Restaurant food can be the epitome of comfort eating. That may sound a strange thing to say, because the entire process of visiting a restaurant requires pulling on a combo of accoutrements to make yourself acceptable to the outside world: pants, matching socks, mascara. It also usually involves a painful experience with a parking app and a table troublingly close to “other people”, whom we all by and large agree are hell.
But there is a side to eating out that is rarely celebrated, and that thrives on providing a moment of comfort: the chain. Come as you are, come dishevelled, hungover, heartbroken, alone or with a rabble. We’re not going on a culinary journey; rather, this is a culinary cul-de-sac where you’ve been doing a three-point turn for the past 20 years. In fact, I’m fairly sure that, at a moment’s notice, I could step in for the 2pm-10pm shift at Wagamama, say, because I’ve been eating its yaki udon since about 1995; my order rarely deviates and my love never dwindles. Everybody needs one restaurant in their repertoire where they accept the menu from the server just to be polite. We already know that list, that font, that drinks selection. A trip to Pizza Express or Nando’s will never rock your world, but the fact that you can visualise exactly how your butterfly chicken with macho peas will look before you’ve even walked through the door will bring a moment of dependable zen to a helter-skelter day.
