Qcaca & Company

There are some really nice things about living way up in the Northwoods. It is inconvenient sometimes to drive quite a distance for shopping that many of your Southern WI folk take for granted, but then there are the plusses. Like, for instance, I will likely never have to go along with a group of friends' choice to eat at either Qdoba or Noodles and Co.

Both are brilliant pieces of marketing. You take the two cheapest stinkin' food staples on the planet -- Rice and Pasta -- wrap it up in trendy this, shiny that, danish modern something else and a fuckload of wi-fi and being seen and you can charge people OBSCENE amounts of money! It's frickin laughable!

I've eaten at both, and it's not that I didn't enjoy the food. It's that I felt unclean...cheapened...sort of violated...because I parted with enough money to eat 'real' food and all I got was essentially the kind of staples they used to spoon out of the bowl on those old CARE TV commercials.

Rice. And Pasta.

Qdoba. You take a $1.00 burrito, fatten it up with about 25 cents worth of rice and a lingering beer fart of trendy atmosphere and there's your 6 dollar stinkin' burrito. Clever? You bet your culo it is. I don't remember rice being the main staple ingredient in any of the burritos I'd ever encountered until dining at Qdoba. Oh, it's tasty enough. And I'm sure someone somewhere in Mexico tried to stretch their family budget by adding rice to their burritos, nothing wrong with that. But essentially what's happening here is that they're wrapping a turd in foil and telling me it's a lump of sterling silver. Sorry, not buying. I can buy a whole stinkin' chuck roast for 6 bucks, rub it with olive oil and sea salt and coarse ground pepper and some minced garlic, let it sit for 2 hours and grill the fucker and pretend I'm at Ruth's Chris instead. Of course, without the atmosphere and the annoying waiter and the 40 dollar cost for what they pass off as a Rib Eye, which is impossible unless they've found a herd of Brontosaurus' somewhere. But I digress. If I'm paying 6 bucks for a Burrito, I want a fucking Burrito. NO filler. I want meat. Maybe beans. Maybe cheese. Take your shiny trendy decor and your atmosphere and shove it up your gilipollas.

Noodles and Company. Again, pretty much same story. Didn't mind the food, but 7 bucks for a bowl of fucking noodles? Are all these people in this place INSANE? You go home, open your cupboard and divert your eyes purposefully away from the stack of 23 cent Ramen Noodle packs in search of something to eat, and decide instead to drive to Noodles and Company for essentially the same shit, albeit with sauce, aluminum, earthy tones and beautiful, trendy people for 7 bucks? I could go on, but someone else has already wrote the definitive Noodles rant, which I present a link to, immediately following this rant.

Ah. It's nice to live up north. I think I'll go make some 23 cent Ramen Noodles, stuff them in a tortilla with 25 cents worth of rice and wonder what the poor people are doing today...

Good day.

http://cuindependent.com/2009/10/13/noodles-company-high-price-for-a-sub-standard-product/