Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (13 page)

And guess what: if it’s full every night, and the others are empty, then soon there will be two on the block – and so on. This should be no different than some restaurants insisting that men wear a tie. If you are comfortable with that, fine. If not, go someplace else. There’s plenty to choose from.

The role of government includes the protection of the governed – but only to a degree and only from predatory or illegal activities. There is a peculiar mentality, however, that seems to invade human bodies as soon as they achieve any governing status – which is that we the People have to be nannied. As I write, the New Labour Government in the UK has just passed its 700th new piece of legislation during its eight years in power.

Nannyism carries direct potential threats for quick-service – one example being that bodies already exist that would like to do away with all ‘drive-throughs’. Any business that purveys food that is popular, largely processed, and contains elements of fat, salt and sugar will attract nannies – and, as I have said many times, the industry deserves (and can stand) a lot of criticism for some of its practices. But the key is to get all the information about content and process in the public domain and then let the people choose. Time and again history has shown us that informed free choice is better than regulation.

I’m not really sure whether this confused position of mine is driven by forces from the right of Thatcherism or from the left of Michael Moore. I suppose, however, that to really make my point, I will have to pose, Dixie Chicks-style, naked on the front of a magazine.

You have been warned.

31. Fences of sausage

N
ot long ago, Donald Rumsfeld – who looks to me like John Denver might have done had he lived to 120 – aimed both barrels at something he called ‘Old Europe’. It sounded intriguing, so I went to find it for you – and to see if there’s something inside it called Old European Quick-Service.

Whatever Old Europe is (and I’m not sure Donald would know it if it bit him high on the inner groin), the river Danube is to it what the Mississippi is to the US. Drifting languidly along, it suddenly fools everybody by kicking south and heading for the Black Sea. Twenty kilometres south of this turn, the people from the hilly region on the west bank (
Buda
) decided to link up with the folk from the flat lands on the east of the river (
Pest
). Without, I suspect, paying a penny to ‘brand development consultants’, they came up with the name Budapest.

It is as ‘Old Europe’ as it gets, and it had been ten years since I last visited. The place feels wealthier – but it still has many of the old Soviet-style apartment blocks, and there is still the occasional Trabant (the ‘East German Porsche’) coughing up blue exhaust smoke. Some of the old buildings are stunning – more so when you consider the place was virtually flattened during the Russian advance at the end of the Second World War.

The usual born-in-the-USA quick-serve suspects are now present – Burger King, Macs, and two of the Holy Trinity: Pizza Hut and KFC. The latter two are in one of their joint retail operations and to me look just as uncomfortable together there as they do in Illinois.

Budapest is, of course, the heart of an Old European tradition – ‘café society’. If you wander into a
kavehaus
, you are entering into the quick-service restaurant of Old Europe. Granted, there is a considerable space-time continuum between there and then and now and the USA, but there are two spectacular differences between the two experiences. The first one is about pace. Budapest is a modern city now, with hustle, bustle, big business, small businesses, government and tourism. However, the difference between eating and drinking in a
kavehaus
and, say, a BK is marked. For those of us who remember records, the difference is like that between 33 rpm and 45 rpm. People slow down in a European café. They look to the experience to charge their batteries, not to drain them some more.

The second big difference is the quality of coffee. There is no excuse – none – for the vapid, vaguely brown liquid served up and described as coffee in most Western-based quick-serves. There are automated bean-to-cup machines available now that can produce an espresso-based drink of reasonable quality both cheaply and quickly. If you served thin mud in Europe, you would close within a week.

Starbucks, of course, tried valiantly to recreate café society. Howard Schultz is on record somewhere as saying he believes Starbucks is more about being a ‘third place’ (other than the home or the office) than about coffee. Starbucks also brought quality coffee to the mass market. The combination of the two elements represents a fair attempt to turn the
kavehaus
into a quick-serve. Interestingly, it is the only area of explosive quick-service market growth over the past decade in the US and the rest of the West – but it is some distance from the real thing, and the gap is now widening again.

