Anyone who has ever eaten at Nando’s will know the chips are
the soft, puffy, mulchy sort that bring back unpleasant memories of school
dinners. You know that sort of half-baked, oven chip taste. A film of jaundiced,
fried potato barely holding in a pillow of tasteless white mush.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that the chicken chain has
admitted using McCain frozen chips in its restaurants. It came after a student
working at Nando’s grassed them up to the Leicester Mercury newspaper, and
other media outlets lifted, I mean followed up, the story.
Nando’s was quick to point out that these were not the sort
of McCain chips you might bung in the oven at home. But instead were a “specific
recipe” exclusively made for the chain – which does make you wonder just how
much effort went into making the chips as unpleasant as they are.
It hardly needs to be said that the outrage over this
damning indictment caused much merriment and vitriol on Twitter and other
social media dungeons, perhaps more so than usual because the snow meant more
people than normal were sitting in their underpants, firing off tweets that
no-one would ever read, rather than braving two inches of snow and struggling
into work.
I haven’t the fortitude of character to bother checking
whether there is now a chipgate hashtag in circulation, as I suspect there
probably is. Just a handful of quoted tweets, for what now passes as journalism
on the BBC website, was enough to put me off, with one moronic tweeter going as
far as describing it as the “revelation of the year”.
KFC staff caught gobbing into chicken buckets or McDonald’s workers
filling salt sachets with ricin might be worthy contenders for revelations,
perhaps even of the year. But buying in chips from McCain is hardly a hanging
offence, and Nando’s could help itself much more by simply training its kitchen
staff to cook the chips properly.
To say the story is overdone is an understatement. What I
find interesting is the attention these reports about what goes on in the
kitchens of budget restaurants get. You can sense a definite snobbery and
delight in middle-class foodie circles (i.e. foodie circles), presumably from
people who would never lower themselves to eat in Nando’s or KFC, or at least
would never admit to doing so. The schadenfreude at such ‘revelations’ is
palpable among those who dine in far more expensive restaurants.
What I have never understood is how this level of outraged, puritan
scrutiny rarely targets the top restaurants. Perhaps these places are just far
better at concealing their tracks? Surely it is far more of a crime to pay ten
times more than you would at Nando’s and then be served bought-in food.
At Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant, the chips arrived in sealed
plastic bags ready to be fried – or at least they did when I worked there. They
are not from McCain. Instead they are made at an industrial estate on the
outskirts of Padstow, by Stein’s staff who also churn out all the Cornish pasties
and chutneys that have made him one of the richest men in Cornwall - upsetting
the locals no end (and not for just using the wrong type of pastry).
He can hardly be criticised for that. The explanation when I
asked was that it was a space-saving ploy and there was not enough room in the
seafood restaurant’s large, airy kitchen to peel potatoes and hand cut chips.
Same as much of the other veg.
However, what did slightly irk was seeing other food come
directly out of a jar or packet. As I say, you’d forgive this in a café selling
£6 or £7 lunches, but not in a restaurant that charges Michelin star prices,
without actually having one.
When I did my brief stint in the kitchen there (admittedly a
long time ago, but I’d be surprised if much has changed), if you ordered the
potted shrimp, all the chef had to do was open a bought-in pot and put the contents
on a plate with (home-made) toast. You could have saved yourself a small
fortune just by going to Asda. The seafood pasta dish was almost as easy. But
for that price you might think Stein’s staff were making the pasta themselves.
Instead, they just boiled up packets of dried De Cecco linguine, which is a very
good one, but you take my point.
I have heard countless tales from chefs working in many of
the top restaurants in Britain, who can tell similar stories. Even the three-star
Fat Duck was no stranger to the practice. The bread arrived each morning,
supplied by a boutique baker, which is forgivable given the size of Heston Blumenthal’s
coffin-sized kitchen. And Waitrose helped out with the sardine on toast sorbet.
The pastry chefs could never have been accused of shouting it from the
rooftops, and you got the feeling that any bought-in food would have been kept
under lock and key away from prying eyes, as the great and the good were sometime
given tours of the kitchens.
It was only when the pastry cooks on ice cream duty said they
had run out of tinned sardines one day, that a hapless chef was sent off to the
nearby Waitrose in Maidenhead for a few tins of own-brand fish, that it became obvious.
