There is a lot of folklore about my work and some very strange interpretations of what various viewers see in my murals. Always a pleasure to have my work analyzed, interpreted and misinterpreted.

Thank you for the interest AB

Thanks for the information and for stopping by!

One thing I always wanted to know when I worked there — is the main face you put up there (a girl’s face, in our case) someone you actually saw in town, or is it just kind of a composite / original creation?

I heard a lot of folklore about it, but thought it would be nice to know straight from the horse’s mouth.

Yes the murals are painted in my studio here in Toronto, Canada. It is one continuous piece of canvas (that one I think was approximately 5′X42′) that is rolled up on a large tube, not unlike a giant roll of wall paper. It is then shipped to site and I install it.
So far I have done over 225 o’Charley’s murals. Website: Blincstudios.com AB

They get some company in Canada to do the murals — they send down their people to go around the community and take pictures of different things, and then they paint a mural and have the panels shipped in. It’s *supposed* to sort of “localize” the restaurant.

In the first year I worked there, I absolutely adored the food. It was very good quality, and I really stood behind the product when I would sell it to people. At some point though, the corporate opinion was that O’Charley’s needed to be more “family oriented”, so they changed the menu around, introduced low-dollar (low-quality) items, and told us to start singing at birthdays. That last part was the real killer for me… Part of the reason I (and even some of my patrons) liked coming to O’Charleys was because you *DIDN’T* have to hear any of those god-awful, half-assed birthday songs. “Just give me my damn chocolate cake and let me get back to my conversation, already!”

I will say that my memory of eating at the original, non chainified O’Charley’s across from Vanderbilt University is an entirely positive one, and so perhaps I am willing to give it more leeway than I would be otherwise.

Also, I can’t believe that no one mentioned the scary mural up on the wall above the kitchen.

Also — O’Charley’s is a terrific case example of why a restaurant with no affirmative stance on veg*n menu offerings is a bad choice for vegans: Typically, steakhouse restaurants like these nickel and dime the small sale items to encourage people to buy the medium-to-big ticket items (saves on food cost and increases check averages that way). The salad Melissa received was definitely NOT worth $4 — but if I had gotten an entree, I could have “added on” the exact same salad for only $2.49. That’s the rub.

Restaurants seem to assume that if a guest doesn’t want meat, they will just ask it to be left off — the problem is that either (a) there are no good substitutes to keep the meal nutritional, or (b) we end up overpaying since the substitute is worth less than the meat that was originally on the salad (this visit to O’Charley’s would be a “b” case).

Some restaurants, such as Chili’s offer some “meat substitute” items, which are terrific because we can have them substitute THAT for the meat items; the restaurant saves on food cost (since I bet anything that a black bean burger is cheaper than a chicken breast of equal volume), but I don’t get bilked on food value.

The salad I got, the California Chicken Salad, was very good, however. But I did not feel the dining experience was worth the $39.40 we spent on it.