Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (20 page)

3. Reduced choices on the menu.

4. Awareness of danger (e.g. with fish and crustaceans).

5. Use of modern techniques and technology.

6. Use of fresh ingredients, preferably bought the same day.

7. Avoidance of rich, heavy, pretentious sauces.

8. Do not ignore dieting.

9. Avoidance of gaudy presentation.

10. Invention.

[Author’s note: This essay is included in full in Mark Kurlansky’s marvellous book
Choice Cuts – a Miscellany of Food Writing
, Vintage Books, 2004.]

When I read the above, it changed my understanding of what nouvelle cuisine was, but it didn’t change my (lack of) enthusiasm for the end result. And it did get me thinking about the challenges facing the quick-service business. It could be argued that nothing short of a revolution is needed, and it could be further argued that it is already underway – with some of the big brands making substantial changes in their menu offering.

Can the French Revolution of 1973 offer us some guidelines and direction? I think so, provided we strip out the raw principles behind it and concentrate on them, rather than get bogged down as to whether you should serve a heavy brown sauce with game or not. Go back and read them again. Mark each principle out of ten for its relevance to the challenge facing quick-service. Almost every one scores well, and (in my book) some score very highly.

One interesting point emerges on portion size. The rebels did not list smaller portions anywhere as an overt goal of nouvelle cuisine, despite the fact that Philistines like me assume that’s what it was all about. Smaller portions emerged as a result of following the charter of the revolution, and that surely has lessons for us. I am in the camp that says portion size has raged out of control in the US for a decade now, and it is a trend that has now arrived in the UK via the Gulf Stream. I am, however, also in the camp that says portion size has become clearly equated with value for money. You can’t just cut the portion size and offer the same stuff. Something will have to compensate for the perceived reduced value of reduced size. It will have to offer increased value via another element being increased – quality, healthiness, freshness, visual attraction, whatever. The answer might lie in developing a similar list of rebellious principles that we now need to follow. In that way, you start again with a clean sheet of paper, and the portion sizes and value for money equations emerge as a result of the new thinking.

Food for thought, as they say. The only problem with this thesis concerns the integrity of the author – i.e. yours truly. I am in my writing den, and I suspect I am the only writer in history to have authored a piece on nouvelle cuisine accompanied by a bacon sandwich the size of a wheelbarrow.

Do not as I do, do as I say!

49. Big easy lovin’

I
have travelled all over the world, but have only ever lived in England and America. Despite their differences, the two countries have one thing in common – a lot of the population of all the other countries tend to whinge and whine about them.

For a few years, it bothered me. I would come up with articulate defences against the assorted one-eyed accusations levelled against us, but then I realised I was just wasting my time. So I went back to worrying only about my soccer team. Until last week.

I caught Ray Davies in concert, and I am pleased to report that the old rocker and ex-Kink was in fine form. The concert, however, had been delayed a couple of months because Ray had been shot in the leg while on a trip to the US. In the bar at the interval I overheard some guy ranting on about the downsides of the city where he had received his bullet – New Orleans.

Enough. A man can only take so much. You can knock me down, step on my face/slander my name all over the place/do anythin’ that you wanna do, but uh-hu honey lay off my … favourite US city. Still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, I have no doubts it will rise again to assume its place as a planetary treasure. Unsolicited and unpaid, I offer those who were present in that bar, and readers everywhere, ten reasons to look favourably on N’awlins:

1. Hot rice and beans in the French market. This is served in a little tub, and our (then) twelve-year-old son had 178 portions in three days. As a world-renowned catering expert, I calculate the gross margin on hot rice and beans to be 98%.

2. I had a romantic dinner with my wife in Paul Prudhomme’s restaurant. On the drinks menu was something called a
chilli-vodka
. I ordered one. In the darkened dining room, I looked lovingly across the table. I raised my glass and proposed a romantic toast. I sipped my drink. My eardrums punctured eight times, my nose streamed, and my eyeballs melted and trickled down my cheeks.

3. Same thing in Pat O’Brien’s, with a Hurricane cocktail. Being from Miami, I had to try one (or a couple). No problem. Then I walked outside into the night air, and an invisible baseball bat hit me across the eyes.

4. On one visit, I went jogging around the area where the new casino had just been built. Fats Domino was starring. I spent the rest of my run trying to work out, if he was as old as I think he was when I first saw him in 1964, how old was he on that very morning. I came up with 184, but I could have been out by five years either way.

5. On another trip, I went to the covered football stadium to see Miami Hurricanes in a Bowl match against (I think) Alabama. I have
never
heard a noise that has equalled that made by the crowd when (unfortunately) Alabama took the field.

6. The city boasts one of the best quick-service dishes on the planet – the Po’ Boy sandwich. I had one that had shrimp as its main ingredient, and I managed to eat it. This I did by unhinging my jaw like a reticulated python, and swallowing it inch by inch –
whole
. It’s the only way.

7. Coffee and beignets in the
Café du Monde
, by the river, in the early morning sun. Why isn’t there one in every city? Why isn’t there one on the banks of the Thames in London?

8. Have you ever had shrimp straight out of the kettle, piping hot, and washed down with ice-cold Jax beer – in the approximate ratio of one beer to one shrimp? No? Try it, but I suggest you use a safety net to start with.

9. You can sit and stare, for hours if you want to, and I have, at Big Muddy (the Mississippi) rolling past. You can ponder where it’s been and where it’s going. You can reflect on its history. You can wonder at its size and stature. You can contemplate the meaning of life. I don’t know of any other river that offers this to someone sitting on a bench.

