While we're all fired up about food, and off the back of Tim T's tale of the Great Canadian Muffin Co., let's dredge up old food outlets.
I'll start with The Great American Disaster. Now, I always thought this was inventive and rather daring name for a restaurant chain. Do you remember these? Very 1970s hamburger joints, in as much as they were red brick with rock music and pictures of things like the Hindenberg on the wall. The burgers seemed massive and brilliant and exciting. Not burgers like we know them to be today of course, with handmade this, organic that and seeded whatever, but bog standard burgers and chips. But they were great. Of course, eventually it must have been a self-fulfilling prophecy as it no longer exists.
Not that we ate out often though - once a year at the Berni Inn for us (every Sunday at the marina for Mrs F-C, but she's posh) - but TGAD was a birthday type place, which is very exciting when you're nine. We weren't in with the in crowd. We were in with the Berni Inn crowd.
So what else? We won't be obvious and talk Wimpy, so who remembers Huckleberry's? Another burger place, but more McDonald's fast foody. And what about Pizzaland or The Deep Pan Pizza Company? There was one in every high street. They were all over London, as was Pastaficcio. We once had a huge row in the one in Twickenham with a waitress who accused us of smoking 'pot' in the restaurant. We accused her of overuse of the microwave. No wonder they no longer exist. And they were herbal cigarettes, honestly.
Any more?
