The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Taking Friedrich Nietzsche to Beefeater at Milton Interchange

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Friedrich Nietzsche at Beefeater, Milton Interchange (image created via ChatGPT)

‘Intellectually productive and emotionally intense natures must have meat’ remarked Nietzsche. Despite the fact he said this, my gut feeling (and I might be wrong) is that he wouldn’t have loved Beefeater. Then again, Friedrich was partial to a bit of beef. For Nietzsche deciding to become a vegetarian – even though he did try it himself momentarily – wasn’t a good idea, as he thought it ‘consumes an unbelievable amount of mental strength and energy, these being thus withdrawn from nobler and generally useful aspirations.’ I think even Nietzsche, though, as intellectually intense as he was, may have struggled with the Beefeater House Mixed Grill comprising a 4-ounce rump steak, half a chicken breast, gammon, and two pork sausages with a grilled tomato, two fried eggs, beer-battered onion rings, triple-cooked chips and garden peas. Just typing that out is enough to bring on the meat sweats. 

Beefeater as an ‘Aesthetic Phenomenon’? 

‘It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ wrote Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. For many reasons Beefeater could be seen as an aesthetic phenomenon, yes, but probably not for the right ones. If Nietzsche is suggesting here that life is illusory, or some kind of hallucination, a useful fiction, a construct, then he surely would have felt vindicated if not a little disheartened when he, like me, found out the disparity between what a Beefeater menu offers, and what it gives in reality. You might be wondering, at this stage, if I’m seriously suggesting that the Beefeater menu is a prime example of Nietzsche’s ‘aesthetic phenomenon’? And you’d be right, as I’m wondering that myself, but I think that is my train of thought.

A Desperate Man

Let me set the scene: it was a midweek, rainy day in late August. September was edging ever closer, we’d been on our big holiday, and what remained was a week or two at home before the school routines started up again. In short, we were all getting a bit fed up with each other, and fed up with cooking and washing up. With the prices for eating out at an all-time high, we thought we’d try to be inventive, use our imagination a bit, think outside the box, try somewhere a bit different, a bit, you know, cheaper... and this, it turned out, was our big mistake. 

Some neighbours had recommended Beefeater and said they were pleasantly surprised, that the steaks were good, and there was an all-you-can-eat salad bar with kids eating free or at a discount or something like that. (Note to self: never listen to said neighbours about eating out ever again). 

So, it was all looking good. And it was looking even better after I consulted the menu online: juicy burgers, huge plates of chicken wings dripping in various sauces, golden chips and all at a weirdly reasonable price.

It must be due to the economies of scale of a huge chain, I said to myself. That’s how they pass on the savings to customers, I said to myself. This place might be a revelation, I said to myself. This could be one of those places you brag about at playdates and birthday parties because it was a secret find, and a signal of both good taste and middle-class frugality, I said to myself. With prices like that, we can have starters, and puddings, I said to myself.  

In short, I was excited. 

But looking back on it now, with two weeks of holiday left, and weeks of non-stop childcare behind me, I was a desperate man. And it turns out Beefeater was the mirage in the desert of my summer holiday parenting. 

The Menu and Mise-en-Scène 

It was a veritable Nietzschean aesthetic phenomenon of which not even he may have conceived. And the reason I describe the pictorial menu as an aesthetic phenomenon is that it was nothing like that in real life. 

But, first of all, let me paint the picture of the establishment. The Beefeater at the Milton Interchange is exactly that, right next to a massive interchange where cars come whizzing off or whizzing onto the A34, north and south, or into Didcot, or the surrounding Oxfordshire villages. The view from the restaurant is, you guessed it, the interchange, and let’s not forget the Shell fuel station and the huge Marriott Hotel across the road. Also, it was connected to a Premier Inn, and so served as the restaurant to the lodgers. So, to say that it was not in the most salubrious of locations would be an understatement. 

After we parked the car and walked in, there was a lady waiting to take us to our seats. So far, so good. What I didn’t notice at the time were the fruit machines and the lone, bloated men sitting at various tables by themselves, on their phones, with pints of lager, and rings around their eyes. 

Anyway, we were taken to our table and so it began.

The Food

The chicken wings, which were mostly crispy batter as opposed to chicken, came with a coleslaw which was mainly water as opposed to coleslaw, and the flat breads which were mainly, you guessed it, flat cardboard than bready. Oh dear. All of a sudden, the £7 for the chicken wings wasn’t such great value after all. In fact, they were such miserable little chicken wings, more like little deep fried rabbit turds, plonked on the plate beside some iceberg lettuce that looked so limp and sad it almost set me off too. At one point, I had a notion to walk into the kitchen, put my arm around the cook and ask him if everything was okay.

The burger came out for the main course and that was a bit better, but then again, it was a burger – a bap, a bit of meat and a bit of lettuce and a sliced tomato and a bit of sauce – it’s hardly one of Marcus Wareing’s technical challenges on MasterChef. The chips were so unmemorable I’m struggling to even conjure them now in my mind’s eye, banished as they are forever to the purgatory of all unmemorable, soggy unloved food.

One thing I would note was the grace and patience of the waiting staff: a young girl was a model of magnanimity and stoicism in the face of our toddlers’ barbaric yawps and demands for this and that, when they weren’t constantly trying to hit each other, or the buttons on the fruit machines, little magpies that they are, eliciting bemused looks from the solitary punters as they looked up momentarily from their phones and pints of Madri.

I would go into more detail about what else we had but I can barely remember it without also simultaneously losing the will to live. 

‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth, suggesting it’s impossible to tell what someone’s thinking just from their facial expressions. This may be so, but when it comes to the plate, it’s different and should read ‘There is an art to find the mind’s construction in the plate’. We can tell when we’ve been presented with a plate of food whether the person who has cooked it has been enthusiastic about it, has put effort into it, has loved cooking it, and therefore, in some ways, loved us. My lesson was learned at Beefeater; it was a loveless meal, that, in many ways, made me come away hungrier than when I went in, and it wasn’t even that cheap. In fact, it was an expensive lesson in getting duped by the Nietzschean ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ that is the Beefeater online menu. 

The Point I Want to Make

Where can you get a decent, nutritious hot meal for £10 or less in the UK today that isn't ultra-processed fast food?

Quality, affordable restaurant food for the masses shouldn’t be a pipe dream, or a hallucination, but a reality. Restaurants are struggling up and down the country at the minute, and Whitbread, who owns Beefeater, has had mixed financial success over the past year or two, with closures and reprioritising areas of growth. But, what huge chains like Beefeater should never overlook is the quality of the food they are serving on a daily basis and what the motivation is behind why they are running restaurants in the first place. And I say ‘chains like Beefeater’ as they are not alone in treating the masses as tastebud-less drones, interested only in cheapness and full stomachs, regardless of the provenance or quality of the food. They may say the chef was having a bad day when we went, or this franchise isn’t representative of the others, but if you’re going to run a chain of restaurants you’ve got to have thought about making sure the quality is consistent.

In short, if these chains want to survive they need to show the customer more love, and the place where that starts is on the plate. Hardworking families looking for an affordable meal out deserve better than this, and I have a gut feeling that even Friedrich Nietzsche, beef eater as he was, would agree with me on that.