TOM JACKSON, MARY TURNER/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE60 The Times Magazine
all over Britain, which has announced plans
to capitalise upon the slaughter by opening
50 new restaurants in the next three years. And
that’s small fry compared with foreign invaders
like Wendy’s, with its square hamburgers and
position in the American market second only
to McDonald’s, which has seen the carnage
here and promised a 400-outlet invasion of its
own, or Popeyes, the “Louisiana fried chicken”
chain that is aiming for 350 in double-quick
time, in this relatively small country, which
towards the end of the past decade was- laughably now – beginning to think of itself
as one of the restaurant capitals of the world.
These last two, Wendy’s and Popeyes,
launched their respective putsches in
Stratford, east London, at the end of 2021,
and so, on the last day of the school holidays,
with two young children to entertain, I hauled
them down there for a crack at two cuisines
that they enjoy a lot more than I do.
I thought we’d try Popeyes first, as fried
chicken is a marginally more interesting
dish than hamburgers, carrying with it, as it
does, the lively political backstory of a recipe
derived from the marrying of West African
culinary traditions with indigenous North
American and colonial ones during the slavery
era, followed by the appropriation of an
essentially black dish by white cooks and
recipe writers, the century-long racist mockery
of African-Americans as primitive hungerers
after a single foodstuff, and the wholesale
profiteering on the dish by Colonel Sanders and
what activists now call his “plantation imagery”.
But I tend to think, yes, sure, white
exploiters stole fried chicken from the black
Eating out Giles Coren
hey’re coming: the giant, always
hungry fast-food corporations, red in
tooth and maw, slack-jowled, heavy
with drool, seeking out new lands
to conquer, pockets to plunder, new
year’s resolutions to sunder, irresolute
guts to fill, waistlines to bloat... And
they are beside themselves with
baser appetite and more rank cupidity than
ever, this January, as post-Covid Britain lies
broken and defenceless before their advance.
Decimated during the pandemic by two
years of ineffective and mistimed government
responses, hysterical lockdowns, mysterious
U-turns, laughable curfews, arbitrary
drinking bans, unfathomable social distancing
regulations, cynical landlords, baffling
paperwork, steepling debt, general public
wussiness and closure after closure after
closure, the British independent restaurant
scene lies battered and groaning and close to
death – think of the famous crane shot of the
military hospital after the Battle of Atlanta
in Gone with the Wind, with you as Scarlett
O’Hara, the winsome foodie in a wide-
brimmed straw hat and long pink dress, vainly
searching for somewhere nice that’s survived...
But it’s not all bad news. Not if you’re a
heavily funded megachain with cash to burn,
such as PizzaExpress, for example, under
new finance and rubbing its hands like Fagin
at the vacant high street sites popping upT
‘If this kind of thing is what’s
left of our restaurant culture
then, like Winston Smith
with Big Brother, we’re going
to have to learn to love it’
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen