Turn up your nose at chain restaurants? Think independents are always best?
Yet in The Oracle many chains are doing well. Tom Fahey goes beind the scenes to investigate.
I’m standing behind the counter at Mission Burrito and owner Jan Rasmussen is telling me about his healthy respect for McDonald’s.
“You can have one restaurant, be there and personally get your vision across, but can you still do it with 10, or 10,000?
“McDonald’s have been amazingly successful at using systems to give people food they really want to eat”.
It’s all a bit disconcerting really. I’m a regular at Mission’s branch in The Oracle. As a five-site operation that’s still locally owned, it’s the only chain restaurant in Reading I feel any enthusiasm to visit. And yet here’s the boss showing his love for the very uniformity and procedure that’s always driven me to independent restaurants.
Which is really why I’m here. I want to know, from the inside, what defines a chain restaurant. Is it pure ignorance to instinctively turn your nose up, or do fundamental differences behind the scenes mean you’ll always be better fed in an independent place? Do cold hard culinary facts support a disdain for chains or peg it as the misguided opinion of incurable food snobs?
Mission’s tiny kitchen makes the answer abundantly clear.
Pots of black and pinto beans laced with onions or bacon bubble away, chicken breasts simmer beneath a slick of vibrant red chilli, the air permeated by smoky ancho and chipotle imported from Mexico.
I glimpse fresh habaneros, jalapeños and leafy bunches of coriander, and stewed pork (apparently bought from a butcher “halfway between Reading and Oxford”) melts into herbs and spices before being shredded and roasted to become the juicy carnitas I return here for time and again.
While he uses a blender as big as my leg to turn a crate of pristine avocados into the day’s batch of guacamole, Davide, a chef from Valencia who grew up working in his father’s restaurant and has now been at Mission for 18 months, explains that the only thing they not made here are the flour tortillas – “but we do buy them from Theale”, adds Jan, enthusiastically stressing local credentials.
Three chefs work in Mission’s tiny kitchen on Friday and Saturday, and, like Davide, they’re all proper chefs, trusted to judge that food is prepared carefully and consistently.
While Jan, an ex-consultant for PWC, is clearly more businessman than idealistic foodie, he still seems incredibly proud of never having compromised on fresh ingredients and from-scratch cooking while growing Mission to five branches.
I ask him what he thinks when people say Reading has become a clone town at least partly thanks to chain restaurants like his.
“Ultimately, the chains do things really well, and they’re sustainable. One-site restaurants can struggle to make a profit and are often on the verge of going under.
“If a restaurant implements procedures that let it stay in business and keep serving good food, why object to new branches?”
Leaving Jan’s kitchen I’m almost in agreement, but his argument rests on good food being the norm. Having worked in a few of them, my understanding of how chain restaurants operate is to drape cheap, part-prepared food in a brand that’s familiar, cool or comfortable enough to make it taste good. A trick, basically.
Surely Mission, with its compact menu and café-style service, was an exception? To find out, I needed to go somewhere I wouldn’t normally visit.
Las Iguanas, one of The Oracle’s chain mainstays, has recently secured a Gold Standard Award from Investors In People, a body that helps companies implement employee best practice. But what does that mean for those of us who eat there?
One of my big problems with chains is their impact on the development of new chefs. All the independent restaurants I know share the same biggest operational headache: “just can’t get the staff”.
Anyone learning to cook in the chains I worked at received a very narrow education unique to our employers’ various processes and systems; something quite different from traditional chef training where multiple styles of food, endless ingredients and as many techniques for prep and cooking are all ingrained through the high-speed repetition and accuracy that separates professionals from amateurs.
When I arrive, just in time for a Tuesday lunchtime rush, today’s two chefs are somewhat up against it. Matthew started here two years ago as a kitchen porter, quickly working his way up to commis chef, and is nothing if not efficient; nimbly jumping between deep fryer and microwave as he crisps squid, chicken wings and patatas bravas, melts cheese on nachos, pre-cooks half chickens and heats the filling for Cuban-style sandwiches.
Across the little corridor-like kitchen, Gautham, a sous chef who’s been with Las Iguanas for three years, is a blur.
Gautham is proud of his food. “The best thing about Las Iguanas is that it’s fresh. We cook from scratch.
He’s right – as we speak chicken breasts are doing their requisite hour in the oven coated in yogurt and spices; onions soften gently soon to be joined by garlic, tomatoes and chipotle chillies for one of about 20 sauces made here; in the walk-in, peppers and a cornucopia of chillies protrude from beneath plastic pot upon plastic pot of sauce; triangles of corn tortilla are relentlessly deep-fried to accommodate an apparently insatiable demand for nachos; and, in the heat of service, hand-sized prawns spit fiercely from a skillet.
One chef serving main meals to around 50 diners would be unthinkable in many kitchens, and while Gautham’s hard work is unquestionable, he does have a little help.
Many items come pre-sliced, some of the sauces and dips have a pre-made base, but burnt flour becomes ever more present in the deep fryer as service progresses, and the kitchen gets pretty frantic as service gets well under way.
Matthew is leaving in a few weeks for East Asian chain Tampopo. But why? Doesn’t he like it at Las Iguanas?
