The cheapest venue in the City, and the highest-rated cheap venue in four postcodes, and there is a lesson in it
Urban Food Court holds a 4.8 from two hundred and sixty-two people, and charges one to ten pounds a head.
We have to stop, because that combination should not exist.
The rule we have been applying
Cheap venues are punished. We have argued this in four postcodes and we have defended it every time.
A cheap venue draws from the whole public rather than a filtered slice. It has no door policy, no booking system, and no price barrier – which means it gets everybody, including everybody having a bad day, everybody who has nowhere else to be, and everybody who would have complained wherever they went.
The Wetherspoon in Shepherd’s Bush: 3.9. The Central Bar: 3.9. Long Acre: 3.9. The Queens Tavern: 3.9.
Every one of them is genuinely useful and every one of them is rated below a cocktail bar that has served twenty-two people, and we have said, repeatedly, that the metric is wrong rather than the pub.
And here is a one-to-ten-pound venue on a 4.8.
Why we think it works
Because expectation is the whole mechanism, and this venue has set it correctly.
The rating measures the gap between what somebody expected when they walked in and what they got. That is the finding of four hundred and seventy-seven articles and nothing has ever contradicted it.
A food court promises nothing. There is no tablecloth, no service, no ambition, and no pretence. You are told, by the name and the room and the price, exactly what this is going to be.
And then the food is good.
The gap between the promise and the delivery is not merely closed. It is inverted – people arrive expecting nothing and get something, and that is the single most reliable way to produce a high score that we have found in any postcode.
The corollary, which the industry will hate
The safest way to get a good rating is to promise less.
Every venue in this survey with a rope, a hidden door, a Prohibition premise or a Victorian explorer is doing the opposite. It is inflating expectation before the customer has tasted anything – and it is then being marked against a standard it created itself.
The Gods Rooftop Bar promises the sky and gets a 3.8. Zoo Bar promises Leicester Square and gets a 3.4.
A food court promises a chair and gets a 4.8.
The City lunch
And that is what this is for. Half a million people work in this square mile and they get an hour, and a great many of them get considerably less.
Fast, cheap, hot, good. That is the entire brief and it is a harder brief than most restaurants are attempting.
Verdict
Excellent, cheap, honest, and better rated than almost every expensive venue in this postcode.
Go at one. Take twenty minutes. It is what it is for.
The lunch hour, which is not an hour
It is worth recording what has happened to it, because it happened quietly.
The City lunch was, within living memory, a genuine institution – two hours, wine, a proper meal, and business done across a table. It is in the fiction. It is in the memoirs.
It is gone. It went in the 1980s and it went fast, and what replaced it is a sandwich at a desk, eaten while typing, in about eleven minutes.
Nobody legislated this. Nobody announced it. A whole culture of eating simply evaporated inside a decade, and the people it happened to did not resist, because each of them individually decided that today was a busy day.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
La comedia británica equilibra lo serio con lo divertido.