10. My favourite memory. When I visit anywhere, I like to dig down a bit and find places to eat that are a bit off-centre. I had heard about a restaurant, Dooky Chase’s, which had been going since 1941. Our son was (about) twelve at the time, and I called a taxi for the three of us (my wife included) and gave the cabbie the address of the restaurant. Now, I can’t fancy this up: the only way you can describe the skin colour of the three of us is white, as in
really, deeply white
. In addition, we were also, I suppose,
really, deeply not poor
. According to the taxi driver, neither of these characteristics would stand us in good stead in the neighbourhood that housed Dooky’s, and he was very reluctant to take us there. We insisted, although by the time he finished his health-warning speech, our inner confidence was a degree or two less than that which showed on the surface. Man, are we glad we did. We just had the best of times. We met Dooky’s widow, Emily, and cherish the memory of our son and her smiling together. Everybody was just great, and I had some fried chicken that I can close my eyes and still taste. We still use Dooky’s recipe book (put together by their daughter, Leah) – and in a cold, wintry England it can transport you to a better place.

I’m not sure my memories will be treated by the Louisiana tourist authorities which much enthusiasm. Having just re-read the list, it has the feel of Osama Bin Laden recommending somewhere for a holiday. But I had to stand tall in defending N’awlins against such an unjust attack, particularly after its recent nightmare. It is not a nice thing to do to shoot a Kink, but – considering all the extenuating circumstances above – the city should plea-bargain for a very light sentence.

After Katrina, it has a tough journey ahead. We should all wish it well.

50. Island in the sun

I
think most adults have three places they could call home. Few people today live in their place of birth, but I suspect they are like me and look back on it (probably through rose-coloured lenses) as ‘home’. Then, of course, there is the place that is lived in now. This might be somewhere you love or hate, or anything in between depending on circumstances, but is another ‘home’.

There is, I think, a third home – a spiritual one. It might be a place you have visited or just a place you have seen in pictures and/or read about, but it is a place that you just
know
is meant for you and somewhere you could live in peace and happiness. I have one of those. It is the Greek island of Crete. I have never lived there, but I have been many times.

Crete is part of Greece, but my spirit is with the island and not with the nation. Greece has wonderful ancient history, but today the nation state is like most others – ridden with the angst and paranoia of modern democracy. The island, however, is something else.

For a start, it’s in the Mediterranean, that glorious pool of water that touches (and reflects) three continents. The flooding of the land basin that formed the Mediterranean is thought by many to have been caused by Noah’s flood, and the glories of the ancient history of the three continents somehow echo in the surf.

We landed on Crete nearly twenty-five years ago. I know the date exactly because it was that great moment in the story of a family when the youngest child reaches the age of three and you no longer need to drive around in a truck to carry the associated equipment. Our plan was for the four of us (our two boys were then aged three and eight) to land on the island, with one soft bag each, rent a car, and set off – staying at different (un-booked) places every night. Our tactics for finding places to stay (which remain the same to this day) were never to stop at somewhere on the way in to a new town, but to drive through it and work back. We did this when we hit Chania, out west on the island, and stayed at a tiny place that had five rooms to rent, right on the beach.

The family who owned the rooms consisted of Mama, Papa, and four children (three daughters and a son). We never moved for the rest of our trip, and I have just come off the phone from arranging this year’s visit. The logistics remain the same – it is 115 paces from my bed to my spot on the beach, itself about ten paces from the surf. In the intervening quarter century, Papa tragically died in an accident, and last month one of the daughters produced the first grandchild.

They now have twenty rooms, which have appeared in batches over the years. They bought the building next door, and one of the daughters runs a car rental business from it. Their beachside restaurant, still based on Mama’s cooking, is simple and stunning.

We have watched Chania grow as a town over the same period, but somehow – like the family business and the local community – it has grown and kept its heritage. Our visit last September coincided with the annual festival celebrating the success and safety of the local fishermen. It involved eating a lot of fresh sardines, drinking a lot of wine, and dancing a lot of dances. One of the family daughters, now a stunning, thoroughly modern, cell phone-clad, zero body fat twenty-something appeared in traditional costume and proudly joined the troupe on the makeshift stage on the beach. There was no embarrassment – it was entirely natural. The old ways and the new somehow go hand in hand on this island. We have watched the small family business grow over the years, overcoming the tragic death of Papa. It became clear to me that, without the benefit of business schooling, Mama and the children obeyed two simple rules that many of us forget in the clutter and competition of modern business. They have particular relevance for the quick-serve business – at all levels. Here they are:

1. Expand at a pace you can digest. This is not – repeat
not
– just about money. It is about operation and execution. Quick-service, at all levels, is now littered with the bleached skeletons of businesses that over-extended themselves to grow in step-functions. If you look below the skin of the current well-documented problems of Krispy Kreme, you find indigestible growth aspirations at the core.

2. Focus your energy on retaining your
existing
customers, and you will not need to spend much energy and money chasing new ones. When we got back from last year’s visit, we couldn’t get over the combination we had just experienced – the family, the beach, the price, the food, the weather, the town – and yapped about it a bit too much in the pub. The result? Six more of our friends are going next year. It is such a powerful message, but so often ignored or forgotten: We exist on a planet that swarms with ho-hum products and services. If you deliver something memorable, you are
distinct
. If you do achieve this, then word of mouth will get you new business.