THE division of labour has always been fair at Confidential.
Three weeks ago our Editor went to Simon Rogan’s The French in The Midland Hotel, the most acclaimed restaurant in Manchester, for a slap-up fifteen course lunch, yes fifteen, and sank in the region of three matching bottles of wines to boot. It started at 12.30 and lasted for four hours. It also cost in the region of £340.
They should dish this out in prisons for every meal as standard. The rate of reoffending would inevitably take a rapid decline. In fact, incarceration itself would become a thing of the past
I, on the other hand, get to review the Arndale’s prized Food Court, with at least fifteen hundred strains of varying trans fats, yes fifteen hundred, with matching cokes and a bellow chasing me from the office, ‘Be back by two, would you good boy?’ It all cost under £20.
Sigh.
The (chol)escalator
The Arndale Food Court is a conspicuous construction, keeping watch to the east and west along Market Street, the glass-sided, airport stairs looking (chol)escalator swallows the hordes up into its bosom.
It’s the stairway to fast food heaven, choc-a-bloc with prams and fake tans, tracksuits, disputes and ugg boots, backpacks, snapbacks, backchats, tattoos and bright Nike shoes. Wailing kids with mothers, friends with brothers and one or two young fervid lovers.
That was my John Cooper Clarke bit.
The 3T jackpot: tan, tats, trackieThis was a Friday lunchtime and the place was teeming with folk, noise and noisy folk. The Court resembles a large sixth-form refectory populated by those of the Open University, so anyone really. Dotted amongst the throngs were the odd suit, Arndale troops and parents worryingly plying their kids with fried food and coca-cola.
The Change4Life lot would've been screwing.
But the scene, for the most part, looked like something from the film Kidulthood. Rabbles of feral school goers in the throes of a haribo-high competing for the role of Alpha in front of a table of young girls who were much more interested in taking selfies and taking photos of each other taking selfies than the show being played out in front.
Things take a turn for the quiet as one of three security guards approach the rabble. They retreat.
Now, as a general rule of thumb, I tend not to dine anywhere that requires three security guards in order to keep the peace. It gives the whole ‘mess’ hall an institutionalised and almost penal quality. As though if you dared to jump on the table banging your lunch tray about you may very well be picked off by a sniper from the girders above. We shall have no more riots in Manchester.
The scene
Surely though, there can be no spot in all of Greater Manchester that exhibits the cities all-embracing multiculturalism than the Arndale Food Court. It’s heart-warming. The people brought together through a mutual love of processed slop.
But enough of that, on to the food dear boy, the food. Let’s just say that if I’d wanted that must salt in my system, I’d have driven to Formby Sands and licked the sea.
Unsuprisingly, McDonalds, KFC and Subway held the monopoly in the Food Court, with more than three quarters of the total customers queuing at these three vendors. I reasoned that wherever you are in the country, the likelihood is that you can pick yourself up a BigMac, Sub or Bargain Bucket within less than five minutes walk.
Somewhere on Lundy Island, a nearly inaccessible three mile, 400 foot, granite outcrop in the middle of the Bristol Channel, a lonely pubescent teenager stands behind the counter of a McDonalds waiting for his first customer.
STARTER: TACO BELL
I decided upon Taco Bell for the starter, an American institution since 1962, this American chain serves more than 2bn customers in the US each year. That’s a fair bit of salsa. There’s but four restaurants in the UK and one of those is in a United States Air Force base.
Like much of the Food Court, Taco Bell seemed to exist under varying degrees of organised chaos, the old British institution of queuing had been thrown to the wind and order numbers that seemed to follow no logical structure were being barked from behind the counters, '1062, 12, 3783, 2089, 7' – It was quite remarkable that anyone got anything to eat at all, let alone what they actually ordered.
Organised chaos
I’ll hand it to the Arndale Food court lot though; the majority are grafters of the highest order and receive their fair amount of unwarranted grief. They’re probably getting paid 27p an hour too.
In amongst the tacos, burritos, nachos, nachos, burritos and tacos there had to be something that could constitute a starter. A carton of fries would certainly not suffice. I was after a real taste of Mexico.
I went for a soft beef burrito from the 99p menu. As close to a starter as I could find.
Now if my real taste of Mexico looked something like soggy lettuce and three shards of grated cheese thrown into a Greggs sausage roll and punched by both of the Klitschko brothers for three days, then yeah this was a bona fide taste of Mexico.
