This story is part of a cross-post between Indefinite Articles and The Eaten Path.
You can read James Boo’s “Preemptive Strike” on Chili’s here.

For all the amazing food we have in the Bay Area, the little holes-in-the-wall and the grandiose temples to flavor, every once in a while there’s something appealing about the strip mall meal. I grew up in Auburn, California, thirty miles northeast of Sacramento, a place not exactly known for its food (excepting Ikeda’s, perhaps, a burger joint and produce market popular amongst skiers headed to Tahoe). Once you’ve had your fill of hiking and naked statues, there’s not really much to do in Auburn except to leave it, and head down to the swath of malls that fill the gap between old mining hub Auburn and the state capitol.

When The Eaten Path main squeeze James invited me to do a Chili’s crossover event between our blogs, in which he would review the restaurant without eating a bite and I would actually have to sit down and put some food in my mouth- a raw deal, to be sure- I have to say I got a little excited. I guess there’s a little nostalgia in me for giant parking lots and salmon-pink stucco-plastered walls. So, I scammed a half-dozen friends into joining me, and we jumped into a couple of cars, chanting “Awesome Blossom” the whole way down to San Leandro.

In all honesty, the enthusiasm was fueled more by the novelty of the story rather than the promise of the food. In our enveloping, obese-friendly booths, we inhaled our bountiful platters down in a daze. The fries have that bizarre Pizza Hut quality of making you hungrier as you eat them, and the entrées come across as flavor templates, little more than the Platonic intention of food. My cheeseburger came from that alternate reality of Doritos and Combos, where burger flavor implies a homogeneous blend of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise.

No, the visit was less gastronomical in nature than anthropological. That giant glowing red pepper floating thirty feet in the sky is the hearthstone of the modern American town. Walmart may have all the deals, but Chili’s, the edgy, margarita slinging Applebee’s, is the place for family and friends to kick back and have a good meal. And as Michael Scott says on The Office, it’s “the new golf course. It’s where business happens.”

But woe, even our cultural anticipation was deflated. Gone are the knick-knack plastered walls, those corporate collections of antiquated signage designed to put us at ease. Gone is the Awesome Blossom, the battered and deep-fried raison d’être of Chili’s (though apparently, it’s predated by the Bloomin’ Onion). Gone is the bustling warmth, even the faux Downtown Disneyland bustling warmth I was for some reason expecting.

Instead, Chili’s is locked in some kind of struggle to reinvent itself, driven by manifest destiny to find that weighty Cheesecake Factory sheen. The menu is a massive tome some twenty pages in length, thickly laminated, and it reads like a webpage with too much design money thrown at it. Thank God for the pictures to help me choose what I wanted.

The one saving grace of the experience was a matter of eerie serendipity. Our waitress greeted us (after an awkward twenty minute wait for menus accompanied only by the screaming of nearby babies), and mid-spiel began staring at me with an odd knowing expression. After a round of questions, it came to light that we both went to Placer High School up in Auburn together, and she remembered me. Sadly, I couldn’t reciprocate.

Here we were, three hours removed from my own Hometown, USA, and this woman emerged from the shadows of the Chili’s bar like a pale blonde ghost. She, like the mini-mall before her, had been blocked from my memory, only to return right on time to deliver me a slice of lukewarm post-Americana.

Jake Mix is a writer, artist and blog editor in Oakland, CA. You can read his work at Indefinite Articles.

Share this story. Stay hungry.

• 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 2:04 am and is filed under East Bay, Guest Post.