Lesson #1: Pimp Your Fast-Casual Game.
First of all: ‘Fast-casual’ is a really horrible phrase. It’s right out of the same business-and-bollocks phrase-book as ’synergy’ and ‘action that initiative’ and people who say it should be regarded with nothing better than an icy cold stare of pure disdain, to let them know that in your eyes, they’ve fucked up. If you’re holding a drink, preferably hot or even more preferably cold, take this opportunity to pour it down the offender’s trousers, while maintaining fierce eye contact. And when I say down the trousers, I don’t mean spill it on the denim, corduroy or cotton that happens to be covering their legs and genitals. The fabric didn’t do you any harm. The fabric didn’t say "fast-casual”. No, I mean slowly and calmly pull said-trousers away from the waist, in order that you may pour said-drink directly onto the genitals. If done with the perfect icy stare said-offendor will realise his mistake and be driven to shamefully accept his punishment with the same silence which you so generously give him. Thus the whole operation may be a soundless one. Beautiful. And much like in Peter Pan, every time you do this, someone who works in HR dies.
Anyway, I should explain what ‘fast-casual’ actually means. Fast-casual refers to restaurants that serve fast and cheap-to-make food in a casual restaurant setting. Thus your food comes quick but you can stay as long as you want eating it. Examples: Nandos, Wagamama, Wahaca, Yo Sushi, Byron Burger, Giraffe, Chipotle.
Pizza Express invented this type of dining, or at least brought it to the UK’s mainstream, and when they did so they revolutionised the way our parents ate out. Suddenly there was a place you could go that was a restaurant, but didn’t feel as stuffy or formal as the full eating-out experience. Kids were welcome, the interiors were strictly controlled by branding companies’ look-books so as to never be off-puttingly ugly or intimidatingly stylish, and the food was tasty, affordable and 100% reliable. Now Pizza Express's successors dominate our high streets, serving up decent food for decent prices across the UK. This is a key word: decent. No one should settle for decent. Settling for decent sucks. But enough of this for now.
Fast-casual is now the UK’s favourite way of eating out, and the businesses who do it make big fucking money. Let me say that again, BIG fucking money. Byron Burger sold for £100m, despite only having 34 sites. And the dudes who bought it weren’t buying 34 x £2.9mil restaurants, they were buying £100m of brand. Opening a restaurant is hard, really hard. It’s pretty much the hardest thing you can do. 95% of new restaurants in the UK fail within one year. That number goes up to 98% if you just look at London. Yet the Pizza Express brand is able to sustain 400 profitable restaurants in the UK. So Byron’s worth 100mil not because they have 34 restaurants, but because they could have 400. And £100m for 400 profitable restaurants is actually pretty cheap.
But, numbers aside, if - like me - you get a little sick at the thought of anyone mass-producing ‘premium’ burgers across 400 sites (or really any disconnect between cooking and a chef’s passion), here’s a silver lining to the corporate cloud of fast-casual: it’s inspiring its own little counter revolution. Where once there was only Pizza Express standing bravely in an empty wasteland, a field of competition it had created and now utterly dominated, now there is Homeslice and Pizza East. David might be so small that Goliath doesn’t give a shit about him, but hell, who cares as long as David makes great pizza and you know where he lives?
Wagamama was set up by the same guy who founded michelin-starred Hakkasan and Yauatcha, so to say that he knows how to make good food is a bit of an understatement. The theory behind his highstreet shop was that people outside the 1% would now be able to afford to eat decent quality, flavourful Asian food. And that’s great. I mean that - if it sounds like I’m slagging off fast-casual, I’m not. I do think that’s really great. But if you live in London, congratulations, because for you there’s something greater. Actually there’s three things: Bonedaddies, Koya and Tonkotsu. I won’t go into detail about the places I’m recommending now, because I think a lot of them will get their own posts sometime in the future. But take my word for it, you don’t want to go to Nandos, you want to go to Chicken Shop. And, most of all, please: you don’t want to go to Byron, if you can go to Patty and Bun.
The only problem with knowing these places is that they come with a curse. What I like to call ‘The Burden of Knowledge’. And what my friends call, ‘Tom being a food dickhead’. See, I used to love Wagamamas, I still do love Nandos to an extent, and the first time I ate a Byron Burger I thought my world had changed forever. Because Byron used to make great burgers. Or, rather, I used to think they made great burgers, and this is the problem: I can’t honestly say now, looking back, whether they genuinely did make great burgers and they’ve dropped the ball since, or whether my standards are just so impossibly high these days, so generously pumped up by London’s burger revolution, that I simply cannot appreciate anymore what - to most people - is still a damn good burger. Now when I have to go to regular fast-casual places I feel a bit like I imagine recovered drug addicts do: penitent, guilty almost that I’ve experienced things that most people don’t get to experience, but still faintly incredulous that normality is really this drab.
So anyway, I’ve rambled a bit here, but to conclude, in summation, and at the end of the day: Byron are crap. And if you love Byron, and you think I’m an intolerable food snob, just hold that judgment until you've tried somewhere better. Go to Patty and Bun. Get a burger, get some wings. It’ll change your life. You’re welcome.