Soft beef burrito (99p): Squashing is not optional
Unfortunately, I’ve had tangy cheese bags of Doritos that represented Mexican food more justly than this – the mince looked and tasted tinned, the tortilla was crusty at the edges and the lettuce tasted as though it’d been swimming for four hours before limping into the wrap.
But hey, it’s 99p. What did I expect?
The coke was fizzy enough.
Little did I know at this point that this soggy and sad looking mini-burrito was to be the highlight of the three course, three vendor experience.
Oh well, onwards and downwards.
Di Maggio's: Quiet for a reason
MAIN: DI MAGGIO’S
One outlet I’d never heard of before was Di Maggio’s on the far north side of the Food Court, an Italian-Scottish restaurant chain using Manchester to make their first step into the English market. They needn’t have bothered. Step back please.
With no customers and a beautifully quaint Italian lake scene splayed across the wall beside the counters, Di Maggio’s seemed a fairly safe option for the main course.
Pizza, pasta and fries, you can’t go too wrong serving pizza, pasta and fries can you? Well, Di Maggio's can. And not just a bit wrong, so very, very wrong.
The macaroni cheese (£4.45) was dished up on a paper plate, a paper fucking plate, the last time I ate from a paper plate I was wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, cramming Monster Munch into my face and probably ruining some other kids birthday party by being a right little shit.
Slop on a paper plate
Now I like to think that I’ll eat most things, except pickled onions, anything with horseradish and I once refused to bite off a beating snakes heart freshly cut from the body of a cobra in the outer reaches of Vietnam (apparently Gordan Ramsey could though). If you chew you pass out from poisoning. Sounds nice doesn’t it.
But put it like this, I’d have taken the beating Cobra heart, smothered in horseradish and chewed it over and over again in place of this abomination. I’m also pretty sure there was an added hint of grit in there.
They should dish this out in prisons for every meal. Incarceration would become a thing of the past; there’d be no more crime in the whole of the UK. Just for the fear of having to eat this bloody macaroni cheese.
Still, the coke was fizzy enough.
Note: If you want mac’n’cheese at its finest then head to the Sugar Junction on Tib Street in Northern Quarter, it’s homely, stodgy, beautifulness in a heart-shaped bowl of love.
I needed another main course. Oh well, once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
Half looks like a chippy
SECOND MAIN (because the other one was so crap): HARRY RAMSDEN’S
I needed something safe, something edible, something from Britain’s longest established restaurant chain, something founded in 1928 in a wooden hut in West Yorkshire by a bloke called Harry, presumably.
Surely I could rely on good ‘ole fish and chips (£4.49) with mushy peas (£1.10) to restore the balance.
Well, Harry’s looked in part like a chip shop, it certainly smelled like a chip shop, but did it taste like a chip-shop?
No, not really.
Small fish and chips (£4.49)
The outside of the chips were tough and akin to chewing on greasy cardboard. The fish, which came in a suspiciously unnatural shape (processed perhaps, from a big freezer cabinet) was overcooked, bland and rubbery. You could have probably deep fried a large triangular white eraser and it wouldn’t have tasted as rubbery.
Much like the mac’n’cheese, the fish and chips remained unfinished.
The mushy peas were fine, they were gelatinous, they were green, and they were mushy. That is all.
Still, the coke was fizzy enough.
Redeeming feature: The west facing vista from Arndale Food Court
By now, I'd consumed so much salt that I’d started to turn into an anchovy and had sank so much coke to clean out the taste in my mouth I had only seven teeth left. Added to this, I was pretty sure that the cheese and salt from Di Maggio’s had formed a temporary coalition and made off with my tongue.
Of course what did I expect?
The Arndale Food Court is all the world's fast-food market condensed into one greasy sump. And people love it. (And listen, I'm also partial to a bucket of KFC when trying to get through the day following a long, long night out.)
The Food Court exists beyond criticism in its own spinning vortex of salt and additives. Jamie Oliver would faint but whatever anybody says won't matter. People want this food because a) it's cheap, b) it fills them, c) they like it.
The Food Court lurks in that limbo, beloved of brand name fast foods - and alien to Confidential foodies - where food is functional and best when delivered through the comfort blanket of a fascia that reads McDonalds, Subway etc...
Yet the staff work hard, the place is kept generally clean by a marauding and restless band of cleaners and it caters to a great number of shoppers from all over the world spending money in our city centre. Which is never a bad thing.
Each to their own and all that.
And if you want an anthropological, rather than a gastronomical, experience over lunch this is definitely your place.
(David, next week, I'll be sending you on a Ginster taste test. Ed)
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