London-based Bryce Elder, by day a contributor to the Financial Times, indulged his gastronomic proclivities in this new UK literary food quarterly. Scrutinizing the business model behind fast-food restaurants took financial savvy—but also a cast-iron stomach.
Consider the Big Mac. Ideally, you should do this by going out and buying one. I’m starting here because, among foodist types, the Big Mac tends to be wielded as an insult. It has become a staple payoff line to restaurant reviews worldwide: ‘We had to stop for a Big Mac on the way home.’ The writer means this as an insult—a criticism of miserly portions, cheffery and over-faff, presentation over content. It’s an answer to the unasked question, ‘where’s the beef?’ Except it isn’t.
Go buy a Big Mac. Please. Put aside your rounded views on globalisation and factory farming for as long as it takes to bite down without prejudice. Because, once you’re faced by the thing, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re quite pleasant. Squeeze-bottle mustard, mostly. A layer of carbon mulch from the double mince, a sweetish roll and some cool shredded lettuce. All the parts come together to form a plainness that’s comforting, familiar, contrite.
The Big Mac can be considered a shite food benchmark, the foundation stone on which a $75bn shite food empire was built. Rage against the McDonald’s Corporation if you must, but it’s hard to find any emotion for its signature product. It doesn’t fail because it aims extremely low, like all shite food should. Anyone wanting to preserve brainpower, like Einstein with his identical jackets, could resolve to eat three Happy Meals a day and never be troubled by another thought of food or hunger right up until the day of their myocardial infarction.
Which brings us to the first defence of shite food: posh food needs the corollary. A Big Mac is the opposite of everything people mean when using leaden phrases like ‘fine dining,’ with its onslaught of novelties, contrasts and tongue exercise. Stopping for a Big Mac after a foofed-up meal is obvious and rational; restaurants are like going on holiday while shite food is coming home.
I was thinking about hamburgers while in Café Rouge. In front of me was a croque au saumon fumé. It was weeping a cloudy liquid that congealed around the chips in a way that did not suggest dairy. This liquid might have been seeping from the white cheese analogue that capped two slices of untoasted white loaf. It might have come from the one clipped bread-shaped sheet of salmon. It might have come from the waiter. There was no way of knowing.
I phoned a friend who works in restaurants and asked: what’s gone wrong with my sandwich? ‘It’s cheap,’ he replied, somewhat condescendingly. ‘It’s made of the cheapest shit imaginable. It is, quite literally, a croquet of shit.’
I poked at the salmon, whose visible edge had turned the colour of a thunderstorm. Don’t tell me about cheap food, I said. A decade of unemployment and fecklessness had introduced me to every discount range in the supermarket, from water-bulked sausages to powdered curry and tins of pasta. Much of it was quite tasty. These pulps of cud, corn syrup and beetle juice had all been tooled to be some low pleasure—even if it was just one suppression of a gag reflex and the feeling of a weight in your stomach. They would not, to my recollection, ooze unidentifiable white grease onto my chips.
When a restaurant cannot match the satisfaction contained in a 29p tin of macaroni cheese, I said, something has gone wrong.
‘Think cheaper,’ replied my friend who works in restaurants. ‘Find the cheapest shit it’s legal to sell, then halve the price. Then halve it again and see what’s left.’
So that’s what I did. I set out to eat very, very badly.
Why is so much commercial catering so poor? Asking this question of hospitality types invariably brings up the 30 Per Cent Rule. It goes, the customer must pay at least three-and-a-bit times what the food has actually cost—so, if a salmon sandwich is £5 on the menu, the ingredients cannot total more than £1.50.
This rule of thumb is so broad and misshapen it could belong to a blind stonemason. Yet it appears to be the catering trade’s only guiding principle. The 30 Per Cent Rule defines what’s served while the more rigid costs, such as wages and rent, are more or less ignored. And so, if you want to make something cheaper, you look first at cutting the cost of ingredients.
This is a brutally stupid way to run a business. It’s as if there’s a widespread concern that, if a cook has to apply more than one pricing axiom, it will push out some other essential information and they’ll forget how to make gribiche.
So should the ungainly rule of profit margin really take all the blame for rubbish catering? I started testing the theory. I got hold of a foodservice catalogue from one of the big wholesalers and reverse engineered the worst things I ate.
