Renovation
Got excited the other day when I saw the windows of a nearby Burger King boarded up. Had the local population rejected fast food and taken up instead fresh soups in thermos flasks, bringing an end to brash neon and that revolting scent of frying mechanically recovered fat that clings to your clothes long after you’ve bolted past the place? Not a bit of it, they’re renovating!
One would hope that behind the chipboard they are turning what was a pretty soulless example of a fast food place into some oasis of culinary calm.
What was so wrong with Wimpy? When I was a kid and you went to Wimpy you sat at your table, looked at your stiffened, laminated menu (with photographs of each enticing choice), ordered from a waitress and got served your food at your table on plates, with cutlery and, best of all, a tomato sauce dispenser that looked like a big tomato!
God knows what kids would do if they were offered cutlery in a fast food place these days, probably knife one another. Given the evolution of food from a meal best eaten with knife, fork and occasionally a special spatula to food you consume from a cardboard tray with your fingers (a great saving in dishwasher tablets for the fast food pushers - but where’s the bowls of water with little slices of lemon in them for us to wash our fingers afterwards? I always love those when presented with them in posh restaurants, despite the fact that on numerous occasions I’ve mistook it for very thin soup and started drinking the stuff). So what’s the next leap forward? Food we don’t even have to eat? Nutritional tablets?
It’s unlikely to be anything as swish as a drip filled with essence of burger and chips stuck in your arm. More likely they just blitz up your meal and then pour it into one of those enormous syringes they use to artificially inseminate whales or something, then ask you to open wide if you’re lucky and bend over if you’re not.
Whatever the inside will look like, and I bet it’s almost exactly the same, but with most of the grease removed from the walls, I expect that when the place opens it will have the standard issue sad character slumped at a table making a cup of coffee last for three hours. I used to consider such fixtures depressing, thinking how empty must be the life of somebody who sits there, looking miserable and making one cup of coffee last all afternoon. What sort of person, I wondered, did that?
I’ll tell you, it’s any poor sod who’s ordered coffee in one of those places, where they serve it so hot that it’s official state as it comes out of the coffee maker is plasma. The three hour wait is mandatory, it’s that long before it merely scalds your mouth, as opposed to being so hot you drop it and it burns a hole all the way to the centre of the planet.
As a committed carnivore who loves to flip a burger on his grill while sucking back a long-necked bad boy, I know that what the public really want is to go into the place and find it turfed, with a few picnic benches and a bloke in the centre of the room with a barbeque and a cool-box full of beef and pork products slowly coming to room temperature and - next to it - a bath tub full of beer on ice.
Alternatively, I hope for a three for one deal on re-opening day.
One would hope that behind the chipboard they are turning what was a pretty soulless example of a fast food place into some oasis of culinary calm.
What was so wrong with Wimpy? When I was a kid and you went to Wimpy you sat at your table, looked at your stiffened, laminated menu (with photographs of each enticing choice), ordered from a waitress and got served your food at your table on plates, with cutlery and, best of all, a tomato sauce dispenser that looked like a big tomato!
God knows what kids would do if they were offered cutlery in a fast food place these days, probably knife one another. Given the evolution of food from a meal best eaten with knife, fork and occasionally a special spatula to food you consume from a cardboard tray with your fingers (a great saving in dishwasher tablets for the fast food pushers - but where’s the bowls of water with little slices of lemon in them for us to wash our fingers afterwards? I always love those when presented with them in posh restaurants, despite the fact that on numerous occasions I’ve mistook it for very thin soup and started drinking the stuff). So what’s the next leap forward? Food we don’t even have to eat? Nutritional tablets?
It’s unlikely to be anything as swish as a drip filled with essence of burger and chips stuck in your arm. More likely they just blitz up your meal and then pour it into one of those enormous syringes they use to artificially inseminate whales or something, then ask you to open wide if you’re lucky and bend over if you’re not.
Whatever the inside will look like, and I bet it’s almost exactly the same, but with most of the grease removed from the walls, I expect that when the place opens it will have the standard issue sad character slumped at a table making a cup of coffee last for three hours. I used to consider such fixtures depressing, thinking how empty must be the life of somebody who sits there, looking miserable and making one cup of coffee last all afternoon. What sort of person, I wondered, did that?
I’ll tell you, it’s any poor sod who’s ordered coffee in one of those places, where they serve it so hot that it’s official state as it comes out of the coffee maker is plasma. The three hour wait is mandatory, it’s that long before it merely scalds your mouth, as opposed to being so hot you drop it and it burns a hole all the way to the centre of the planet.
As a committed carnivore who loves to flip a burger on his grill while sucking back a long-necked bad boy, I know that what the public really want is to go into the place and find it turfed, with a few picnic benches and a bloke in the centre of the room with a barbeque and a cool-box full of beef and pork products slowly coming to room temperature and - next to it - a bath tub full of beer on ice.
Alternatively, I hope for a three for one deal on re-opening day.
2 Comments:
You should open a burger joint like that~ you could just stand there drunk, wearing an apron and a big hat. You could even learn tricks about flipping burgers. You'd also need some TVs in there with sports on, but of course, only you'd have control of the remote. I'm positive every man's wife would actually thank you when they realized that strip club attendance had declined due to your venture.
Cat got your tongue?
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