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tesg's guide to big chain road food consumption
CHAIN -- Shari's The "family restaurant" concept is pretty basic across the board, be it at Village Inn, Perkins, IHOP, JB's, or countless others. Breakfast, some sandwiches, a single-page token dinner menu that's awful, and pies pies pies. Push the pies. Yum. Pies. Never tasting even close to as good as they look pies. Really bad pies. Shari's gimmick that made it special was their six-sided restaurant design, sunk-in, with great landscaping. The unique design meant more window booths. The interior overall had an intimate feel to it nobody else could compare to. The menu was straightforward but at the same time had some great signature items like Strawberry Lemonade and featured beautiful pictures of scenes around the Pacific Northwest (Shari's is based in Oregon). Shari's gave you lots of options for sides on most menu items like potato salad or cottage cheese instead of french fries. Shari's was great and seemingly always busy no matter what time of the day or night it was. Slogan really said it all..."Real People, Real Places, Real Food". The first Shari's opened by Ron and Sharon (Shari) Berquist in Hermiston, Oregon in 1978. The Berquists ran the chain for seven years. In 1989, the company was purchased by Larry Hatfield and John Elorriage, who sold the company in 1999 to Fairmont Capital, a California investment company. They sold the chain to another equity group in 2005. On the increasingly rare occasion Shari's opens a new lcoation, they're not building the signature structure of days gone by. They're building a crappy looking box that you could turn into a Carl's Jr overnight and nobody would notice the difference until you walked in the door and wondered why Shari's suddenly had a menu board. The menu went through radical changes after the 1999 sale, including the removal of optional sides in favor of a "you'll get this and LIKE it" approach. Most of my favorites went away. It got so bad that every time I was asked how I liked my food, I started saying I didn't because when I said I did, it came right off the menu. Guaranteed. I'm not alone in my complaining...The last time I stopped at my usual Shari's, I found the parking lot empty, a very unusual circumstance at 6:30am (they're usually packed). Yet the help took twice as long to do anything as they used to. They didn't seem to care anymore. Sad. If there's a positive, you can still get a Strawberry Lemonade. It pretty much begins and ends there for me anymore.
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