At the risk of sounding like an ad I’m kind of startled at how not-terrible Little Caesars is for the price. A lot of food and a completely reasonable tasting and baked pie for stupid cheap when compared to almost everything else.
"$5, hot and ready."
"Is it good?"
"It's HOT and it's READY."
Literally all you can eat + pasta. Dirt cheap. If you're the 'one-meal-a-day' type, is there a cheaper option?
Not sure when they switched to extreme value focus.
They're also a good example of this, actually. They'd held their $5 price point for a long time but had gradually been cutting toppings until they were comically bare. Then they introduced a $6 "extra toppings" (or something, I don't recall the way they phrased it) pie that just had the same amount the normal ones used to.
Post-Covid I'm pretty sure the sad-pie price is up to $6, and the actually-has-toppings edition is $7.
That kinda goes for most things, really.
I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars and Star Trek.
But I fully realize that Bladerunner is astronomically better than either of them.
And none of those masterpiees keep me from fully enjoying smutty trash like Space Truckers, or even any of Philip K Dick's horrible random short stories.
Unedited tosh most of it but it does a job !
Someone who gets enjoyment out of a $5 pizza is in an objectively better position than someone who can only get enjoyment out of a $10 pizza. Sorry!
I'm not that way with wine and beer. I don't like bad wine or beer at all. I will turn it down or just drink it to be polite, not enjoying it a bit.
I think the difference is I never liked bad wine or beer, while I started out liking bad pizza and bad coffee before I learned what the good stuff tasted like. So, you might be safe.
[EDIT] Reflecting more on this, part of it may be that I regard bad coffee and bad pizza as pretty much totally different things from good varieties of the same—I just happen to like both. I don't really consider one a substitute for the other, I guess. Bad coffee is just coffee-flavored... but I like coffee flavor! Good coffee has all kinds of flavors going on. If you're interested in getting into that, I recommend finding a highly-regarded local roaster doing a tasting event—I personally find it much easier to get into a new flavor-related thing, such that I can start to understand it and pick out various notes, if I can do side-by-side tastings of various examples of the thing, all in a short span.
It's similar with beer and wine, I just happen not to like "beer-flavored" or "wine-flavored", the way I do like coffee-flavored coffee or find greasy bread smeared with salty cheese and tomato sauce satisfying even if it's pretty awful—get me the nice stuff that has more going on and I'm in heaven, though.
Edit: Agreeing with another commenter in this thread that some coffees at gas stations are truly awful and are immediately thrown away. Those aren't legit coffee though, and don't count toward what I said above.
It has ruined the cheap (Robusta) coffee for me. There are diners that make a great medium roast cup and use Arabica beans.
But the good coffee sure is good, and it’s fun to get familiar with the varieties.
Until my early mid 20s I never like coffee at all. Then I tried double cream and sugar coffee, then milky cappuccinos, then massive syrupy sweet Starbucks.
After years of "acclimatizing" I thought I'd branch out. I bought a grinder, fresh coffee beans, a scale, French Press, 16:1 ratio. I went black and never went back.
Coffee made well from fresh beans freshly ground has a sweetness a caramel like after-taste. Very little bitterness (comes from brewing too long) and can surprise even those who pile on milk and sugar or even salt to mask its bitterness.
There's a time and place for everything, and even the snobbiest of us food snobs can appreciate the time and place for the likes of Little Ceasars, Costco Pizza, Wafflehouse, et al.
Which means it's good drunk food available when the drunks want to eat.
I live 1,000 miles away from the nearest one, but I sure did love a late Saturday night at Waffle House when I lived in the south.
Where I am now, a "109 spicy special,"[0] hot off the grill, a single serving bag of nacho cheese Doritos and Pepsi does the job too.
Gone is the 90s yellow a la carte one. Gone even is the replacement that at least kept the classics on the back.
Now it's $8+ meals, with token hashbrown options at the bottom.
Used to be, you could get a perfectly serviceable meal there for under-$6. E.g. double hashbrowns ($3) + single hamburger ($1) + drink ($1.5).
Now the closest thing to the same meal is double the price. Double hashbrown $5. Single hamburger doesn't exist, and hamburgers start at $6.
His career as a chef was at a brasserie serving brasserie fare which is basically like working at a French diner, not necessarily anything that's going to educate your palate.
Again, not criticizing him, I'm actually envious, I wish I could be happy eating mediocre food, my life would be much simpler.
Sometimes a cheap-ass $5 meal really does satisfy people far more than a Michelin star restaurant. Humble bragging about only being able to enjoy non-normie food sounds silly and unrefined, really.
I do think as a chef learning haute cuisine is learning useful things about cooking and what makes some bread better than other bread, and what consistency a sauce should have and how to achieve it.