Skip to main content
As far back as I can remember, Applebee's has been the butt of jokes. This is somewhat unavoidable when an international chain adopts the catchphrase "Eatin' good in the neighborhood" but there are always seemed to be something nastier about the criticism. Applebee's never seemed demonstrably worse than say Chili's or Red Robin or TGI Friday's. Yet my friends and assorted acquaintances held a special disdain for Applebee's. To its credit, the the neighborhood dining establishment has gone out of its way to court the young, hip millennial crowd… which mostly opened itself up to more jokes.
Mean-spirited jokes and derision notwithstanding, I ventured forth to my neighborhood Applebee’s (5.6 miles away) to try out the new menu aggressively targeted to appeal to my people. The interior remained as generic-y sit-down chain as I remember, with local sports stuff lining the walls. The Aloha jersey—I believe Thomas Tyner’s—was a nice local touch, even the Beaverton Beaver in me is still trying to wrap my head around Aloha ever succeeding in football. Darius Miles being the most prominent player in the Trailblazers section of the wall mural felt like a nice deep cut.
Once you get past the appetizers being called “Apps” and the “Hand-helds” subsection, the menu is actually quite a bit more interesting than I remember, too. A square ciabatta roll, fried and battered jalapeños and onions and most perplexing, a mixture of American and “craft beer” cheese, might seem like an odd way to construct a Philly cheesesteak, but it all worked. Crisp house chips are a definite upgrade over french fries. And, hey, there’s a burger with hashbrowns and an egg on it because millennials like brunch, right?
The most interesting thing to me, however, was the s’more ($4) I found on the back of the menu. As with any popular camping food, the s’more is a simple, timeless, unambitious, boring yet functional recipe. But Applebee’s had some fun with it. The marshmallows are still there, the melted chocolate has been replaced with a chocolate sauce, and the graham crackers have been replaced by vastly superior churros. Instead of being pressed together into a crude sandwich, the ring-shaped churros are served on the side with the marshmallows floating atop the chocolate.
The clump of molten, fused marshmallows proved a frustration as I tried to combine the three ingredients. Scooping up marshmallows with my chocolatey churro was an all-or-nothing operation. Which was okay as the churros and chocolate were a solid combination on their own, perhaps better without the puffy white sugar globs anyways. Where the marshmallow is the key to original s’more triad, it feels like the odd man out once Applebee’s decided to add cinnamon sugar to the mixture. Instead of getting into an ontological discussion about what a s’more is, I’ll just say that this is an improvement over all the s’mores I’ve consumed in my 27 years of camping only when school made me.
And this gets into the very nature of what Applebee’s is these days. It was never as terrible as many viewed it—none of the much-derided, tacky ’90s chains ever truly were. It’ll never actually be your neighborhood hangout. For those of us who live or grew up in the suburbs where Applebee’s has found success, “neighborhood” is a nebulous concept anyways. Applebee’s is trying to be better these days. It’s added some interesting new items to the menu, and most of them aren’t bad. Some are even good.
Willamette Week