Big Maconomics
In every McDonald’s around the world, workers perform similar tasks with similar, shipped ingredients stored in similar freezers and prepared according to similar international protocol. This matters to economists, because McDonald’s offers an international apples-to-apples comparison of wages and prices.
[PREVIEW] MEATmarket / Covent Garden, London
MEATMarket, the latest offering from MEATrepeneurs Yianni and Scott, is a fast-food version of their one-stop-burger-shoppe model, hosting some old MEATfavourites as well as spanking new incarnations of classic American-style fast food.
If you’re at all interested in the movements of the Meat[_____] crew then you’ve probably already seen a few reports on this new site in Covent Garden that was previewing last weekend. So, to cut to the chase, here’s our take on it.
If you plonked Gott’s Roadside in a locale like DownUnder in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, we reckon this is what you’d get.
It’s the counterpoint to MEATliquor: the menu is optimised for speed and takeaway convenience. Yianni gave us a quick tour of the kitchen, explaining how it’s been organised so each dish has its own cooking station which will keep wait times to a minimum and make it a real option to the Covent Garden lunchtime crowd, as well as the post-theatre folks who don’t have anywhere to go.
The burgers are the quicker cooking dual patty versions with a few new additions. The Black Palace isn’t really a White Castle slider, more a version 2.0 of the Ibzo burger that was briefly available during the Meatwagon era eighteen months ago. How time flies.
The jalapeño poppers are a proper must-have, just like the deep fried pickles are at MEATliquor. Perfect heat.
The deep fried bacon covered Ripper Hot Dog was the surprise star of the evening.
The velocity of these guys is incredible. #MEATeasy only just closed down thirteen months ago and these guys don’t show any signs of slowing down.
Yianni is getting to indulge his love of Wendy’s and A&W with this one. We love it too. It’s a proper fast food joint with a shiny, new kitchen.
The strip lit market location makes it immediately different. And if we’re honest, underneath those lights, the burgers are more functional than aesthetically pleasing. Our suggestion? Wrap them up. Have some tongue-in-cheek fun with the packaging.
Jubilee Market is one of those especially grotty bits of Covent Garden. You’ll sit on a balcony above it, looking down upon a sea of tourist tat and Microsoft Word signage. It’s quite the juxtaposition and we can only hope tourists do stumble upstairs by accident.
It’s going to be another rip-roaring success, and it might just be the first step to making this corner of Covent Garden something to be proud of.
- Simon & Rob.
[REVIEW] Ribs, Pulled Pork Sliders and Burgers / Duke’s Brew and Que / Haggerston, London
We wanted a huge bowl of the pulled pork
From the outside, Dukes Brew and Que wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Jeeves & Wooster, squeezed between a building wrapped in scaffolding and a council estate in Hackney-but-still-the-rough-bit Haggerston. The juxtaposition is evident inside as a throng of well dressed 9-to-5ers mob the bar, leaving the local drunk looking bewildered. Poor bloke, he only wants a pint of fucking bitter. Later, when he bowls up to bar for another scoop, the front of house will try and give his tiny table by the window away to a trendy young couple, and he will not be best pleased.
That’s the thing - it is a boozer, with most of the crowd queuing at the bar for one of the impressive selection of beers here solely for that reason (our pale ale loving compadre was ecstatic). But it’s also a restaurant. An arguably good balance. And yet, we are still a bit disconcerted since the FOH lady chooses to ignore us and we find our pre-booked table on our own and wait a good ten minutes before the waitress decides to give us the time of day. In short, it looks like a pub, but it’s definitely a restaurant. Not much space for those just there for the sauce.
The menu is a bit odd for somewhere touting itself as a barbecue place - there is a lot of steak going on, and a burger. And the only pulled pork available is housed within in ‘sliders’. They’ve also committed the cardinal “mission statement” sin as you can see from the picture above.
We ordered everything vaguely barbecue, and a burger.
Let’s start with that burger. The patty was thick, moist and packed a distinctly barbecue flavour, almost as if it had been smoked itself, which was quite novel. The sauce with it was fresh and spicy sweet, and the bun did a stand up job housing the lot. Yep, it was a barbecue burger, of sorts, and whilst not mind-blowing, it wasn’t bad. It did taste a bit like a frankfurter though, which some of you might find some disconcerting.
On to the ribs. The pork were pleasingly big, pink and chewy. The beef ribs were heavier on the gristle and didn’t quite have enough fat to keep them as palatable, or enough sauce to keep them moist.
Both of them however were criminally sweet, and we have a theory about it. Duke’s clearly have some kind of Memphis-style house rub they’re applying to all their ribs, be they cow or pig. We think that once they’ve been smoked, they’re re-dunked into the rub and flash-grilled so the sugar caramelises just before they’re sent out. Now, this is a problem. The dark sugary bark does indeed look really good, but there is an overwhelming caramel taste and smell to both types of rib.
Worse than that, the flash-nature of that grilling means you get the odd grain of sugar stuck between your teeth, which gives it that shuddering granulated sugar crunch that is far from pleasant. We’re fine with sweetness in ‘cue, but the sugar itself should not be identifiable by texture.
Gross.
All is not lost though. The best thing by a country fried mile were the pulled pork sliders - dinky little gems of moist pulled pork topped with a zingy slaw, served in a brilliant dinky brioche bun. We all agreed a big daddy version of one of these would have been epic. Unfortunately, the fact that you only get three of them in a mains serving is ultimately too stingy.
