Skyline Chili Owner Has the Funniest Goddamn Quotes About Skyline

Generally, it’s the job of a restaurateur to talk about how great their product is in order to entice customers. If you own a Skyline Chili franchise, however, that’s apparently impossible, because some lies are just too huge for the human brain to even attempt to propagate.

Mark Keilholz is a Skyline Chili franchise owner in Dayton, Ohio, which is great, because it’s always good to attach a name to the food equivalent of a war criminal. He’s also apparently really, really grumpy about the FDA forcing him to put calorie counts on Skyline’s menu (which they’re requiring pretty much everywhere as part of the ACA), but really, who gives a shit about that? Honestly, I wouldn’t have bothered even writing about this if Keilholz’s quotes about his own pride and joy restaurant weren’t so goddamned funny.

It should be obvious from looking at the above picture that we’re talking about something any unbiased observer can see is hot diarrhea. I mean, look at that thing. It looks like someone took a poop on the world’s most depressing plate of spaghetti, then tried to cover up what they did by emptying an entire bag of industrial-grade shredded cheeselike product on top of it. That image of technically-encheesened fecal pasta is their honest effort to make their product look as appealing as humanly possible, and that was the best they could do. They had one job, and you can’t even blame them for failing at it. Given this fact, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that even franchise owners can’t bring themselves to describe the food as “good.”

For instance, here’s Keilholz on his regulars:

“Most of my customers never look at a menu,” says Keilholz, 65, owner of a Skyline Chili franchise in Dayton, Ohio. “They’ve been coming in for years. They know exactly what they want.”

Is there a sadder theoretical existence than knowing Skyline’s menu so well that that you never even have to consider which variety of sloppy discharge might bring you the least amount of pain? I submit that there is not.

Keilholz on how someone develops an affinity for Skyline:

“They come for the atmosphere,” Keilholz said. “They come because when you grow up around here, sooner or later your parents will drag you to Skyline and you learn at a young age to just love it.”

First of all, way to make Southern Ohio sound like the worst place in America.* More importantly, though, that’s the perfect quote about Skyline: if you grow up in that area, you will learn to eat Skyline and you will like it, dammit. Mark Keilholz’s answer to the simple question “is your product delicious?” could be roughly summed up as “well, if you eat enough of it, sooner or later your taste buds wave the white flag.” This isn’t Keilholz’s fault; not even Ted Cruz could claim Skyline Chili was delicious with a straight face.

Fortunately, we’re not done. Keilholz manages to top himself at the end:

Keilholz sees no need for calorie labels. He knows exactly what goes into each greasy, cheesy dish.”I still eat the chili every day,” he says. “I’m hanging in there. The doctor says I’m okay.”

“I am probably surviving exposure to my restaurant’s food.” Well, then! Sounds like a ringing endorsement!

* For the record, there’s no way it’s in the running as long as Oklahoma exists.