Why I’ll never fall out of love with chain restaurants
Why have Brits fallen out of love with the reliable charm of mid-market meals, asks Esther Walker
Some behavioural trends make total sense. That one where no one goes to the cinema any more – that makes sense: I hate the cinema, too! Smelly, dirty and filled with people talking, rustling sweet wrappers and looking at their phones every 10 seconds.
And the one where no one shops on the high street any more – also logical. Any shop you go into will not have the thing that you want in the right colour or size, and the shop assistant will always say: “You could try online.”
But the decline of high-street chain restaurants? I love chain restaurants. I’m not a picky eater but most of the time I don’t want to be surprised by food. I want to look forward to a thing that I am going to eat, and I want to know that it will be OK when it arrives at my table.
Diners apparently looking to impress their friends by instagramming themselves at the latest trendy restaurants are said to be one reason that mid-market chains have had a shocking year – with 1,123 restaurant companies becoming insolvent in the last 12 months. This is catastrophic! And more fool these crazy trend-slaves who think they are too good for a “Wait Here to be Seated” sign.
I still feel massive and stinging resentment towards an ex-boyfriend who made me walk round and round York one Saturday night in 2002 in the drizzle, looking for an independent restaurant because he refused to go to Pizza Express – just because it was a chain. We eventually found this nightmarish place, empty and smelling quite strongly of cleaning fluid and … what else? Wet dog?
I also remember what I had – it was supposed to be Thai curry but it arrived as a sort of coconut soup with mushrooms floating in it. I ate it, (like I said, I’m not picky), but out of the grimy window, across the cobbled street, I could see through the shining plate-glass window of Pizza Express the cream of York society having the time of their lives, laughing, clinking glasses and guzzling la reines and capricciosas.
I’ve never been the one who wanted to winkle out some little gem of an independent restaurant. Who cares? I just wanted a table, a cold glass of wine and a hot plate of food. I was always happy in a Café Rouge or a Strada, eating my bresaola, or my “Roman-style” pizza.
And then I met my husband, who is the restaurant critic of The Times, and I didn’t get to go to chain restaurants any more. Now I have to go to whatever restaurant is new – it might be totally amazing or it might be awful, but it will definitely be unexpected.
So, added to general mealtime hunger, there is often a frisson of anxiety with my dinner, which is not
– I admit – the worst problem to have but oh! to walk into a Masala Zone or a Nando’s and know what you’re going to eat! To stride confidently in and know that it won’t be too long before you’re eating something that will hit the spot is not to be sniffed at.
The saving grace, of course, is my children. Chain restaurants were basically invented for children, who really are massively picky eaters. I’ve never understood the sort of slight shame parents express when their kids will only eat certain things. Of course children are happiest eating chips and pizza and plain pasta, no butter please or sauce or anything weird. They’re children! It’s only natural! Their self-preservation instincts are ludicrously strong and, obviously, they are suspicious of food in new places (I’m sympathetic).
And so when my children and I are not required to eat in a brand new gastropub, which might be fabulous and might be really seriously inedible, for Daddy’s “work”, we sail off to one of the various chain restaurants that we are familiar with. In Pizza East, I order before I have even taken off my coat and without looking at the menu – I can taste the delicious deep-fried calamari as I ask for it; my children dash for the counter overlooking the pizza ovens and watch their meals being made.
It genuinely disappoints me that there isn’t more room in my life to investigate new restaurant chains – I’ve never been to a Jamie’s Italian, a Shake Shack or a Patty & Bun, and it has been years since I’ve seen inside a Wahaca, a Byron Burger or a Wagamama.
How sad to now think that I might not get there before they all shut.