The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker Read online

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  Contents

  Introduction

  McDonald’s

  KFC

  Chicken Tikka Masala

  Pizza Express

  Hotel Breakfasts

  Nando’s

  Belgo

  Chinese

  Kebabs

  The Stockpot

  TGI Friday’s

  Aberdeen Angus Steak House

  Thai

  Greggs

  Pie and Mash

  Caffè Nero

  Browns

  Airline Food

  Paul

  Yo! Sushi

  Birds Eye

  EAT

  Terminus du Nord

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Unbearable Lightness of being a Prawn Cracker: A Selection of Real Meals

  Will Self has written nine books of longer fiction: Cock and Bull, My Idea of Fun, Dorian, Great Apes, How the Dead Live, The Book of Dave, The Butt, Liver and Walking to Hollywood. He has also published numerous highly acclaimed books of short stories and non-fiction.

  From 1995 till 1997 he was the restaurant critic of the Observer (his reviews were collected in Feeding Frenzy), and he has been writing his Real Meals column for the New Statesman since 2009.

  Introduction

  In 2009 I proposed a column to be called ‘Real Meals’ to the editor of the New Statesman, a leftish and venerable British periodical that I have written and cartooned for, on and off, for most of my career. The idea was simple: most food writing and restaurant criticism is concerned with the ideal, with how, by cooking this, or dining there, you can somehow ingurgitate a new – or at any rate improved – social, aesthetic and even spiritual persona. I aimed to turn this proposition on its head, and instead of commenting on where and what people would ideally like to eat I would consider where and what they actually did: the ready meals, buffet snacks and – most importantly – fast food that millions of Britons chomp upon in the go-round of their often hurried and dyspeptic lives.

  In a way I had form where this was concerned. For a while, in the early 1990s, I had been the restaurant critic of the Observer newspaper, and in that capacity I was able to witness at first hand the way in which food – and in particular eating out – became the cultural ideology of the era. When the Blair government came in this munching tendency solidified into a hard – and to my way of thinking, indigestible – fact: sod art, film, literature, theatre; all you needed to be cultured in the late 1990s was a small bowl of extra-virgin olive oil and some warm Italian bread to dab in it.

  As you can appreciate, I was never that interested in food per se – indeed, I think there’s something markedly infantile about a culture that takes too much interest in what it puts in its mouth – but I was much taken by the theatricality of the restaurant experience and the way it enabled the bourgeoisie (and under Blair more or less everyone began to self-identify as middle class) to act out its roles and impostures.

  Fast-forward to the end of the noughties, and far from foodyism having faded it was more powerful than ever. The time was ripe, I felt, for an antacid to be applied to all those mounds of polenta and dribblings of jus. While trendy restaurants remain obstinately in vogue – just last night I was in Bristol, where an 800-seater multi-cuisine buffet-style mega-munch had just opened in the trendy docks quarter – the looming clouds of economic recession have begun to starkly underline the fact that, while the few chew on exorbitance, the great majority must eat cheaply.

  Let me state for the record: I crave simplicity in food and in restaurants. I almost always eat in the same two or three cheap ethnic restaurants in London, and I carry no more brief for the food-is-an-art-form school of thought than I do for the multinationals who pump hydrolysed corn syrup into the distended bellies of the morbidly obese underclass. It is in that spirit that I have, for the past two years, ventured the length and breadth of the land fearlessly eating what I would undoubtedly have been eating anyway. The results you hold here in your hand: mal appétit!

  McDonald’s

  When, in 1996, I hung up my bib as restaurant critic of the Observer, I went out with a grande bouffe by eating at McDonald’s and La Tante Claire in a single lunchtime. It seemed to me that yoking a Michelin three-star temple of cuisine to a fast-food joint where the keener staff wore three plastic stars perfectly expressed the taste of the nation. If only I could’ve foreseen what was to come! This culinary de bas en haut was soon to become the very Kulturkampf of New Labour’s Britain!

  I never really wanted to review food anyway; what interested me were fancy restaurants as a theatrical experience: the bourgeoisie ogling itself in a mirrored booth. Perhaps now, at last, the time is ripe for a little deflation and maybe we should all start paying attention to what’s actually on the end of our plastic forks, not Nigella, Marco-Pierre, F***ing Gordon – and all the other celebrity egg-flippers. It’s in this, more grounded, spirit that I undertake to survey the actual establishments where we eat, and the real meals they serve: only a fraction of the population will ever nosh in La Tante Claire, whereas, at current sales levels, the 1,154 McDonald’s in Britain could serve a meal to every man, woman and child in the country given a mere thirty-five days.

  The chain may no longer be the fast-food world’s longest – that’s Subway – or largest – that’s KFC – but it remains the foodies’ biggest McBogeyman. Proper people don’t eat there – only the chavs; besides, for the Left, with its global reach and aggressive uniformity, McDonald’s isn’t so much a food outlet as the fourth arm of American military power. There may be McRice in Indonesia but, barring a few regional variations, when you enter a McDonald’s – whether in Seoul or Scunthorpe – you’re making a contract: place your lips here to suck on the tailpipe of globalization.

