Top 10 Chain Restaurants Ranked, Graded

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — Let’s say you are driving to spend the holidays with your family. And you are getting hungry. Realistically, chain restaurants may be all you have as choices when you are tooling down the interstate, no matter where you are going. Not many mom-and-pop-best-homemade-food-ever restaurants are willing or can afford to advertise along the highway.

So what do you do? The signs before the next exit give you the following choices: Outback Steakhouse, Chili’s Grill & Bar or Denny’s.

Which one of those is your best choice for the best dining experience?

Well, the Washington Post’s food critic Tom Sietsema more than likely put on his fat pants and ate at the top 10 full-service restaurant chains and ranked them — so you don’t have to.

“Ranking America’s top 10 chain restaurants” is a humorous, yet serious look at popular eateries we all know about, even if we haven’t eaten at them all.

And you could do your own taste tests and compare your findings to those of Sietsema’s because there is at least one of each of the top 10 restaurants somewhere in the mid- and lower Hudson Valley.

First up, and coming in last place with an “F” grade, according to Sietsema, was Buffalo Wild Wings Grill and Bar.

“The saddest meals of my entire year?” he wrote. “Nothing can touch lunch and dinner at the sports bar that can’t even get its signature dish right.”

Ouch.

Wild Wings locations in the Hudson Valley include White Plains, New Rochelle, West Nyack and Wappingers Falls.

Topping the list with a grade of “A” — and only one location in the Hudson Valley — is Cracker Barrel.

“Especially after eating a lot of food that tasted as if it came from a factory rather than a kitchen, it was clear: No other chain restaurant in my months-long survey comes as close to home cooking as this operation,” Sietsema wrote.

His description of the chain restaurant is picture perfect and exactly matches my impression of it having only eaten at a Cracker Barrel once a couple of years ago.

Cracker Barrel has one location in the Hudson Valley and it’s in Fishkill. There is another over in Milford, CT.

The other restaurants Sietsema put to the test are as follows, with some locations listed and in no particular order:

• Denny’s: Newburgh
• Red Lobster: Scarsdale, Yonkers, Nanuet, Poughkeepsie, Kingston
• Texas Roadhouse: New Rochelle, Poughkeepsie
• IHOP: Larchmont, Hartsdale, Poughkeepsie
• Chili’s Grill & Bar: West Nyack, Nanuet, Somers, Poughkeepsie
• Outback Steakhouse: Yonkers, West Nyack, Wappingers Falls, Monroe
• Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar: White Plains, New Rochelle, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh
• Olive Garden: Yonkers, Poughkeepsie, Middletown

Read Tom Sietsema’s humorous and informative rankings and reviews of all 10 restaurants here. Do you agree with his grades? Tell us in the comments below.

Photo caption: Buffalo Wild Wings in Wappingers Falls. Photo credit: Google Maps.