To begin, I went back to Café Rouge and ordered a ‘steak baguette with oregano Dijon mayonnaise’ while scanning the catalogue. The first discovery was that you could indeed buy cheaper than retail basics—but not by much. The savings made by replacing meat and cheese with their bulk-bought industrial proxies could be measured in brass coins. Buying the ingredients I was eating from Tesco, for example, would have cost about five pence more than the lowest-grade wholesale I could find.
The steak, battleship grey, had a tendon running through it the size and tenderness of a SCART cable. The baguette was burnt.
Café Rouge is part of the Tragus group, which is owned by Blackstone, a very large New York private equity fund. Tragus operates 280 restaurants in the UK, and at the time of press was in talks to buy 80 more. There is an obvious multiplier effect to operating on such scale. Stack up all the pennies you could save by inflicting proxy meat on the customers each day and the annual total would be in the order of £500,000. Any financial director flexing the spreadsheet would, I’m sure, consider this a useful cut as they look to justify their annual bonus in the order of £500,000.
So, Chain restaurants are run by someone in the head office whose job is to plane down every cost. My sandwich is terrible because it was designed by an accountant. But for a smaller operator, a few penny savings should be insignificant against the value of repeat customers, which is why we should all love the smaller operators.
As explanations went, that one seemed rather too pat. It matched the Guardian-reading consensus, but didn’t sit well with my Big Mac benchmark. There was no option. I would have to keep eating.
I turned next to peer selection, curious to see what everyone else hates. One of the more popular customer review websites could, with a bit of manipulation, show a top ten of London restaurants by lowest average score. There were no major surprises: numbers one and three belonged to the Harvester chain, while number two was an Aberdeen Steak House on a notoriously tourist-trap street.
I’d been to Harvester a few months earlier. It was in a new-build shed on a town bypass in the east of Scotland, and would have been familiar territory for anyone inured to shopping in the deep-freeze aisle. The menu delivered nothing that could agitate, excite or confuse an eight-year-old—which was of course the point. We were all there for the daily-sterilised ball pit.
So I went to the Aberdeen Steak House.
Here’s where a good storyteller would subvert your expectations. I went intending to undercut decades of sneering jokes and lazy snobbishness aimed at this little chain, with its red felt banquettes and 40-year history of lurching between expansion and administration. I’d have liked to claim that the tourists brave enough to go off-guidebook of a Friday night and chance a nearly empty restaurant in Leicester Square have been getting a showcase of British quality and value we locals are too priggish to acknowledge.
It took one ten-ounce sirloin with Béarnaise to unravel all these hopes. It cost £22 without accompaniments and was like eating a truck driver’s forearm.
We all understand that food suffers perniciously from the law of diminishing returns. In common with CD players and fast cars, a move from ‘good’ to ‘better’ requires a multiple of price that far exceeds the gradient in quality. Almas caviar is five times the price of sevruga, yet delivers a qualitative improvement so slight that only connoisseurs can be convinced it even exists. What seems less understood is the opposite but equally pernicious effect at the other end of the scale. Swapping butter for non-dairy spreadable fat saves a fraction of a penny per serving, but there’s no-one on earth who can fail to notice the difference. These moves from ‘cheap’ to ‘cheapest’ save a restaurateur nearly nothing, but drop the customer off a cliff in terms of quality.
I checked the meats chapter in my wholesale catalogue. It suggested that, when marking up per sirloin, Aberdeen Steak House had probably tested the outer tolerance of the 30 Per Cent Rule—but not by much. Better meat at the same margin could have added a pound or two to the bill. Saving that pound or two would, I assume, have helped the manager hit a target pricing demographic on the business plan, with the opaque drawback that the waitress will never, never, never serve the same customer twice.
To be clear, the Aberdeen Steak House is not an example of shite food. Shite food is honest by definition. The Big Mac’s low expectations are built into its cardboard wrapper. But there can be nothing honest about a £22 sirloin or a £5 croque au saumon. They’re forgeries, imposters dressed up to look posh and stand egregious from the shite.
Equating ‘cheaper’ with ‘fake’ is a national disorder that, like many of our quirks, can be blamed on the war. There’s a plausible lineage between modern counterfeit catering and those wartime propaganda recipes that promised to turn ration-book scraps into a Sunday roast. Generations of make-do, you might argue, have left us resigned to accepting sow ears after ordering silk. Or that might all be bunk and, more likely, we just don’t complain enough.
