Chain Leader

David Farkas

Out of Style
January 24, 2007

English diners, like Americans, are constantly reminded by the food police which foods are good for them and which are not. The grub at Little Chef isn’t, apparently, to the dismay of Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator. Here’s a small morsel of his brilliant lament for the aging and unfashionable chain, which appeared on Jan. 10. You can mop up the rest of the text here (registration required):

Little Chef, Big Chef: Britain still loves a fry-up

Little Chef may still offer its customers a greasy, dog-eared, ’70s-style menu, but it has served up a rich banquet of opportunities for cultural commentators in the past couple of weeks. Having changed hands just over a year ago for £52 million, the chain of 235 roadside restaurants founded in 1958 went into administration (into the hands of its accountants, that is, one step short of bankruptcy) at the end of 2006, and has now been knocked down for around £10 million to a mysterious combination of ‘turnaround specialist R Capital’ and an Israeli property group called Arazim.

Whether and in what form these cheerless, tasteless plastic cafes will survive remains to be revealed. But in the meantime everyone from style guru Peter York to celebrity chef Brian Turner has been getting in on the act, with reminiscences of childhood outings in the family Morris Minor to savour the Little Chef experience, and analyses of why it’s now so irredeemably out of fashion: The food is unhealthy, the ambience is naff and the service is surly—unless you’re lucky enough to find a branch staffed entirely by Poles. In short, it’s just not Pret a Manger, which is what modern Britons really want…

Modern Britons, of course, be damned.

Posted by David Farkas on January 24, 2007 | Comments (0)