  I hadn’t – consciously – eaten in a McDonald’s for at least five years before visiting one for this piece, since one afternoon when my then three-year-old had a full-blown hyperglycaemic fit after taking a couple of slurps on a McFlurry. So walking into the McDonald’s on Oxford Street, through a funnelled passage with a floor-length VDU screen on one side, along which ran the continuous thread ‘I’m loving it . . .’ made me feel like Rip Van Winkle; three years ago the chain underwent the first major corporate redesign in aeons. All that yellow and orange has been infused with terracotta. Then there are the ‘linger’, the ‘grab & go’ and the ‘family’ zones – all of them differently detailed.

  I noted that such ethnicities as an oriental snack wrap and a chorizo melt were on the menu, but I wanted to remain within the cave of the Platonic burger, so ordered the upmarket equivalent, something called an M, which at £3.49 was basically a square burger on ‘Italian’ bread. Naturally I had to have a small fries (99p), and a small Coke (89p), and also a garden salad (99p), which turned out to be a tiny nest of lettuce, grated carrot and radicchio in which lay a clutch of cherry tomatoes. It came with a sachet of sweet dressing labelled ostentatiously ‘2.2% FAT’, which was the size of a mobile phone. Once I’d spurted it into the waxed-paper pot, the leaves were drowning in this gloop.

  Upstairs in the grab & go zone, on moulded barstools a svelte-looking and multiracial gaggle of narcissists watched themselves eat in mirrors, while glancing occasionally at a monitor whereupon African-American men and women toyed with each other’s underwear to musical accompaniment. What a triumph for the Blairite social revolutionaries! There was even someone reading a book – albeit one written by Bill Bryson. So far so predictable – but the whole experience took a strange turn when I started asking my fellow snarfers what they thought of the place.

  They were all only too ready to impart. The Spanish girl standing gulping down a cheeseburger and the young guy in the silk shirt stuffing fries into his mouth both took time out to explain they only ate beneath the golden arches because, ‘It’s fast.’ Other diners were more voluble: ‘For a while they stopped salting the fries,’ one animadverted. ‘But now they’ve started again.’ A young, working-class woman with toddlers explained that: ‘I’ve started eating here
again, I didn’t used to ’cause my parents told me it was unhealthy.’

  A smart-looking Kiwi sitting beside me chimed in: ‘I confess, I eat here about three times a week – the breakfast is perfectly all right; I mean, there’s not a lot you can do wrong to a hash brown. Besides, I’m a builder and I burn it off during the day.’ His blonde companion was less sanguine: ‘This fillet of fish has 16.5 grams of fat in it – that’s a quarter of a woman’s healthy daily allowance.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about these things,’ I observed.

  ‘That’s because I’m a nurse,’ she replied shamefacedly.

  Indeed, as her companion expatiated more (the meat is fresher and the food served hotter in Bordeaux), and other folk stopped by to fat-chat, it occurred to me that the whole McDonald’s experience had been enormously enriched by our awareness of healthy eating, becoming a communal exercise in chomping through false consciousness. It made me suspect that the entire McLibel business, Fast Food Nation and Super-Size Me had all been secretly funded by the corporation in order to impart the pleasing flavour of guilt to their comestibles.

  But what – I hear you cry – did your succulent juicy beef, your Emmental cheese and your toasted, stone-baked ciabatta actually taste like? Let alone your Pentland Dell potatoes, sliced then fried in non-hydrogenated sunflower oil? To which I can only reply: the same old shit.

  KFC

  Chicken, chicken! Every place I go there is chicken, every step I take wishbones and drumsticks crunch beneath my soles, while the blisters in battered old chicken skin crepitate eerily. If, as I do, you live in large city, you’re never more than a few feet away from some disjointed portion of a poultry carcass. If, as I am, you’re the owner of a dog, you’re never more than a few seconds away from having to shove your hand down its throat to try and retrieve a splintery bone.

  Sometimes I think this great al fresco charnel house is only the just resting place for these poor birds’ leftovers – after all, their miserable and truncated lives were spent boxed, then they were exterminated with Einsatzgruppen awfulness, before being flogged in boxes; at least now – albeit in bits – they’re spread about, as if having been subjected to a strange inversion of a Tibetan Buddhist sky burial, whereby humans scavenge bird corpses rather than vice versa. At other times I project myself into the dim, distant future; surely, in the course of geologic time these great middens will petrify, forming some hitherto unknown sedimentary rock, one that will cause geologists of the distant future to dub this the Kentuckyzoic era?

  What can we say about Kentucky Fried Chicken, as it was formerly known, or KFC, as it is known now? Well, the chain is a ‘concept’ (yes, that’s what they call them), along with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, of Yum! Brands. With its 36,000 restaurants in 110 countries, Yum! is the biggest fast-food purveyor in the world (and, if you accept the strong anthropic principle, the entire universe). That’s a lot of bones – not, I hasten to add, that we can blame KFC for all of them. Colonel Harland Sanders, of the string tie and snow-white locks, may have founded his first fried-chicken outlet as long ago as 1952, but the relentless strut of this headless foodstuff across the known world has been greatly facilitated by religion.

