Its 9pm you are driving through a small town ANYWHERE, over a mile you see these SIGNS for food- where do you stop?

At 9pm no food is safe for me. I would be up all night with horrible indigestion. Let's say I was still in my 20s though, I would probably just eat a burger.

I find it's really hard to fuck up a simple burger. Even something like McDonald's is at least edible. Bad pizzas are awful and a bad taco will make the rest of your drive terrible.

@creepingdeath0: There's also more of a bad pizza to eat if you feel obligated to eat all of whatever you buy

I'm a vegetarian so I'd probably go with pizza because at the very least I can probably eat their plain pizza.

Chinese Food can be an okay bet (though there's a risk that sauces that seem vegetarian aren't) but I haven't seen a sign for "chop suey" since the 1980s, so the fact that the signage is literally decades out of date would make me suspicious of the quality. If it was any good wouldn't they be able to afford a new sign?

The gyro place might have falafal but they don't always. If it offered falafal I would probably go there instead of pizza.

Burger is the safe bet.

If it’s a diner, though, just drive through the hunger. Too many terrible greasy spoons out there to pick one out of a hat and not have regrets.

I'm a gambling man and I want to see just how bad the Chop Suey can be, death shits be damned.

See it is a real puzzler! Because any of the food could be a 'queasy" mistake. By saying 'Chop Suey' I might have dated the Chinese food place, but I wanted it to be generic as possible.

Its funny, I don't think my family has ordered Chop Suey, Lo Mein, or Egg Foo Young from a Chinese food place since 1973!!! We have had Chinese food monthly from 1969 to 2019, but that 1950s and 1960s style of food went off our orders a long time ago. It almost makes me want to get some again.

Burger is the safe bet. It's the easiest to disassemble and customize if you're wary of the finished product. I'm not disassembling a taco that mofo is getting eaten once I nab it.

Of all the choices, burgers are the safe bet. Especially in foreign countries. Just to get a taste of their interpretation of a burger. I am disappointed you don't have listed BBQ or fried chicken.

Having grown up in a small town, and having driven through many small towns in my life, the correct answer is Pizza. Now, you may ask why that is, and I will break it down going from least safe to safest.

Chop Suey - Never, and I mean NEVER, order Chinese in a small town unless you live in that town and know it's good. There's a reason this restaurant is in BFE and not a bigger city. Bad Chinese can be really, really, really bad.

Gyro - Hole in the wall Greek in a city can be very good. Hole in the wall Greek in a small town has a high likelihood of being really bad. Whether that is dried out meat, bad pitas, or terrible Tzatziki sauce.

Tacos - This one is tougher to get wrong, but a lot of small town places have stale taco shells. Also, they very easily make the meat poorly with either bad spice choices or overcooking.

Burgers - This is the second safest. It's tough to mess up a burger, because as long as it is cooked, you can douse it in ketchup and eat it. However, the danger here is how many small town burgers just drip in grease. This can ruin a burger, but it's still fairly safe.

Pizza - The safest option. Even a bad pizza is delicious, especially if you order safe toppings like cheese and pepperoni. The pepperoni is not likely to be house made, so it's pretty safe. If you order ground beef, it could fall in the same place as burgers above. Even if the marinara is not very good, it doesn't coat the pizza. You can overpower any pizza with Ranch or Buffalo sauce, but even the worst hole in the wall pizza is still good and the safest choice.

Hamburger was my go to, but there's a 2% chance that they're just gonna serve you a hamburger steak in gravy. Not sure I could handle that kind of disappointment so late in the evening.

@ginormous76: “even a bad pizza is delicious”

I submit to you Exhibit A:

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bombcast-32/pizza-pizza-is-good-pizza-1878986/

My standards are low. If the sign had Sims simlish language up or a rough pictogram of an animal, I would still stop and try it out. I like to pretend I have an iron stomach but time and time again I've paid for it but in the end I still haven't learned my lesson. Bring on the mystery soup and the chunks of unidentified meat.

Gotta go with burgers on this one.

"A single dish providing a balanced helping of nature's blessings: meat, grain, and vegetable. How could anyone hate such a magnificent thing?" - Code Talker

I prefer cheese on mine but I see where you're coming from C.T.

@mezmero: Fuck lettuce on a burger...tomato for days, though...I’m down for mushrooms, too.

Pizza is always the safe option. You CAN fuck it up but man you gotta really go hard at it to manage.

Burgers are a gamble. You either find the diamond in the rough diner or you find the same sad burger that every truck stop has.

In my head I know pizza is the safer bet, but my heart still would never give up on a chance to eat a taco.

Burger is actually my last choice out of all those options, but given the scenario it's the only safe bet.

I love gyro/doner/shawarma, but there's a reason pizza is the best food on earth...well actually there are multiple reasons, but one is that it's *very* hard to fuck up.

What the heck is GYRO supposed to mean?

@rebel_scum: I asked my wife about this thread. She agreed that the one true answer is burgers.

Gyros were a close second for her. I wouldn’t have thought about it this way, but as soon as she said gyros were number 2, I understood before she explained:

Who the fuck is going to run a gyro restaurant in the middle of some small town without knowing how to make gyros?

