Driving home for Christmas? Beware ghastly service stations

‘ If there’s one word to describe the British hotel and restaurant industry – and there is – that word is disgusting,” said the writer Bernard Levin, when he squared up to hospitality giant Charles Forte on That

Was The Week That Was in 1962. “There are other words that might be pressed into service in emergency: lazy, inefficient, dishonest, dirty, complacent, exorbitant, but disgusting just about sums it up.”

Levin spoke of the time he booked into a hotel in Dartmouth, where he asked the proprietor if he could have breakfast the next morning at 8.15am. The man looked confused and stuttered back: “You’re not on the continent now, sir!”

It was a running post-war theme: the drab and terrible state of British food, which nevertheless seemed to sum up the British state of mind in wartime: grin, bear it and victory will be ours.

Of course, we have travelled so far from that era. Our restaurant scene is the most diverse, interesting and eclectic in the world. No other country has the mix we have, the variety of cuisines; a reflection of one glorious upside of immigration.

But driving home for Christmas, the festive motorway theme tune of Chris Rea on our mind, you can’t escape the elephant in the room. With kids needing pee stops and me needing pauses to stretch, one inevitably comes face to face with that shameful culinary and cultural catastrophe that is the motorway service station.

How I would love to see Levin lacerate all those invisible men and women, who between them operate Moto, Welcome Break and Roadchef and who curse our highways. I could sum it up by calling it the four Fs: Foul Food and Fraudulent Fuel.

The brilliant journalist Henry Dimbleby sums up the problem perfectly in his 2023 book Ravenous in a chapter that should be on the national curriculum called: “Anatomy of an egg sandwich”. He lists the ingredients in what the label calls a “handmade” sandwich. And there are 32 of them.

The big beasts who run these places can be knocked off their perches, in the same way that some better eating habits have become mainstream. But it needs some hardy entrepreneurs. Vive la révolution!