It's all over the news: IHOP has agreed to acquire Applebee's, the troubled behemoth bar and grill franchisor, for $2.1 billion in cash.

Now, I was never a big fan of Applebee's in the first place - I often quip it's the only restaurant that has less cooks on its line than it does microwaves - but with this IHOP deal in the offing, I don't foresee an improvement of the real issue at hand.

I'm not talking about the Singing Geezers, the famously bad interpreters of famously overplayed classic rock ditties featured in Applebee's ads (now on their way out thanks to a recent agency shift); or even the number of locations, which is staggering (1,943 in 49 states, 16 foreign countries and one territory): the crux of the Applebee's crisis is their abysmal food quality.

At such a pivotal era in the company's history, perhaps a little review of the Applebee's philosophy would prove helpful in interpreting the current issues at hand:

Once upon a time, the Applebee's business model worked like a song (yes, maybe even a classic rock song): open outlets in little hamlets that didn't have a "neighborhood bar and grill"; serve clunky, crappy cuisine - and collect the cash. For quite some time, there was lots of it (money and crap, which seem to go hand in hand here); if you're the only game in town, you can pretty much do what you want, and no one is going to complain about the food quality. Time, however, is a cruel mistress, and the same dance of decrepitude that doomed those damn geezer songs allows rivals with slightly superior quality like TGI Friday's (where they actually hand-bread your chicken fingers) and Chili's (progeny of dinner house maven Norman Brinker) to encroach on your territory.

People become more erudite and all of a sudden notice the brown specks on the lettuce and the fajita dough fossilized by one of your 1,468 microwaves on premises. What to do? Call in Tyler Florence, Food Network refugee and ex-restaurateur in need of bagfuls of dough (the green kind) to finance his new dining concept in New York City.

Ty, as we'll call him, their new spokesperson, isn't going to help: as Nation's Restaurant News was quick to observe, the presence of a celebrity chef in a TV spot does not guarantee his spiritual presence in the kitchen of your local outlet. The culinary expertise of a slipshod operation like IHOP, subject of myriad Dateline NBC exposes and even a MySpace titled simply, "ihopsucks", isn't going to help, either.

Applebee's needs an insurgence of money - money that IHOP, which plans to finance the acquisition through guarantees on future royalties, and has, according to Bloomberg, about half the market capitalization of Applebee's - simply doesn't have. OSI's (better known as Outback Steakhouse & Co.) private buy-back may have been lead by mere mortals (its founders), but the operation is backed by a major investment firm with the available capital to spruce up ailing Outback locations. What is IHOP going to do to improve food quality and abet modernization of antiquated stores?

For the latter, they're doing nothing, since they're selling all the non-franchised stores. As for the former, I'm almost scared. Food quality at IHOP, a nearly all-franchise operation, is patently horrible outside of the morning daypart (and even then, it's no Brennan's). IHOP has consistently rated in Consumer Reports surveys as one of the poorest family restaurants in operation: last year, they scored only two points higher than Waffle House in the "Family Restaurants" category. Their official press release regarding the acquisition (see the cumbersome ihopapplebeesacquisition.com) may tout IHOP's tremendous "brand revitalization", but I'll tell you what's really inefficient, at least from the perspective of an outside investor: one franchisor that specializes in crappy breakfast, buying another franchisor that specializes in crappy dinner.

Now we can eat crappy food all day long while dueling banjos serenade us with "Sweet Home Alabama" and ol' Ty tries to teach a seventeen year-old line cook how to make breakfast quesadillas with bagged, frozen chicken strips, canned salsa and a really, really powerful microwave (or maybe even all 1,468 at once).

Does this sound attractive to you? Exactly. Does the idea of your "neighborhood bar and grill" being managed by ghetto IHOP seem attractive to you? Exactly. Is this going to encourage you to go in and spend money, which is what IHOP needs you to do to pay for this exercise in arrogance?

Exactly.

Above: IHOP CEO Julia Stewart, who started in the restaurant business as a waitress, is now proverbially spitting on all of our food with the acquisition of insipid bar and grille Applebee's.