Consuming Interest
Simplified Catering
By LESLIE
ADRIAN Since food rationing ended there has been a Welcome development in a section of the trade Which takes the form of concentrating on essen- tials. Lyons Corner Houses and some of Forte's restaurants are the best examples. Here you will find short but well-planned menus, good food, Rood service, cleanliness, good lighting and decor and, outside the rush hours of 1 to 2 and 6 to 7, no queues. Even in the rush hours good planning and layout have reduced queues considerably.
The Corner Houses show best how, on a large scale, the change in this kind of catering has occurred. Each Corner House used to have half a dozen restaurants all more or less the same and each about as unenterprising as the rest. Now each is entirely different from the others and, in the Coventry Street Corner House, for example, you decide first what you want to eat and at what approximate price and then go to the Wimpy Bar for hamburgers and coffee, to the Piccadilly for a mixed grill or pancakes, to the Chicken Fayre for chicken or duck or to the Seven Stars fqr a steak, ribs of beef or grilled sole. , The service is good because working conditions for the staff are good; the food is good to start With and is kept that way by being cooked in the open to order rather than in large amounts behind the scenes and left to keep hot ann dry up; the wines are well chosen and reasonably priced; the chefs are specialists and experts because jobs are broken down so that each chef has only one job to do, does it often and so does it well. This means, of course, that he is not a chef in the real sense at all. He could no more prepare all the dishes on a large menu than could a waiter, but he can do what he is expected to do very well indeed. He is paid rather less than a fully qualified chef would be and the saving on staff wages is passed on to the customer in lower prices.
Two criticisms which I found to be unjustified: firstly, if you go to the Chicken Fayre, let us say, because you want roast chicken and it turns out that your partner wants a steak, she (he) cannot have it. This is unavoidable when the menu is (purposely) a short one. But Corner Houses are places to go to when you have decided in advance what you feel like eating and you choose the restaurant which specialises in your choice. Be- sides, at every Corner House there is a Brasserie with a longer and more varied menu suitable for people who have not made up their minds in advance.
Secondly, the wine list in these restaurants is a very short one. What if you want a wine not on the list? The list is short to avoid embarrassing people who do not know their wines and who are pleased to have the appropriate one chosen for them, but anyone who wants a wider choice of wines is encouraged to ask for the Corner House's complete wine list which is, by any standards, a good one.
The Grill and Griddle and the Fish and Chick'n in Piccadilly Circus are the best examples of Forte's popular catering. (I wish, that both Lyons and Forte's were a little less twee in choosing names for their restaurants.) The Fish and Chick'n has tables, waiter service, wines, beer and spirits, and room for about ninety people. The Grill and Griddle is a brilliant piece of design and organisation. It is in the form of a series of bays running across a long, narrow room. Each bay has twelve places and is looked after by two waitresses so that each waitress has to attend to only six (ever changing) customers. Almost everything—for the waitress and the customer—is to hand. In each bay there is a hot-plate for coffee and milk, a heated con- tainer for the two soups on the menu and another for soup bowls, a supply of rolls, butter and nap- kins, a container for used crockery and a cash register. Between each two places there is a con- tainer for the menu, four kinds of sauce, vinegar, oil, salad cream, salt, pepper and English and French mustard. The idea is to allow the waitress to serve you at once with your first course and then to take the order for your main course to the grill so that it will be cooked when you are ready for it. The 'kitchen' runs the length of one wall and, as at the Corner Houses, is completely open. Salads, by the way, are kept fresh and made crisp by humid refrigeration. This restaurant is open from 8.30 a.m. to midnight; the menu ranges from two fried eggs and bacon at 4s. to fillet steak with grilled tomatoes and fried potatoes at 12s. 6d.
Concentrating on essentials, offering only a limited number of dishes in each restaurant but doing the whole job very well at reasonable prices --this is what Lyons and Forte's are doing. They are aiming at a completely different clientele from the clientele they were once concerned with (and still are in their smaller restaurants), and their efforts are being justifiably rewarded. I hope they will now begin to do something to improve the service at their smaller restaurants.
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