Once Upon A Time (Little Chef)

Name: zoe_page_1

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Product:	Little Chef
Date:	09/05/02 (1120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: convenient locations and opening hours

Disadvantages: the food, staff and just about everything else

…I was a gymnast. To hear the rest of the story, scroll to the end. For the op itself, keep reading.

Almost all motorway service stations these days seem to have a Little Chef somewhere inside, and numerous winding country roads are home to them too. Although we drove past a million on the M6 the other day when driving down south, we eventually ended up in one in a little village near Basingstoke. When I say little, I mean it. Wee. Tiny. Very ‘ickle. A few houses, a pub and a petrol station seemed to make up the rest of it, and that’s not an exaggeration. We didn’t really choose the Little Chef, but it was pretty late and the pub wasn’t serving food, so given that the alternative was chocolate and crisps infused with petrol fumes, we chose this place.

I’ve eaten at Little Chefs many a time, usually through convenience over everything else. Over the years the menus have change slightly, but one thing has remained constant – they always include very tempting looking pictures of every dish on offer. You know the sort – gleaming crockery holding plump, juicy food oozing with flavour. In reality though, this is far from what you get.

** Location and Layout **

Little Chef’s are sold as being roadside restaurants, which implies, correctly, that they can be found by the side of roads…. Most motorway service stations will have at least one, and many A and B roads boast them too. Inside the vary from being normal fast foody restaurant style (think McDonalds) to being, well, trainlike. Lots and lots of the service station ones have booths set out like train seats, with only narrow corridors between them. Odd.


** Menus **

Little Chef offer an interesting range of food, most of it for most of the day. There are Grand-Slam style All-Day Breakfasts, plus smaller options like cereal and toast. Main meal wise they have steak, fish, and chicken dishes, plus vegetar
ian options and a choice of burgers. Then there are the side orders – rolls, chips, garlic bread, onion rings and so on – that cost 50p each to add to a main meal (but more on their own).

The pudding range seems to have been radically reduced recently, with only a limited selection of cakes, ice creams and pancakes still on offer. I though this was a shame since the pancakes used to be the highlight of my trips.

For children they have Kids Fun Meals for those aged 10 or under, with a main course, drink, ice lolly and free gift for only £3.49. For the littlest members of your family they offer free baby food.

Prices are not low, but they often have special offers on – my snack was free with the other main course we purchased for example. The drinks (soft drinks – coke not pepsi - juices, tea, coffee and alcoholic beverages) were nice and large but also pricey. The real problem though, is the quality. Recently lots of their food has truly been going down hill. Most dishes go straight from freezer to microwave to plate (all their vege dishes are Linda McCartney ready meals as far as I can tell), so it’s never going to be top quality cooking, but it seems they can’t even get this simple procedure right, with half our food arriving not fully cooked, and the other half burnt (incidentally, the dishes were not served at the same time, so they didn’t have the excuse that they were waiting for the other to finish if you see what I mean – the blackened one arrived 5 minutes before the raw one). Timing, it seems, is not one of their strong points.


** Opening Hours **

These vary depending on the location, but most are open by 7am at the latest and close around 9 or 10pm, meaning that whenever you’re hungry, they’ll usually be something on offer.

** Service **

As with all chains, the service varies depending on that particular branch’s staff, but
I have never once come across what I’d class as outstanding workers. The best I know of were at the Little Chef near Formby, but even they were only mediocre. Service stations are usually the worst, because the employees are working unsociable hours in unsociable locations, but the last one we were at wasn’t all that much better. The whole show seemed to be being run by 2 people – a chef and a cleaner-cum-server-cum-till-operator, but then it was a very small place, and there were only 2 other tables occupied. The food took ages to arrive, and then wasn’t cooked properly. The staff seemed to spend a lot of time running around, but not all that many minutes doing anything worthwhile.


** Fun Gym Comp Story To Round Off With (sic)**

I was 6 years old. It was my first gymnastics competition ever, and I was in pain from having my hair yanked back for 9 hours, but also excited. I finished medal-less, but placing in the top 5 for all my events in the 5-8 age group, and so I was happy. On the way home we stopped at a Little Chef. This was in the days when I had to write a diary at school each week, and also write a letter to my dad every weekend. I’d take in a copy of the letter and use it for my diary, cos I was lazy like that. On this occasion, I also kept a spare print out of my account, and have it at home in my certificate album, along with the scoring sheets and so on from the weekend. To this day I can still remember what I had to eat at the Little Chef, because I wrote it down in detail. It went something like this:

We stopped at a Little Chef for tea. I had 4 slices of toast, 2 glasses of coke, some chips, a pancake and a mars bar. I was very hungry because I had not had any lunch [due to my whole not eating before / during competing thing]. It was very nice and I ate it all up.

Oh, those were the days.


** Verdict **

The food generally sucks. The service sucks. The locat
ion is usually handy, but that’s not enough to balance out those two. Little Chef, it is clear, sucks. Avoid at all costs unless you manage to travel back to 1988 and have just competed at Southport YMCA’s gym comp, when by all means, pop along. And bring me a pancake back.

Summary: