Chuck E. Cheese & Applebee's are catfishing local food lovers
Issue 154: His full name is Charles Entertainment Cheese. Let us never forget.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter. (If you’re new, thanks! We send around links every weekday to something newsworthy or just plain bananas in the food world.)
Read yesterday’s dispatch: Why it's so tough to get produce from farms to food banks
If you’ve been browsing the vast expanses of delivery apps like Grubhub lately, you may have noticed a new place pop up in your neighborhood: Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings. I’m here to tell you that this might not be a local eatery, but rather Chuck E. Cheese in disguise. Yes, that Chuck E. Cheese. A classic catfish, luring us toward love by means of a fictional online persona.
For those who have scrubbed the weird Chuck E. Cheese animatronic robot band from their memory (oh, how I envy you), let me remind you: Pasqually P. Pieplate (yep) is the allegedly human drummer slash Neapolitan pizza chef of Chuck E. Cheese lore. A reddit user in Philadelphia discovered this scheme when she ordered pizza on Grubhub from “Pasqually’s,” only to find it had actually come from Chuck E. Cheese. (This is made even weirder by the fact that apparently there is a real, non-Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurant called Pasqually’s in West Philly).
(photo courtesy VICE. Pasqually is on the far right.)
This happened about a month ago, but it’s worth paying attention to today because, it turns out, our mouse Charles isn’t the only one pulling these shenanigans. Yesterday, we learned that Applebee’s, which I similarly can’t imagine would be anyone’s first choice (or… maybe is the perfect mood to match a global pandemic??), is pretending to be called “Neighborhood Wings.” A truly perfect nondescript name, if a nefarious one. It’s the “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids” meme of chain restaurants. (For reference:)
Sublime.
But here’s the thing: I submit to you that this is not just silly; it’s actively destructive. As we know, local restaurants are struggling to survive Covid-19. If you genuinely want Chuck E. Cheese pizza delivered to you, fine. I won’t judge you out loud. But if you’re trying to support your neighbors and are unwittingly lured away by a tricksterish corporation, that seems problematic to me.
So. Order from genuinely local restaurants. And while you’re at it, in the words of New Yorker writer Helen Rosner, “pick up the damn phone” instead of going through the apps, so your local favorites aren’t slammed with fees. Better for them — and better for you, because you won’t accidentally end up with Chuck E’s pizza.
Bonus link: Make sure you’re actually calling the restaurant’s direct line instead of the fake number Grubhub generates to make more money, because that’s a real thing they do. Lovely.
Before we go: an update in the Alison Roman fracas. (To catch you up to speed, in an recent interview, Alison Roman (a New York Times cooking columnist who had been insanely popular but criticized in some circles for whitewashing “ethnic” recipes) called out two women of color, Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, for commercializing their names as brands. It was an odd remark because Alison Roman seemed to be doing something similar — in fact, Teigen was supposed to executive-produce a new show Roman had in the works.)
Last night, per the Daily Beast, the New York Times put Alison Roman’s cooking column “on temporary leave,” which sparked some interesting reactions on Twitter that I’ll share here. This is not an exhaustive roundup; just remarks from smart people that are worth thinking about — about who the media gatekeepers are, who gets to be the judge of what reactions are “excessive,” etc.
OK, that’s all. See you tomorrow! Until we meet again, if you like this newsletter, please don’t keep the secret to yourself! I give you my permission to share it:
