Restaurant Review: Wonder

I don't normally do reviews on the site. Well, I do (example, example, example), but they're more when I have something specific in mind. Today's review is no exception as we look at a restaurant chain as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism and everything wrong with how current large-scale systems simply do not respect their consumers and treat them more akin to mindless cattle than individuals.

Pictured: By the time this post happened, I'd already accidentally eaten here on multiple occasions.

The story begins a little over two years ago when my partner and I needed to order dinner in for some reason. When we do order out, we try to get cuisines that we cannot cook super easily. We chose a barbecue joint nearby and went along with our evenings. However, when the food showed up, we found it strange that the bag and containers were aggressively branded with "Wonder" packaging. This would prove to be the beginning of a corporate/individual relationship that, if the other person wasn't a corporation, would probably be a crime of some kind. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The food? Meh. I stand my description of the food tasting "fake". Like I knew it had nutritional value and calories, but it didn't taste like food. It was more an approximation of what the meal was supposed to be rather than... you know... actually being food. It was edible (and we did finish it so as to not waste food), but only in the most technical sense.

Pictured: Getting a little ahead of myself.

There are plenty of awful restaurants in the world. This is hardly newsworthy. Heck, I'm sure there are a ton of overly corporate restaurants who have the exact same issue with their food being aggressively average (the tragedy of Lilly Flannigans in Babylon, NY comes to mind; if you know you know). But one bad meal is not why I decided to write this. There are plenty of people who do that and I'm not one to follow the crowd.

So why am I going out of my way to write this review? Well, everything that happened after. After our bad experience, we decided that we simply would not eat from this establishment again. As you can tell from the images so far, that would prove to not happen (and not because we changed our minds).

I've lost track of how many times I've thought we finally figured out how to avoid this restaurant and it not working. First, we noticed that several "restaurants" did indeed list "by Wonder" in their name, so we thought it would be as easy as just... not picking one of those. This would prove to not work as we discovered that there are a number of "restaurants" that do not give the same disclaimer. Then we started a list of Wonder restaurants so we knew not to eat at them. Unfortunately, our list was apparently not complete. And we still haven't managed to find a true foolproof way to avoid this restaurant that doesn't take more energy than would defeat the purpose of not having them be a part of our lives.

Pictured: The one that opened a few blocks away from me. yay.

The decision to not eat from this establishment should have been easy to enforce. Indeed, part of the whole tacit social agreement to allow capitalism to function is buttressed by the assumption of consumer choice and freedom. The agreement, as I understand it, is that corporations are free to advertise and make themselves appear as tantalizing as possible. In return, consumers are allowed to choose what product they would like from everyone in the space, from the small mom-and-pop shops to the largest conglomerates.

But as we all know too well, letting well enough alone isn't exactly Corporate America's strong suit. The problem starts to arise when companies take active steps to take that choice away. Here, I truly feel that my decision to choose from whom I get my meals has been infringed on. This is deeply troubling and does not bode well for the future.

Sure, I could look up every address of every restaurant I'm considering ordering from to ensure that they don't have certain addresses. But, given the number of addresses in play here and that new ones are being opened all the time, I don't even think this form of control would work 100% of the time. I truly feel doomed to eventually have a meal from people I have decided with my family we do NOT wish to have a meal from.

Pictured: The horrors persist.

This is the dystopia. Handle yourselves accordingly.