I did find a quick-serve idea that might be transferable to the West – if it wasn’t for a tiny obstacle. To give you some idea of where I’m going, if you or I saw a wealthy area, we might say it had streets paved with gold. Not so the
Magyars
of Budapest. They would describe it as having ‘Fences made of sausage’. Quite.

Yes,
the
quick-serve idea of the new millennium could be … the butcher’s shop! In Budapest, the ordinary butcher (
hentesaru
) has morphed over time and is now quite a sophisticated quick-service concept. Every Hungarian eats
kolbasz
(smoked sausage), and there’s only one place to eat it – the butcher’s. Apart from the refrigerated meats on display for sale, the butcher will have steaming trays and vats containing the day’s offerings. There will be a wide variety of sausages, hams and black puddings available, along with bread and mustard. There will also be bowls of pickled cucumbers and peppers marinated in vinegar. You can get snack or main-meal sized portions, and the locals usually arrive carrying a pocket knife. They then carry their meal to a counter and cheerfully begin hacking away. The minor downside to this experience is the spray of paprika grease that targets the front of your shirt.

After experiencing this, I couldn’t wait to launch the idea in America. At the back of my mind, I saw this as the New Quick-Serve Thing we’ve all been waiting for. I would modestly make a few million and then exit stage right – and leave you all to get on with it. Then the snag hit me, and I’m afraid it’s insuperable. The idea is stillborn for the USA. You see, there are only three actual butchers’ shops left in America – and they are all in China Towns.

Old Europe. New America.
Vive la difference
.

32. My hit list

I
’m in a really bad mood, and it’s probably because I’ve been ill. Being ill to a male over fifty is entirely different in both content and process to what it was thirty years before. In those days, you would shrug off major health threats and traumas as if you were brushing away some mildly irritating insect that had perched on your arm. In my case, I would frequently complete soccer matches minus several limbs and pints of blood, rather like that famous knight in the Monty Python movie. ’Twas as nothing. I would spit at things like the doctor’s diagnosis of influenza and head off out into cold, wet, winter nights barefoot and dressed only in a T-shirt.

Today, it has changed. A slight ache or runny nose, and I will take to my bed, often for weeks. I will need potions and tablets by the thousand – and frequently the people at Lemsip have to run an extra shift at their production facilities to keep up.

So, a recent tummy upset floored me. It is only now, when I am just fit enough to take a lightly boiled egg and toast soldiers, that I have diagnosed the source of the problem. I was in a quick-serve recently, and somebody made me a sandwich while wearing plastic gloves. This can’t be right, and it must be a major (as yet unidentified) health risk, up there along with SARS, bird flu and MRSA. For all my life I have made sandwiches using my naked hands. When my mum made them for me, so did she, and when my wife has, ditto. Hands are provided for such tasks and, yes, they should be clean before they are so used. If God had meant us to wear plastic gloves when stuffing filling into a bread receptacle, he would have either given us plastic hands to start with or stuck something like a Swiss Army knife on the end of each arm. Plastic gloves are for doctors, for specific male examinations involving a finger and an orifice. They can have no role in or near sandwiches.

Plastic gloves for sandwich making are high on a list of things I am going to ban when I become President of the US or Prime Minister of the UK – I haven’t decided yet. In addition, and while I am in this bad mood, let me tell you about some other quick-serve things that tick me off and whose days are numbered after I get the keys to the Oval Office or Number 10:

• Those stupid little sealed packages that contain the essential accessories to quick-serve food – ketchup, salt, pepper etc. These represent the only way you can get any taste or flavour in many offerings and should arrive at the table in a recognisable bottle or cruet set. They should not require a wrestling match and the chipping of your teeth.
  