We wanted a huge bowl of the pulled pork and it’s just not an option on the menu.
The sides were fine, the only disappointment being the mac ‘n cheese. The pasta was topped with lots of rubbery grilled cheese without any real evidence of a proper cheese sauce. Macaroni with cheese if you will. Amateurish.
They’ve clearly done their USA BBQ research too, they’ve got the rolls of greaseproof paper right, but the menu feels focus-grouped to death (steak, steak, steak). Duke’s guys - do what you know you can do.
Duke’s is going to draw inevitable comparisons with Pitt Cue Co (which we will be reviewing soon): everything is served similarly, on similar trays, with a similar slaw side, with that familiar New/Old Filament Lightbulb Aesthetic.
But we’re not going to bother - the subtlety and complexity of Pitt Cue’s flavours, crossed with its significantly lower cost and more convenient location really doesn’t warrant one.
- Rob & Simon.
[REVIEW] Childhood Memories / TGI Friday’s / Stratford, London
“The burger bun is actually pretty good…”
We’re sure a lot of you have fond memories of TGI Friday’s from your youth. Even though you probably won’t admit it in public.
We certainly do. To us it was a place of magical wonder, full of bright, garish awesomeness. The staff were always effervescent, covered in their own quirky, idiosyncratic collage of badges (Rob’s pretty sure he was once served by one waitress wearing roller skates). The bar was always a hive of excitable chatter, bottles being juggled about with skilful abandon by Tom Cruise-esque bartenders. They had an uncanny knack of gluing things to the walls: guitar, baseball bats, American football helmets. It was the equivalent of Disney World in a restaurant.
The food? Man, neither of us can remember much about that, both having only soft-focus memories of steaks and sundaes. That, and it being a family friendly environment for one’s Dad to get drunk.
Neither of us have been there in decades, so it was with wide-eyed expectation of a truly amazing experience that we headed to their newest London booth in Westfield Stratford.
We weren’t disappointed. The place is massive! One of the booths is IN a New York Yellow Cab! Ridiculous!
Seated at our heavily spot-lit table, it felt like being in Las Vegas - with the ever so slightly too loud American pop tunes, the air con pumping out at constant speed, the floor-to-ceiling displays of Americana. We looked around dumbstruck. Maybe, just maybe this was going to be amazing!
We were brought down to Earth with a Deep Impact style bump. The prices seemed steep and the portion sizes were criminally small, something all too apparent when the starters of bone-in and boneless Buffalo wings, plus Chicken Fajita Nachos, turned up. “WTFs” reverberated, looking at the dozen or so nachos sparsely arranged on the huge plate in front of us.
Only a couple of tiny pieces of chicken were immediately discernable, and not many more after that. They were average at best and no one rushed to finish them. Both types of wings were bolstered by the liberal use of Frank’s on them, the boneless options having the same consistency as KFC popcorn chicken with glandular issues. But again, for the price and ‘sharing platter’ status, there just wasn’t enough of them.
As you can imagine by this point, we were not all that hopeful about the delectability of the mains that followed: a ‘Classic American’ burger with cheese and some Sizzling Blackened Chicken & Steak Fajitas.
The burger bun is actually pretty good, a ‘classic’ American Wonderbread / McDonald’s-style one - smooth, spongy, outrageously sweet and competently toasted. The special sauce is also a respectable mustardy thousand island-style effort.
It’s also worth saying that the thing smells incredible. Like it’s taken a bath in that weird Flame Grilled flavouring they use at Burger King. It can’t be natural.
The shortcomings are very visually apparent, and abhorrently unacceptable.
The patty is way too small for the bun, comically so, like a toddler trying to walk around in grown up shoes. We popped open the lid and saw a grey excuse for a patty that was overcooked, dry, and so densely packed that on biting it really didn’t feel like meat at all. But it tasted like meat, in that way chemicals make it taste like meat.
It was bad. Pretty fucking bad. And they have the nerve to advertise them as ‘juicy’.
On to the fajitas. Ever hopeful. Nobody does proper TexMex fajitas in London, despite what they try to say in the papers.
While the spicy seasoning that coated the peppers and onions was passable, it was the meat again that was flawed. The steak was a brown leather apology: dry, overcooked so it was like chewing a gristle fruit gum. The chicken tasted like those Birds Eye Chargrills, pumped full of water and reconstituted to shit. Even the chargrill taste was clearly synthetic.
You have never seen such a despondent bunch of lightly sozzled diners, the disappointment being all too sobering despite the plethora of icy booze we had thrown down ourselves.
For an establishment that advertises itself as the home of ‘fresh from the grill’ dishes, all of the meat here is severely lacking. Sadly, it is an all too common experience amongst chains that almost feel as if they have superseded the need to draw people in, so wide is their established consumer base. What is saddest of all is that this type of thing constitutes a decent meal for most people. A treat, even.
As a point of contrast, Rob had a stupendous three course lunch at Gauthier two days prior which came in three whole pounds under his share for TGI Friday’s. This only added further upset to the bill arriving.
There are 900 TGI Friday’s around the world. The company line is they serve the same thing globally. We would obviously never waste a meal in the US at one for the sake of comparison, but we have a hunch the portions wouldn’t be so dismal over there.
If only the Cheesecake Factory would come over instead, with its impossibly-priced bible menu. We can still hope.
- Rob & Simon.
