The Food That The Chili's Baby Back Ribs Songwriter Has Ironically Never Eaten
You may not know Guy Bommarito, but you would have to have arrived here from another planet to not know at least one piece of his work. In 1995, Bommarito — then the executive creative director at GSD&M, an advertising agency in Austin, Texas — created what just might be the catchiest commercial jingle ever written. The jingle is the now-iconic ad for Chili's baby back ribs, shown here in a 2017 YouTube video. In 2017, Bommarito told Vice he wrote the jingle "in, like, five minutes" in a quick attempt to redeem GSD&M, which had earlier done a Chili's ad campaign that bombed to the point the company was ready to fire the advertising agency.
Certainly, you'd expect the man who created this catchy celebration of a plate of barbecued baby back ribs to be a great fan of digging into a rack of sauce-slathered pork and bones, maybe even indecorously but enjoyably licking the tantalizing sauce off his fingers. But in Bommarito's case, nothing could be further from the truth.
Why start now?
In the 2017 Vice interview, Guy Bommarito shared the surprising fact that while he had eaten ribs, and guessed he'd probably even had baby back ribs, he had never eaten Chili's baby back ribs. In a 2015 appearance on the now-defunct "Great Big Story" series (via YouTube), conducted in a Chili's restaurant, Bommarito (shown above) had gone even further, politely declining a plate of baby back ribs offered to him during videotaping of the jingle's story. "You know, I haven't eaten one," he said. "Why start now?" Ironically. he did not want his Chili's baby back ribs.
That sounds almost like the opposite of Walker Hayes, whose hit country song "Fancy Like" basically became Applebee's anthem. Hayes ate at the restaurant as a child, and his family treated it like a kind of fancy meal (via the LA Times). He even spent three hours chatting about life experiences with co-writers before crafting "Fancy Like." He wasn't trying to boost Applebee's sales. (In fact, the track also name-checks Maybelline, Wendy's, and Victoria's Secret.) Bommarito, on the other hand, wasn't trying to turn memories into music but rather music into rib sales. "The whole thing was kind of this fluke that happened because restaurants love having music over food, 'bite and smile' kind of stuff, the way that Las Vegas loves slot machines," he explained to Vice.