The end of Little Chef? The rolling roadside cafe thread. If you like.

I like the cafe at Ballinluig near Pitlochry - excellent home made soup and ALWAYS busy, which is a good sign. Scotland's a bit short on service stations (being a bit short on motorways), but diners are always better than service stations anyway which are soul-less hell-holes.

http://www.transportcafe.co.uk/cafelist.html

I like the Little Chef because we were always in there while Dad fixed his knackered car when I was a little 'un.

i loathe the little chef

The one I used to work in is shut now, as is the other one my family used to frequent when travelling down south, at Killiecrankie. I still get oddly nostalgic when passing the site of either.

There were no tins of sweets in Little Chef Little Shop either, sadly.

-- giboyojimbo (reduhnekkisssss...), January 3rd, 2007.

QFT. This is like getting nostalgic when they eradicated consumption.

Heston Blumental waxed lyrical about one service station in France which had a Bresse theme (very good tasty breed of chicken), and you could get half a bresse and chips. Standard fare in french service stations is pretty darn good, steak hache is always on the menu.

Tebay is the foodie's paradise of service stations, pretty views too and they stock local produce.

Rare or even bleu steak with green peppercorn sauce and frites? Mais, oui!

What about Happy Eater? Friend worked at one in Devon and saved her name badge, eg, logo humanoid pointing into open mouth as if representing step one of an induced vomit.

Droool.

don't, lauren: he'll explode with food-lust.

What about Happy Eater? Friend worked at one in Devon and saved her name badge, eg, logo humanoid pointing into open mouth as if representing step one of an induced vomit.

first time i saw a happy eater i was about eight and thought it said "happy easter". couldn't work that out at all.

i will geniunely miss the little chef; but yes, i suppose that, like emily, it's a nostalgia thing. i mean, i've not been in years, even though we drive past one every time we hoy up the A9 to see my folks. ("little thief", as mrs F calls it; indeed, as her entire family call it.)

but i have astonishingly fond memories of going to the one at seaton burn with my uncle and cousins after days out in northumberland, and of various happy stop-offs with my parents on what now, of course, are fondly remembered happy holidays but may well, at the time, have been tedious fucking trips to the lake district against my will.

ultimately, i associate it with childhood happiness, rightly or wrongly. and come on, dudes, the breakfasts ROCKED. fried bread par excellence.

but we got lollies and everything

always hated the lollies. the staff used to force them on you, though, as you walked out the door.

"good boy, you ate it all up. have a lolly!"
"don't like lollies."
[SHOCK. HORROR. mouths stop mid-chomp. sausages roll to a halt on plates. pancakes quiver.]
"but you can't leave without a lolly."
"don't like lollies."
"LOOK, YOU FREAKY LITTLE INGRATE, TAKE THE FUCKING LOLLY!"
"muuuuuum!"
"she's right, darling. YOU MUST EAT THE LOLLY. now get in the car: we're off to shap for three weeks of gloom in a rented cottage with only a broken stove and some dog-eared roald dahl short stories for company."

You mean the universal "I want a blowjob" signal?

Jesus Christ, I live in America, and there is no food sold in service stations, here. Just death and sadness. We're all full up on death and sadness.

Hot dogs sit on steel rollers and slowly (sadly) spin their miserable lives away. They spin for hours and even days at a time, growing ever more jerky-like and dismal, wrinkling and crumbling around their blackened little salt-hearts.

Sometimes, secret trucks come and deliver "hamburgers" wrapped in aluminum foil. These sit in glass cases under heat lamps, on a bed of crisply dead flies -- never cooked, only heated -- again for hours into days (into weeks?). The only difference here is that the hamburgers are not rotated, ever, and thus come to envy the hot dogs their terrible fate.

In addition to the above, some service stations offer customers a large bucket of opaque, yellowish-orange grease which can be plunged (by application of a feculent plastic lever) in obese rivulets onto stale corn chips. This is referred to as "nacho cheese".

Since many are displeased with the above offerings, most service stations located on interstate highways have partnered with popular fast-food restaurants, such as McDonald's Dead Cow Restaurant and Kentucky Dead Chicken.

These vast public lavatories serve thousands of irritable yet foul-smelling diners a day, and (apparently) rotated sausages and emulsified cheese fats won't quite cut the mustard. Instead, we now get a wide variety of truck-borne hamburger, chicken and pizza-like items that sit under eternal hot lamps, wilting to sordid perfection.

We used to have diners. Then they went away.

You crazy as hell and must not have grown up in the south. There are gas stations down here that are among the best meat-and-three diners anywhere, and about ten blocks from me thataway is the old Oak Park Amoco, now a Chevron, where you can get really good fried chicken and jojo potatoes. (But get it between 10:30 and 1 when it's fresh.)

anyway, we chug from blackpool to york, look at the university for three seconds, fuck about, buy cigs, have a sneaky pint, then head back. on the way home we stop at a little chef somewhere; can't remember where.

i have a toasted teacake and a cup of tea. goonar has a pancake and some coffee. cookie orders fish, chips, peas, bread and tea, followed by some kind of fudge dessert with fake cream.

back in the car, goonar asks: "so, you off out tonight, cookie? that why you're having an early tea?"

"naah," he burps. "i'm off home for me dinner."

happy days.

It's featured in this list of supposedly decent places to eat in the UK 'while on the road'.
http://www.goodfoodride.com/bmwuk/goodfoodride/homepage/

(please be aware it is also an advert for BMW)