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.
At Wagamama, I know the swirl of the server’s ballpoint pen, scribbling numbers on my disposable table mat, and that it means fat udon noodles, wobbly gyoza and a Diet Coke will manifest themselves in about 12 minutes, very possibly for the 150th time in my life. This instils in me a sense of calm in a way that walking up the steps to a Michelin-starred “voyage of culinary exploration” simply does not. At Wagamama, I have eaten this yaki udon, on this plate and with these cheap wooden chopsticks, through a dozen stages of life. I have been young, cool and hip, dipping my gyoza in the vinegary soy dip, and I have been washed-up and 30, crying over a break-up while cramming chilli squid into my mouth. In my 40s, I retreated to Wagamama for bang bang cauliflower during death, divorce, deadlines and other personal hiccups.
For me, Wagamama isn’t just for tough times, though: the branch at Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London, is about 50 metres from a 20-screen Vue cinema, making it the ideal spot for carving out some clandestine “me” time. Katsu curry, a bao bun and then Barbie are an entire afternoon of big, dumb fun for about £20. Such chains offer something slightly different from cooking, too; they provide a soothing, liminal space where children won’t tantrum over “new things” and where even gran has her go-to order. Yes, there are a dozen places close to my home that serve better gyoza and noodles, and all of them have their merits; the same goes for pizza or Portuguese chicken. But we choose the chain because it rarely seriously angers us. Sure, they will have bad days – fiorentina pizza with a hard egg yolk, a Zinger Supercharger Tower meal with missing hash brown, or dry, overcooked peri peri chicken, as well as missing loo paper and forgotten desserts – but your favourite chain never truly burns its bridges.
Or at least almost never – Pret a Manger has recently pushed me to the very edge of patience, with prices rising even on its watery soups and shrinkflation salads. What I find odd about this is my feeling of actual betrayal. Pret was never my friend; it has always been a steely-eyed corporation, not a cheerful, stand-in mother who owed me mate’s rates on Love bars or bircher muesli pots. Still, a sense of true companionship had definitely set in between me and Pret during the last approximately one thousand times we ate together. There was tremendous comfort in hiding in corners of random branches, eating Pret’s “proper porridge” after scattering in the little pot of pistachio, seeds and dried fruit. I sometimes also took a honey sachet, even though the rule is nuts or honey – one or the other – but Pret didn’t mind because it was my chum, so it didn’t really count as stealing. But now, as I gaze into my soup with its lonely single broccoli floret, resembling something Oliver Twist might beg for in the workhouse, it turns out that Pret was quietly planning the big grab back.
Even so, I still have Greggs sausage rolls, Starbucks’ vegan Beyond Meat breakfast sandwich and even McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish, which always takes a little longer than everything else on the menu because they make it fresh. Allowing myself those extra three minutes, to ensure I get to eat something hot in a motorway service station, is often my single moment of self-care in an otherwise thankless day. I’m not at Noma now, and needs must, so I’ll take joy however it’s packaged.
The second episode in the new series of Grace Dent’s Comfort Eating podcast goes live on Tuesday 3 October. Listen to it here. Her new book of the same name is published on 5 October by Guardian Faber, priced £20; to order a copy for £16, visit guardianbookshop.com
Join Grace in London, Manchester or via a live stream for a series of Guardian Live events during October where she will be discussing the book. Tickets available here.
