By Mark Heath.
I wanted to hit him, this lanky greasy chav who was bragging to the bar maid at the top of his voice.
“I’m a chef, you know.”
“Really? Where do you work?”
“Wetherspoons.”
I’d just finished working a 70 hour week in a cellar kitchen with no natural light, making all fresh food for a busy independent restaurant.
On my day off I wanted a quiet pint at my local and this twat was interrupting it. I wanted to punch him in the face and watch him slump to the ground bleeding.
An overreaction? Maybe, but someone working at Wetherspoons and claiming to be chef deserves everything they get. It’s like someone with basic first aid claiming to be a doctor.
It’s not that cheffing is an incredible art form to be mastered by only a chosen few – it’s not – but it is a hard skill that takes time and dedication to learn. Working at Wetherspoons is not cheffing, nor for that matter is working at Cafe Rouge, La Tasca, Zizzi, Strada or any other of the innumerable identikit chains you see scattered through every city up and down the land.
These chains all have two common goals – to make money and to achieve a generally acceptable level of consistency.
The cost of this is directly seen in the food, which in most chain bars and restaurants is centrally produced and pre-cooked, arriving at the restaurant in a Brakes Bros or 3663 van to be re-heated by the ‘chef’.
It’s not just that the food is pre-cooked – it’s cheap and this is reflected in its quality. The beef on any of these chain restaurant menus was probably reared in Brazil, your chicken battery farmed in Holland and cheap lamb for some reason is always from Namibia.
Foreign labour welfare and carbon footprints don’t feature on the board’s agenda.
Your average ‘chef’ working in a standard chain restaurant will spend most of his days operating a microwave and slitting steamed vac-pac bags open. The odd thing like a steak or burger that has to be cooked fresh is usually brutalised, and when asked to freshly poach an egg or fine dice an onion the ‘chef’ would almost certainly have a breakdown.
The alternative lies in local independent restaurants. Sheffield’s full of them and most are producing high quality, consistently fresh food using local suppliers like All Seasons, Woodhead’s, Crawshaws and JH Mann, who also source the majority of their goods locally.
The barmaid apparently agreed with me – she was talking to one of the other locals and casting evil looks along the bar.
I agree – I always feel a bit seedy eating in a chain restaurant. But they really are hard to avoid, even in Sheffield.