Shite food rarely merits complaint and doesn’t require disguises. It aims so admirably low that there’s very little risk of failure to deliver. If we showed more appreciation for this kind of candour then perhaps we wouldn’t be served so much fourberie. It all comes back to having too little respect for shite.
Hang on though. What exactly has shite food done lately to merit our respect? To answer that, I was obliged to keep eating.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been working to classify adult food fussiness as a mental (and therefore insurable) disorder. In their interviews, a curious trend appeared: nearly everyone would eat breaded chicken sticks and French fries. Even the people who talked of apples and spaghetti as if they were acid and barbed wire could cope with a McChicken Sandwich Meal Deal.
There seemed as good a place as any to continue my investigation. I went back to McDonald’s.
Trying to describe a McChicken Sandwich makes the word ‘bland’ unavoidable. The taste is of mayonnaise between three textures of nothing. It’s heroically anonymous. If the Big Mac were Snow Patrol, the McChicken Sandwich would be a jazz-fusion covers album of Snow Patrol’s greatest hits.
KFC is basically the same, albeit with a Byzantine menu of leg and patty combinations that introduce tiny gradients of cayenne pepper into the scheme. Nando’s has less variation and costs a bit more because the lights are dimmer and you can drink beer. All of these are nondescript enough to fit the principle of Einstein’s jacket: this is food to forget even before you’ve finished chewing.
But from there, things deteriorated. I began visiting KFC clones in my area, places with names like Tennessee Friers Club and Krispy Fresh Chicken. Each incarnation had little to add to the basic formula, so chose to compete only on price. And, for every penny saved, the quality fell further down the cliff. The chicken became stringier, the batter muddied and the chip fat had gone a few more days without a change. Eventually, for about 50p less than a KFC Zinger Tower Burger. I was receiving little wrapped packages of avian bones and grease that looked like what’s left when a fox has been at the bins.
So, Chain restaurants are run to military standards with global economies of scale, while the Independents surviving in their wake are forced to prune down every cost. This seemed to be the opposite conclusion to my previous one, yet the two co-existed quite happily. That’s how easy it is to dismiss all shite food as obnoxious: you don’t even need a consistent line of attack.
My intention was to put together a consistent line of defence, but there was only so much longer I could keep eating.
It all ended on a warm spring Saturday night, with sun slipping into West London’s block horizon. Youth took to the streets in search of life immediate. Curtains rose, strings tightened, anticipation built. Laughter and doubt, fear, anger, joy and lust: all the touchstones of Saturday night were percolating through the rising neon glow. But I knew none of this, because I was in the Café Splendour in Earl’s Court Road, eating a half chicken and chips.
A half chicken is exactly that—a Damien Hirst cross section that has been dropped naked into boiling oil rather than formaldehyde. You pick between the bones and tensed sinew in search of any edible flesh—an experience not unlike eating the foot of a badly burned plane crash victim through the leather of his shoe.
In neighbouring tables, families of tourists slumped, chewed slowly and avoided each others’ gaze. A TV on the back wall cut randomly between ringtone adverts and videos of generic European holiday pop, as if finding a less abrasive channel would be too much effort. The owners and customers seemed to have reached a truce on the least that could be expected—a level of subsistence that could be lazily defined with the motto ‘that’ll do.’
I had to stop. I couldn’t eat any more cynicism, or sit among any more misery.
Here is my third and final defence of shite food. It needs defending. Expectations have been eroded by our neglect of the arse and of the food industry, and people are taking liberties as a result. We need to stand up and say, this isn’t good enough. This is inedible. You’re taking the piss. You’re lowering the bar. Because if we don’t defend the good name of shite, who will?
I left my half chicken and took a taxi to Hereford Road, a media-friendly restaurant in Notting Hill, where I met my friend who works in restaurants. We crammed into an improvised corner seat and ordered razor clams, calves’ brain, oxtail—things considered too low to merit inclusion in my wholesale catalogue. Nearer to town, families were being brought bogus steaks and lobster while close by, they were tearing at emaciated chicken carcasses in search of any clenched flecks of flesh. And, all across London, strangers to the city wanting somewhere warm and unthreatening to quell all thoughts of food and hunger were finding no option to match the globalised, metronomic mundanity of the Big Mac.
Any foodist type who finds this state of affairs unpalatable really ought to start caring a lot more about shite food.