Wait for it! McDonald’s is bringing something brand new to the table

WHEN I got the press release about the reopening of the newly renovated McDonald’s on Grafton Street I skipped over the increased capacity (305 seats, to be precise) more jobs (30, as it happens) and even the “host of new digital facilities”. I was transfixed by the words ‘table service”.

I’m, broadly speaking, pro-McDonald’s. There’s nothing quite like a Big Mac and occasionally I rather fancy one. Perhaps once a year. The same goes for the Quarter Pounder With Cheese, despite the abuse of the word ‘cheese’.

I first ate in a McDonald’s on a school trip to Germany; I had never experienced anything quite like it and I was entranced, aged 16. But I still believe that their burgers are strange riffs on the theme, a genre of their own. Bunsen, for me, do by far the best classic burgers in Ireland. Wow burger are pretty good too. I wouldn’t try to compare a McDonalds burger.

Anyway, I toddled along and rapidly discovered that ‘table service’ didn’t mean you can plonk yourself down and be waited upon. Or tablecloths, of course. I was naive to think that ‘table service’ meant ‘waiting service’.

No, you have to go to one of the many touch-screens and go through various digital hoops; only then, having taken a plastic sign with your order number on it, and having found a table, and having displayed the number as best you can, do you get your food and drink delivered.

And, frankly, it’s quite a palaver. I became quite nostalgic for all the times I invariably chose the slowest queue but at least found a human at the end of it and was handed what I wanted in response to verbal requests.

I made two trips to the touch-screen, one for savoury, one for sweet. The savoury order involved a Quarter Pounder With Cheese which, we agreed, was as good as ever and the only justifiable use for Easi-Singles or whatever you call the plastic cheese-like substance that they use.

The Classic Signature hamburger was good too, in a different way. And it involved a slice of actual cheese and a pretty good brioche bun. I liked the presence of finely and very freshly sliced onion and the vaguely mustardy mayonnaise. It was much more classically hamburger like than the rest of the McDonalds canon.

Fries – oh come on, chips! – were limp, flaccid, terrible. And this is an operation with a ‘Hamburger University’, albeit rather far away, in Chicago. Curly fries were weirdly pleasant, crisp but largely unfurled. Is this a good or bad thing? I had never had them before.

And then I tasted my first bizarrely titled McDonald’s apple pie in decades. It’s no more a pie than I am; it’s very hot, spiced apple purée encased in a deepfried batter coating. And it wasn’t bad on this occasion, but a bit smaller and considerably sweeter than I recalled.

I was determined, as one who generally eats low carb, to have just a taste of the mini Crunchie McFlurry but I failed. I scoffed the lot and enjoyed every last appallingly sweet and unhealthy morsel. For the uninitiated, this is soft-serve ice cream mixed with little spheres of Cadbury’s Crunchie. And it’s seductive. Diabetes on a spoon.

Then came the coffee. McDonalds coffee is good. There was a perfectly pleasant flat white but then as we removed the lid from the espresso the contents were revealed: a splash of black coffee, no ‘crema’ to speak of.

Our server remarked, ‘it took so long to find you, it’s disappeared...’

But he returned a few moments later with an espresso that looked absolutely perfect and tasted pretty good too.

So, there you have it. A touch screen ordering system (that lets you customise your burgers in minute detail, if you so wish) that takes a bit of getting used to and therefore will only be useful for regular customers. And a numbering system that’s far from perfect.

But the food is grand, in the Irish sense of the word, and, as everyone seems to agree, consistent. Apart from those frightful ‘fries’.