of the restaurants make it worse by giving flavored butter with the rolls. We pay a good chunk of change for a steak or other entree, and we waste our appetite by bingeing on bread before the meal arrives. We get filled up on bread while waiting on a $20 steak to arrive. Our steak finally arrives, and we don't finish it because we're too full of bread. So now we've spent $20 on a steak and didn't eat it all because we wasted our appetite on FREE bread. It's not like they brought us free shrimp; they brought BREAD. You're probably thinking "Puddin, you can always take the rest of your steak home." That's crazy. A hot steak [hopefully] right off of the grill is ten times better than a reheated steak. I'm not paying $20 to eat half a steak and eat the other half reheated.
Logans and Texas Roadhouse make it even worse -- they have buckets of free peanuts on every table. So those that don't particularly like the bread can gorge themselves with the free peanuts. It's the same way with Mexican restaurants. We gorge ourselves on the free chips and salsa and when our piping hot meal that we paid for arrives, we're too full to eat it. They should bring you the bread (and peanuts and chips and salsa) after the meal. Then you would be able to eat and enjoy the meal that you paid for. But this is never the case.
The next time there's a lull in a conversation you're having, start talking about a steakhouse, and say "They have the best ribeye" and see for yourself. Trust me - someone WILL say "They have the best bread."
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