Food Court Food You Should Never Eat

For most of us, a day trip to the mall ends the same way. Once your shopping agenda has been met, it's hard to figure out what to do next. You've probably already thrown a few coins in the fountain by the elevators. You've checked the showtimes for the sketchy mall movie theater, and surreptitiously made faces at the toddlers riding the indoor carousel. Finally, it hits you: It's time to grab something to eat at the food court.

Hunger strikes nearly everyone at the mall, sooner or later. But the choices we make there are critically related to how we'll end up feeling for the rest of the day, whether we'll feel recharged my nutrients surging through our bloodstreams, or bloated, lethargic and mildly depressed as our overworked cardiovascular system tries in vain to figure out how to process a cheesesteak. Or maybe you'll just be angry that you wasted your hard-earned money on something that didn't taste half as good as you thought it would. The decision you make at the food court is important. We're here to help.

For pizza chains desperate to crack the food court puzzle, the solution seemed simple: Make pizza available, without making customers wait to have dough tossed around in the air, layered with cheese and toppings, and cooked in a high heat oven. After all, mall shoppers have a packed day of shopping for $200 stainless steel hazelnut cocoa machines at Williams-Sonoma ahead of them; they can't be expected to wait around while their fresh food cooks. Making a few pizzas ahead of time, keeping them warm, and selling them by the slice must have made a lot of sense.

The problem here is volume. If you're hitting the food court during peak mealtimes, these pizzas are turning over pretty quickly, and you're able to get a fresh-ish slice pretty quickly. But hit the mall in the mid-afternoon, and there's no telling how long those tepid slices of decaying meatball pizza have been congealing into an oily mass under the warmer. And no, pizza guy, putting that single sad slice back in the oven for 40 seconds before serving it isn't fooling anyone. If you're eating mall food court atrocities, the least you can do to love yourself is insist on eating food that's made to order.

There are few things finer in this life than a balanced, freshly-made, piping hot Philly cheesesteak: Those delicate tendrils of seasoned, thin-sliced ribeye steak, cut against the grain so that your teeth neatly shear through each bite, sautéed with a scattering of translucent, caramel-colored diced onions, all enrobed in a smooth layer of provolone or (even more ideally) Cheez Wiz, the disparate elements fusing the sandwich's filling into a singular mass of cheesy, fatty, greasy perfection. It's the vision of this platonic ideal that inspires us to try a food court cheesesteak every once in a while, and it's a mistake almost every time.

Where do we begin to enumerate the problems? Bland, sub-grade, unseasoned meat that pulls out of the sandwich in big pieces, searing steak-shaped welts onto your unsuspecting chin. Big strings of over (or under) cooked, bitter onions. An application of cheese that amounts to little more than a gesture, perched sadly and half-melted on top of the sandwich's other ingredients, served on a roll that was delivered somewhere between six and 60 days ago. Food court cheesesteaks never live up to the promise of the versions sold in Philadelphia (or even at your favorite sandwich shop), and for that reason, they earn a "pass" from us.

Corn dogs address a problem that doesn't exist; that is, how to translate the full-service, sit-down luxury experience of "eating a hot dog" into a more portable snack that can be eaten on the run. That's why so many corn dog restaurants have to employ teenagers in outlandishly tall, colorful hats; they're trying to distract you from the fact that they sell a product that has no reason to exist.

Sigh. Okay, we understand how you can make the case for battering and frying a hot dog in cornbread, and then serving it on a stick, since it's been scientifically proven that any food eaten from a stick is at least 140 percent more awesome. But there's no excuse for food court corn dogs to be as bad as they are. Whether it's old, sour, bitter fry oil, under-cooked batter that's still wet and raw in the middle, or using the lowest possible quality hot dogs legally allowed to be sold for human consumption, a corn dog is almost always a high-calorie "snack" that will leave you unsatisfied, a little bit queasy, and craving a real meal within the hour.

So far in this rundown, we've taken great pains and gone to frankly admirable lengths to avoid being critical of specific brands. But in this instance, we have to make an exception, because DIPPIN' DOTS ARE AN ABOMINATION THAT EXISTS IN STRICT DEFIANCE OF GOD'S WILL.

For the blissfully uninitiated, Dippin' Dots has promised since its invention in the 1980s to be "the ice cream of the future," which is a slogan predicated on the idea that in the future, ice cream is basically terrible. Instead of the cool, creamy treat that Americans have loved for generations, in the future, ice cream base will be flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen into tiny spherical beads that are guaranteed by their very design to give you an instantly crippling ice cream headache, while being neither "delicious" nor "fun to eat" nor by definition even really "ice cream." Devoid of richness, flavor, or any of the other elements that make us want ice cream in the first place, the Dippin' Dots kiosk is definitely one place to skip on any trip to the mall.

Smoothies are arguably one of the healthier choices for a quick, satisfying snack at the mall food court. Sure, many of them tend to be higher in calories and sugar than one might expect from simple combinations of fruit, vegetables, juice, and dairy. But at least they're natural, right?

The trouble is that because the local wheatgrass whirlers have to compete with the sights and smells of the shops around them, each one selling iced chocolate chip cookies the size of trash can lids and tractor tire-sized mountains of cinnamon roll dough and dripping frosting, many of the so-called "healthy" smoothie shops have been augmenting their offerings with some decidedly unhealthy add-ins. Because sure, strawberries and yogurt may make a good smoothie. But you know what makes it even better? Adding in a scoop of peanut butter, some dark chocolate protein powder, a drizzle of caramel, an entire Butterfinger, 40 marshmallows, and some rendered animal fat. Before you know it, your "healthy" snack can clock in at 1800 calories, and leave you feeling sluggish and lethargic for the rest of the day.

Pre-made sandwiches are a bummer. Overall quality is almost always an issue, with ingredients including soggy, limp, brown lettuce, mealy slices of colorless tomatoes, dried-out pickles, and cheese that has liquefied and fused into the surface of a few lifeless grey slices of meat that could have come from basically any animal, served on insipid slabs of wet, chewy bread. But our biggest objection to the pre-made sandwich isn't even necessarily one of quality; it's the absence of choice.

Sandwich enthusiasts (and the marketing gurus at Subway or Quiznos) know that a major part of the appeal of a sandwich lies in its customizability. We don't want to eat what someone ELSE has chosen to put on our sandwich; we want the freedom to add black olives, or pickled jalapeños, or an extra scoop of tuna. We want chipotle peppercorn sauces and six different options for bread and pepperjack cheese. Or none of that, at all. And in this day and age, in THIS MALL FOOD COURT, that's our right and our privilege and our expectation. Because this is America, we're shopping, we're hungry, and gosh darn it, honey mustard is gross.