  To begin with there were fake KFCs, called things like ‘American Fried Chicken’ or ‘Tennessee Fried Chicken’, but then came a new generation, offering halal fowl, and with names like ‘Favorite Chicken’ and ‘UK Chicken’. Now you can chaw your way religiously across town, from Chicken Imperium to Chicken Satrap, from Chicken Region to Chicken Zemstvo, until, eventually, you reach some miserable joint tucked in the armpit of the earth and called simply ‘Chicken’ – that nonetheless offers BBQ beans.

  ‘Iss safe for the Hindus, innit?’ said the charming woman I engaged in conversation at a city-centre branch of KFC the other evening. ‘I mean, those Hindus can’t eat pork, can they?’

  ‘Muslims,’ I corrected her. ‘It’s Muslims who can’t eat pork – along with Jews, and for that matter Rastafarians.’

  ‘Muslims?’ She grabbed her companion’s arm for support. ‘I thought it was cows that wuz sacred for them.’

  This young couple – who I had bearded about their attitude towards the establishment – proved just as voluble as the people I’d spoken to in McDonald’s. As they prattled on about how much junk food they ate, and where they ate it, I wondered if there were something in the Colonel’s famed secret recipe besides innocuous herbs and spices. Neither of them gave ‘a monkey’s’, about the conditions in which their dinner had been reared. (It’s worth recalling that the EU standard for this is twenty – that’s TWENTY – birds per square metre, their beaks clipped so they don’t try assist each other’s suicide.)

  ‘You’re shitting yourself,’ said my cut-price Candide, ‘if you sit there thinking about that stuff. I mean, it’s not like you think about how your jeans are made by a poor kiddie in some Indonesian sweat shop.’

  ‘Um, actually,’ I gulped, ‘I do sit here contemplating just that.’

  I also sat there thinking how recherché the KFC experience was, what with its red walls, beige tiles and blond-wood-‘n‘-steel furniture. The portrait of the Colonel – the keynote of the decor – is outlined in airbrushed neon swathes, a 1980s corporate bastardization of a Warhol silkscreen print. In fact, KFC is undergoing a rebranding (reconceptualization?), part of which is moving back to the original appellation, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  I suppose Sanders would be proud; after all, his colonelcy was awarded in 1935 for chicken-frying expertise. This conjures up an image of the antebellum South populated entirely by burger-flipping majors and corndog-griddling generals – perhaps that’s why the Confederacy lost and Atlanta burned? Sanders’s secret recipe is still kept at KFC’s Louisville headquarters in a safe the combination of which is known only to two finger-lickin’ executives at a time and, together with the Coca-Cola recipe, it must rank as one of the true elixirs of the age.

  But what does it taste like? A tricky question to answer, given that, unless you were raised by anchorites in the Sahara, this taste-datum is seared into your cerebellum. I manfully ordered two pieces with fries and a small bucket of Sprite. I also had two corn on the cobs (on offer at 99p). I say ‘had’, but I only managed one bland watery cob, a few fries, and one piece of chicken. I’d been given two breasts – at least, I think they were chicken breasts, they might have been the buttocks of superannuated Indonesian child labourers. At any rate, I only choked down one before concluding that the secret was really a mystery wrapped inside a battered enigma: how can anything that tastes this awful be quite so popular?

  Chicken Tikka Masala

  I suppose I was looking for an archetype that no longer exists – at least, not in a pure form. A fusty realm of red flock wallpaper, oval aluminium platters and piped sitar music. I was in search of that unreal establishment, the Indian restaurant – unreal, of course, because the vast majority of so called ‘Indian’ restaurants are in fact owned and run by Bangladeshis; but unreal, also, because just as second- and third-generation British Asians no longer see any need to kowtow to the ethnic indiscrimination of the majority (and so style their establishments ‘Bengali’, or as offering ‘Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine’), so they have also hearkened to the foodyism of the past decade, vamped up their decor and even begun flirting with the unsafe sex of gastronomy: fusion.

  From the outside, the Mirsha (‘Finest Bengali Cuisine’), just off Ladygate in the East Riding town of Beverley, seemed, if not archetypal, innocuous, but once inside I found a dim minimalist cavern, with dark board floors and blood-red napery; there was no smelly Axminster carpet, or waiters with dahl-stained white jackets waggling their heads obsequiously – instead, I was shown by a dapper man in black to a table directly opposite a large, wall-mounted flat-screen monitor showing clips of Bollywood musicals.

  OK, fair enough, but so long as the gaff served chicken tikka masala, I would still be in the right place. Britons eat a half-million curries a day, and one in seven of them are CTM (as it’s known in the trade). There is a plausible argument for claiming CTM as our national dish; after all, a Glasgow-based ‘Indian’ chef says that he invented it, in the early 1970s, when a local yokel asked for some gravy with his desiccated chicken