I like the logic, but I still probably wouldn’t trust it to guide me through a minefield of potential vomit.

I actually recently ate at a hole in the wall burger joint. Place was near deserted and it took way longer than it should have to get my order considering but the burger (egg and bacon) was on point. Burger is safest and sometimes you can find a real gem with burger joints.

I picked burgers because the sign is appropriately pluralized.

My question for random burger places is not how well they do their burgers but how they do with their Fries.

Curious where people are from because I have never in my 47 years of life seen a sign that said "Chop Suey".

Let see...Burger, Pizza, and Taco are definitely what I am picking between.

Base on what I had before Taco has the best batting average; as in the worst taco I had is still better than the worst pizza and worst burger I had...although that could be due to where I live. If this is a small town in anywhere I think I lean burger. I had bad pizza before, and it was quite terrible. Whereas worst burger is probably cold buns and dry meat...which some condiment and salt + pepper can hopefully alleviate, plus I also feel like a mom and pop burger joint also has the highest chance to be great.

The generic Gyro meat really doesn't do it for me, and assuming the worst I am guessing that's what I will be getting.

I rather go hungry than take my chance with the chop suey.

Based on that thread, I assume you are presenting that as evidence in favor of my argument.

You sir, have not visited enough small towns. It is far easier to run a restaurant in a small town than a big one. Two restaurants in my home town have been open at least as long as I have been alive and still in business. One is a bar and grill, so they make money off alcohol sales in addition to really mediocre food. The other just makes really mediocre food. It was the only place to "go out" within an hour drive that wasn't also a bar, so everyone goes there. A decade ago, the worst Chinese restaurant I have ever eaten at opened there. It's still doing good business, because again, choice is limited and if you've never (or very rarely) eaten Chinese, you would think it was good.

Anything but a burger joint, because burgers are boring as hell.

@ginormous76: I grew up without good pizza, but really good Chinese.

I moved out of my parents’ place and got an apartment in an Italian neighborhood. The local Chinese place didn’t serve rice, instead they had dinner rolls.

I ordered delivery, so it was a bit of a shock. I assume if I had gone there myself, I’d have seen some warning signs.

@ginormous76: Eh, there are handful of passionate folks without taste buds in there, but even then, there are a lot of qualifiers like “at 3am,” “consistency over quality,” and some references to self-loathing.

I'm always a little shocked at people I meet who have never had Chinese food. Its rare, but I have meet people who have NEVER had take-out or dine-in Chinese food. The other shocks is to explain that unlike most restaurants we eat "family style". Ex: Everyone around that table makes a dish choice, spreading out the types of meats, vegetable, and spiciness of the dishes. We are not sticklers, if someone wants to order two types of pork dish...fine...more the merrier. We drink ice water or jasmine tea, we never drink soda. And, yeah, we are the weirdos who ask for chop-sticks.

The above is not right or wrong, it just how my family does it. I have been to Chinese take-out that served things other than rice..always an interesting experience...I don't think I have had dinner rolls.

@monkeyking1969: It was run by a bunch of Italian guys in Rhode Island...it was really weird.

I guess I am starving. I avoid hole-in-the-wall/mom & pop places, unless they have been vetted by someone I trust.

Interesting poll! I'd back burgers myself, but from a food safety/likelihood to kill me, Pizza probably the safest bet right? No way in hell I'm eating Gyros in some backwater.

I've had bad versions of all these dishes around the world, but I would say that even weird and bad pizza is usually pretty edible.

Also I'm surprised by how much support burgers have. There's been quite a few occasions that I've not eaten the burger I bought because it tasted gross or was cold or had some other funk fouling it up.

Yeah, my last choice would be burger. So much on that plate can be wrong. A typical burger is the sandwich, fries, and a maybe pickle spear, right. Ninety percent of the time with a "burger" that will be teh bun, patty, lettuce, tomtos, maybe some raw onions. Well...SO MUCH can go wrong. Fries are a crapshoot, limp old fries are meal buzz-kill. That pickle spear unless they make their own pickles is likely to be trash. The lettuce, tomatoes, onions are hardly ever great, yet at their worse they are just pure e-coli. A burger is the one thing on the list that is very likely to have raw vegetables on it.

What I want to choose: gyro

What I'd probably choose: burger

Burgers can be damp and greasy and gross, and fries can be rubbery or soft or burnt. Pizza can be the *very* greasy variety thay leaves your hand dripping. Gyros are maybe too dry. But I feel like a taco is hard to fuck up too badly. And you get free chips. Maybe you could have food poisoning or something from the meat, but that basically never happens to me.

The burger place XD

You can probably tell if a pizzas been undercooked enough to not kill the germs of the grumpy divorced dads hands who made it

I think after seeing Daym Drops content, I am rethinking about how "bad" that bad can be.

So, maybe, Bad Chinese food is the worst

Burgers never let me down.

Gyro all the way. We don't really have anything like that or chop suey readily available where I live though, so realistically I'd probably go with burgers.