FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

The Meme Battle Between Outback Steakhouse and Texas Roadhouse Is a Sign of End Times

How are we ever going to explain this to our grandchildren?
Photos via Flickr user Mike Mozart

Earlier this morning, I swear I heard an analyst on CNN pronounce the word ‘memes’ as ‘mims’ and I thought that things couldn’t get worse for that widely circulated photo of Kermit the Frog sipping tea, but here we are. Because someone has clearly decided that restaurants, fast food chains, and even MoonPies should have a capital-V Voice on social media, we have all been forced to endure something even more painful than a middle-aged woman talking about Facebook ‘mims’: Your granddad’s two favorite steakhouses are currently trying to burn each other on Twitter.

Advertisement

Jack Wagner—photographer, director, and memelord at @versace_tamagotchi—may have best esummarized the online slapfight currently brewing between Outback Steakhouse and Texas Roadhouse. “Alright folks they had a good run, but i think were gunna have to pack it up and call off the whole ‘memes’ thing,” he said, which seems logical now that a moderately priced steakhouse is responding to another moderately steakhouse with the Impact font and the Savage Patrick picture.

This entire thing seems to have started with another Spongebob Squarepants meme, when Daisy Hilborn tweeted a comparison between the two restaurants, assigning the Texas Roadhouse logo to the Krusty Krab, while pasting Outback’s signage on Sheldon Plankton’s far inferior Chum Bucket. (Parents, how the fuck are you supposed to explain 2018 to your children?) Texas Roadhouse responded by retweeting Hilborn and adding “We will not comment on this, but we will just leave this here…”

Ooooh shit, it’s apparently on, because Outback responded with Patrick the starfish and the comment “When you see Texas Roadhouse try to throw shade, but they’re too scared to @-you.” It devolved from there, as the two chains traded jabs about whether Outback’s steaks are dry and whether Texas Roadhouse naming an entree “Road Kill” is indicative of its quality. (It’s worth mentioning that Longhorn Steakhouse briefly appeared in the replies to Hilborn’s original tweet, but then ghosted, whether because it didn’t have anything else to add or because it wanted to maintain some of its flame-grilled dignity).

So this is where we are, almost four months into what might be the stupidest year in human history. Our 71-year-old president is threatening to beat the shit out of our 75-year-old former vice-president, and two steakhouses are using screenshots from a cartoon to battle each other online. Forget calling off “the whole memes” thing: Now might be a good time just to catapult this entire planet into the sun.