He does, “but it’s important for chefs to learn different cuisines – especially a beginner”.
I get the impression he’d love to chop onions, shred cabbages, fillet fish, blanch chips, blend avocados and portion chickens, but, with only two men in the kitchen, if this time-intensive prep was done on site, customers might well be left hungry and chefs would be far harder to train and find.
Plus, as I leave, the dining room is still heaving. If commercial microwaves and jars of avocado sauce have any effect on how much customers chowing down on Matthew’s nachos enjoy them, there’s no hint of it here.
Perhaps the answer lies in branding. Las Iguanas is fun, casual and cool with a funky Latin vibe and some of Reading’s best cocktails. It’s a brand that’s very easy to like.
But can a brand really make food taste great? For the answer to that question I needed to go somewhere with a very, very powerful brand: Jamie’s Italian.
Halfway up the staircase that separates Jamie’s two floors, head chef Flavio stops to point out the plain, black and white documents that cover its walls.
“These are about our ingredients – so everyone can explain them to customers. The products are highly priced but we use them to create dishes that anyone can afford,” he says.
Reading along, it’s hard to argue – free range beef from Tillyfour Farm in Aberdeen, San Daniele ham, barrel-aged risotto rice and salmon smoked at the foot of Ben Nevis – for a high street restaurant it seems almost needlessly fancy.
Of course, if there’s one thing guaranteed to make even the ponciest produce sound as approachable as baked beans, it’s Jamie-speak, and the wealth of information dotted across this wall sounds as if the man himself has been busy with pen and paper.
Why is onglet steak so-called and where is it cut from? What shape is radiatori pasta and which sauces should it go with? Which mate of Gennaro’s inspired the restaurant’s lamb breast recipe? What blend of beef cuts are used in the burgers?
I’m racking my brains for more than two or three local restaurants where the chefs – let alone the front of house – possess anything close to this level of knowledge about their food.
Apparently, though, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Go further backstage and glossy pictures of dishes from this and menus past cover every spare inch of whitewash. Flavio describes each so proudly it might be his own creation, and in fact, some are.
“The company gives us the restaurant and we run it. We have a budget we must achieve but I can be creative and I can train others to be creative,” he says.
While Jamie’s main menu changes four times each year, Flavio has daily control over the restaurant’s specials. Of course they must be Jamie-style but today’s lamb breast and ricotta ravioli, grilled trout and beetroot, braised shin of beef and fusilli with sausage ragu couldn’t be further from formula food. I know this because, along with the waiting staff, I ate them. I don’t know another restaurant where this happens daily – every special sampled by the staff who’ll serve it while Chef explains ingredients and cooking processes.
“Fritto misto is my favourite dish to plate – I like to stand the scallop up, get nice height on the prawns – I like to take my time over it,” says Deedee, one of the commis chefs.
He is also convinced his insistence on breaking off rough-chunks of polenta “to make the edges proper crispy” rather than cutting neat squares has been adopted by the company in all sites.
I get the impression it’s a coincidence, but there’s no doubting his enthusiasm for making food as good as it can be.
Similarly, Paul, a service chef who’ll be running the pass today, explains that “we try to run out of food every day to start from fresh every morning”.
Prakash, a pasta chef who’ll later be juggling over 40 pans and boilers simultaneously, are cooking in a way that requires more than just following procedure.
It’s real cooking done by chefs with genuine enthusiasm for it.
They get a little help – most desserts aren’t made here, the cannelloni is bought from a deli and two pasta sauce bases come pre-made. But with every strand of pasta rolled daily, focaccia baked from scratch, chips steamed and fried, risottos stirred with care and polenta boiled, set and crisped, it’s not a lot of help.
Far more useful, in fact, is the pervasive enthusiasm for food that makes Jamie’s Italian possible.
Alongside all the pictures of dishes and ingredients are snaps of the staff having a right old time doing foodie things.
To understand why this is important, think back to brands. If a chef believes in a brand whose key values are fresh food, great produce and good value, those are the things he’ll dish up.
As an owner who’s still seen in his branches displaying irrepressible enthusiasm, Jan Rasmussen is at the centre of his brand: staff feel the same and they make great burritos.
Jamie Oliver obviously can’t do the same, but by keeping genuine enthusiasm for quality food at heart of every Jamie’s Italian, he might as well be standing on the pass.
So do real chefs, careful cooking and good ingredients leave me eating my anti-chain words (as well as a rather tasty breast of lamb and polenta chips)?
Am I really the worst kind of food snob for firmly believing that chains are best avoided when, clearly, some of them are nurturing talent to deliver great food in a way many independent restaurants never will?
Two days later, I inspect a pub near Sonning for a guidebook. The menu has nearly 80 items, chips are mahogany, sauces taste of burnt flour, carved cucumber garnishes are everywhere, steaks are incinerated, the butternut ravioli is like glue.
I pay for the meal and deny them a guide entry. I might visit 50 pubs like this every year and yet I’ve never been tempted to decry the entire business of serving food in a pub on the basis that some of them don’t do it very well.
Which, having seen how they’re run, is exactly how I’ve come to feel about chain restaurants: some are good, some are no so good, but either way there are enough of them in Reading for us to only need visit the good ones.
