Double Flee A

Moe's sucks

We don't have Chipotle down here, we have Moe's, a carefully mediated restaurant experience which I will now, with my usual style, flash, and overpowering air of morbid disappointment, explore the demerits of.

Number one, the food's not as good. Not even close. The salsas are sedate compared with Chipotle's hot and have little to offer but tomato flavor. If the situation of this blog were far more lifelike in many ways, I'd drink some to prove to you how weak it is. This blog would have to be really different, wouldn't it?

Number two and second-most obnoxious, the menu is a train wreck. I hated even looking at it, much less saying the words that would get the food to my mouth. The tacos menu alone offers The Full Monty, The Other Lewinsky, and The Ugly Naked Guy. Now, silliness once you've earned it I can understand, like if your barbecue restaurant in downtown Philadelphia has been serving it up awesome for fifty some-odd years and you want to call a dinner the Fat Guy Special. But everything on the menu? And it's all part of the "flavor" of the restaurant's ambience? All I can experience under these conditions is what I imagine brought it to exist in this way: a board room full of guys in power ties thinking outside the box. Maybe they just got back from a Tony Robbins corporate retreat. I literally had to employ a breathing technique to restrain myself from walking out of this place for that reason alone. But because of what they make the employees do, I found a new center within, and awarded myself the dragon belt of the serene Zen master. On to that.

Number three and the kicker: every so often, maybe every two or three minutes, the entire staff has to shout "Welcome to Moe's!" Here's how it works. Someone, I'm guessing an overachieving (underachieving?) assistant manager, will initiate the "Welcome to Moe's", then the rest of the crew will shout/say it too. And this, I guess, is how you're designed to feel welcome, appreciated, and important when you go to Moe's. What is the ideal customer thinking here? "Whoa, I just wanted a taco and now THIS? Aw-fuckin-RIGHT!! I'll take the Lewinsky [snort] with no sour cream if you know what I mean!"

According to my lovely and perceptive wife who went there this afternoon, the crew's interest in saying "Welcome to Moe's" managed to sound more like "I want to kill myself". Well put. There's nothing like a stinging corporate mandate to get the morale up. I'd do it like a zombie too, both for myself and for whatever customers felt that something was extremely wrong with this entire scenario, which when you go to Moe's, there undoubtably is: "Welcome to BRRAAAINS!!"

P.S. If you're from Moe's corporate and reading this post that tells people how shitty your company is, I can be bribed to remove it, but not with gift certificates.

posted by dale @ 9:36 PM