Grease Is The Word
Sorry, I'm going to swear two days in a row but why is so much fast food so fucking awful?
Yesterday I was driving back from Stoke and stopped at a couple of service stations. The food options? Bags of sweets, more of those fucking awful Walkers Crisps (see yesterday), the full range of Ginsters products or Burger King / KFC at what appears to be three times the usual price. A couple had branches of M&S which was vaguely encouraging but you're still only talking about mass produced sandwiches, Millionaire's Shortbread or some odds and sods to cook with at home. If you're peckish there and then, you really are stuffed. So why? Even Budgens have woken up to the idea of locally sourced food so why can't Welcome Breaks and their ilk? Hell, one of the service stations was near Melton Mowbray: would it really be so hard to get a few decent pork pies in?
The thing is it's not just the Motorways that are a problem. You can include Victoria in this rant. There I was at some godforsaken time of a Sunday to collect Mrs Lambshank from Victoria Station. Thanks to a slight delay, I had about an hour to fill so went to get a coffee. Given that the "pay and display" would be more accurately described as "mortgage and display" - £2 for 20 minutes? Are you having a laugh? - my choices were limited to whatever the station could privde. Still, a modern central London terminal (and effectively the Gatwick gateway remember). That should be a reasonable source of eating surely?
All I can tell you is that Coffee & Co. make some of the worst coffee I've ever tasted (I guess "Crap & Co." while more accurate wouldn't be quite as marketable) while Aussie franchise Oporto needs to be Deporto. Fast food? This was more slow shit. How do you fuck up an egg and bacon roll AND take five minutes to make it? Rubbish bread, fatty, flabby bacon and something reheated and rubbery that maybe once had a yolk but now might require an autopsy - its or mine - to confirm. And all smothered in some sort of brown sauce. I'm no snob when it comes to breakfast calories and have an ever-expanding soft spot for the hangover curing properties of the Sausage & Egg McMuffin (I like to think a team of expert research chemists spent months perfecting the perfect beer-absorbing combination of carbohydrate, protein fat and whatever the hell that "cheese" is made from) but one powdery, greasy bite of this abomination and I decided I'd rather be hungry than keep eating. Utterly vile. Kick them out, nuke Coffee & Co., and give the franchises to people who can actually provide something worthwhile.
Yesterday I was driving back from Stoke and stopped at a couple of service stations. The food options? Bags of sweets, more of those fucking awful Walkers Crisps (see yesterday), the full range of Ginsters products or Burger King / KFC at what appears to be three times the usual price. A couple had branches of M&S which was vaguely encouraging but you're still only talking about mass produced sandwiches, Millionaire's Shortbread or some odds and sods to cook with at home. If you're peckish there and then, you really are stuffed. So why? Even Budgens have woken up to the idea of locally sourced food so why can't Welcome Breaks and their ilk? Hell, one of the service stations was near Melton Mowbray: would it really be so hard to get a few decent pork pies in?
The thing is it's not just the Motorways that are a problem. You can include Victoria in this rant. There I was at some godforsaken time of a Sunday to collect Mrs Lambshank from Victoria Station. Thanks to a slight delay, I had about an hour to fill so went to get a coffee. Given that the "pay and display" would be more accurately described as "mortgage and display" - £2 for 20 minutes? Are you having a laugh? - my choices were limited to whatever the station could privde. Still, a modern central London terminal (and effectively the Gatwick gateway remember). That should be a reasonable source of eating surely?
All I can tell you is that Coffee & Co. make some of the worst coffee I've ever tasted (I guess "Crap & Co." while more accurate wouldn't be quite as marketable) while Aussie franchise Oporto needs to be Deporto. Fast food? This was more slow shit. How do you fuck up an egg and bacon roll AND take five minutes to make it? Rubbish bread, fatty, flabby bacon and something reheated and rubbery that maybe once had a yolk but now might require an autopsy - its or mine - to confirm. And all smothered in some sort of brown sauce. I'm no snob when it comes to breakfast calories and have an ever-expanding soft spot for the hangover curing properties of the Sausage & Egg McMuffin (I like to think a team of expert research chemists spent months perfecting the perfect beer-absorbing combination of carbohydrate, protein fat and whatever the hell that "cheese" is made from) but one powdery, greasy bite of this abomination and I decided I'd rather be hungry than keep eating. Utterly vile. Kick them out, nuke Coffee & Co., and give the franchises to people who can actually provide something worthwhile.
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