Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent by Barry Gibbons

Author:Barry Gibbons [Gibbons, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9781908864703
Google: C7PubOr_gTEC
Publisher: Infinite Ideas
Published: 2006-09-24T18:30:00+00:00

31. Fences of sausage

Not long ago, Donald Rumsfeld – who looks to me like John Denver might have done had he lived to 120 – aimed both barrels at something he called ‘Old Europe’. It sounded intriguing, so I went to find it for you – and to see if there’s something inside it called Old European Quick-Service.

Whatever Old Europe is (and I’m not sure Donald would know it if it bit him high on the inner groin), the river Danube is to it what the Mississippi is to the US. Drifting languidly along, it suddenly fools everybody by kicking south and heading for the Black Sea. Twenty kilometres south of this turn, the people from the hilly region on the west bank (Buda) decided to link up with the folk from the flat lands on the east of the river (Pest). Without, I suspect, paying a penny to ‘brand development consultants’, they came up with the name Budapest.

It is as ‘Old Europe’ as it gets, and it had been ten years since I last visited. The place feels wealthier – but it still has many of the old Soviet-style apartment blocks, and there is still the occasional Trabant (the ‘East German Porsche’) coughing up blue exhaust smoke. Some of the old buildings are stunning – more so when you consider the place was virtually flattened during the Russian advance at the end of the Second World War.

The usual born-in-the-USA quick-serve suspects are now present – Burger King, Macs, and two of the Holy Trinity: Pizza Hut and KFC. The latter two are in one of their joint retail operations and to me look just as uncomfortable together there as they do in Illinois.

Budapest is, of course, the heart of an Old European tradition – ‘café society’. If you wander into a kavehaus, you are entering into the quick-service restaurant of Old Europe. Granted, there is a considerable space-time continuum between there and then and now and the USA, but there are two spectacular differences between the two experiences. The first one is about pace. Budapest is a modern city now, with hustle, bustle, big business, small businesses, government and tourism. However, the difference between eating and drinking in a kavehaus and, say, a BK is marked. For those of us who remember records, the difference is like that between 33 rpm and 45 rpm. People slow down in a European café. They look to the experience to charge their batteries, not to drain them some more.

The second big difference is the quality of coffee. There is no excuse – none – for the vapid, vaguely brown liquid served up and described as coffee in most Western-based quick-serves. There are automated bean-to-cup machines available now that can produce an espresso-based drink of reasonable quality both cheaply and quickly. If you served thin mud in Europe, you would close within a week.

Starbucks, of course, tried valiantly to recreate café society. Howard Schultz is on record somewhere as saying he believes Starbucks is more about being a ‘third place’ (other than the home or the office) than about coffee.

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