• When I first came to the US, for a long time I thought the biggest quick-serve brand was a concept called ‘now hiring’. This sign was outside virtually every quick-serve in the US, and that hasn’t changed much. You put up this sign, usually with a couple letters missing if it’s on a pole, and it tells me all I need to know about you and your restaurant. I go someplace else – where they know how important good staff are, and where they can
  find and keep them
  .
  
• If you open for lunch at, say, 11.00 a.m., and you have a salad bar, you can be pretty sure your salad bar will look neat and appetising when you open. By 11.10 a.m., it will look like downtown Baghdad.
  
• While I’m whining, can I bring up the subject of tomatoes? Not their availability, or even their physical appearance – but what happened to their flavour? I’ve spent a long time in and around quick-service, but I’ve never found the (obviously huge) factory where quick-serve tomatoes are painted scarlet and all natural flavour is scientifically removed from them. A quick-serve tomato bears no taste resemblance to the real thing, and I am reluctantly drawn to the conclusion that they must all be strip-mined in Peru somewhere.
  
• My final act before I am impeached will be to order the removal of all automated hand-driers in men’s washrooms throughout the quick-service nation. These are a major health hazard and must go. Here’s how it works: your (average) male quick-serve customer, on visiting the bathroom and having completed the activities that drew him there in the first place, will, contrary to female received wisdom, wash his hands. He will then put his hands under the electric drier and start to rub them together under the ensuing flow of hot air. Said flow of hot air will complete the job – if he has two or three days to remain in place under it. He hasn’t, of course, so after two or three minutes he abandons his position and exits the bathroom, finishing drying his hands on his jeans. His jeans were last washed two or three months ago. (Note: all this has to be seen in contrast to the French approach to these things – where they wash their hands
  before
  going to the toilet. Oh, sorry – have I put you off your baguette?)
  

So, I’ve a lot to do when I take over – but I do feel a lot better having shared my problems with you. My strength is undoubtedly returning and my temperature is down. Shortly, I may even be able to blow the froth off my medicine.

33. McD’s and the perfect storm

I
t is an incorrect assumption, made by most Americans, that all we English live in huge castles and are waited on hand and foot by a livery of butlers and footmen. The truth is a long way away from that. Take my own case, for example: my rather understated home – notice I deliberately stay away from the contentious castle idea – has but fourteen hundred rooms, and the moat is barely 300 metres across at the bridging point. As for a livery of fiefs and servants, I make do with a handful for the essentials – cufflink storage, dandruff management and the like. I make do with an under butler to iron my copy of
The Times
everyday before propping it up on the breakfast tray.

It was the newspaper that jolted me to life yesterday. Yet another hundred column inches were dedicated to the doom and gloom surrounding McDonald’s, and the probability that somebody may soon have to switch off the life-support machine. As the only living journalist (and I use the last word in its loosest sense) not to have passed comment on the subject, I thought it was time for me to wade in.

In the movie
Perfect Storm
, a unique set of negative weather conditions come together, and the ensuing freak storm kills George Clooney and his boat. Many are making the argument that something similar is brewing for McD’s. Remembering that McDonald’s primary market is to entrepreneurs (who buy franchises and/or invest in partnerships), you can quickly reel off a quorum of freaky-sounding negatives.

• Through its history, the hamburger QSR sector has relied on a momentum-giving goosing every decade or so – a structural development in the offering (e.g. breakfast, drive-through, chicken, value menus, kids’ programmes). There hasn’t been one for ten to fifteen years.
  
• For most of its international life, being an American icon brand has put wind in McD’s sails. Not any more. Kids in Japan now worship David Beckham, not Michael Jordan. In the Muslim world it’s probably wind-against for the foreseeable future.
  
• The shadow of adverse legal activity has landed firmly on the industry, with predatory consumer lawyers and class-actions on behalf of a fat sedentary nation now on the radar screen.
  
• In many parts of the world the brand has mature distribution – and further investment can only be defensive and/or cannibalistic.