13 Coventry Street, London W1 (020 3763 5288). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90
At the top of the stairs up to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co by London’s Piccadilly is a sign. It reads: “Stupid is as stupid does”. Perhaps I should embrace this as a gift from the god of restaurant critics: here, my child, take this slogan that they have nailed to the wall for you and riff on it. Tempting though it is, I think dismissing an operation like this as stupid – even if stupid is part of its skill set – would be a waste of everybody’s time. Why bother going if it was simply to confirm a few prejudices?
If you read this column you probably care a little too much about your lunch. People like us endlessly compare notes on this Peruvian-Italian fusion opening or that artisanal salt-rubbed duck leg café. We also know there are places we would never visit. Meanwhile hordes of people are coming to London and spending their money in places like Bubba Gump. This intrigues me. I put them in the same category as S&M torture gardens: while generally I might not wish to participate, I would like to know what goes on in there.
And so I ascend the stairs from the ground-level gift shop and, as instructed, follow the smiley faces on the floor to the reception desk. Lunch at Bubba Gump is like attending a rave in 1987, only without the music, the drugs or the fun. For those who are not aware, the restaurant is a spin-off from the ultra-conservative, thoroughly emetic 1995 Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump, in which the eponymous character makes his fortune by forming an Alabama-based shrimp company with a chap called Bubba. There are now more than 40, with the majority in the US. None are in Alabama. Be aware: the waiters will force you to take a quiz on Forrest Gump trivia.
The concept of movie-based restaurants is, I think, a fertile one that has been under- exploited. Why, for example, has nobody opened A Last Tango in Paris Café, with a fine line in buttered crumpets? Where is the Apocalypse Now Diner with its take on steak tartare? Instead, we have Gump. The site is vast. I went looking for the loo and found a primitive tribe yet to make contact with civilisation. I also got lost. After a while one raw-wood booth with its faux lean-to roof looks much like another. Everything is slapped with quotes from the movie, like half-remembered song lyrics.
The menu is long and picture led. It comes on wipe-down laminated sheets. And this, I think, is part of the appeal. It offers a sense of heat-set reliability. For most, eating out is an uncertain business, and not unreasonably so. Those of us who make a habit of it are used to having our expectations unmet; to spending money on the gristle-strewn and depressing, and chalking it up to experience. It’s a bizarre way to behave.
Others don’t wish to do so. Bubba Gump is part of a large, successful commercial concern. It could only be so if it made money out of lots of people going there. And if lots of people go there it must have something to offer. And it does. But let’s deal with the horrors first. There’s the blood-orange margarita, shaken at the table in what looks like the central piece of a game of KerPlunk. It tastes of children’s fruit sweets and tooth decay. This, apparently, is the “fun size”. I assume the “depressive” size would come in a cast-iron bucket.
We order a pear and berry salad, which is made with pecans, raspberries, strawberries and indeterminate white chicken protein. It is dressed with a close cousin to the blood-orange margarita. Rejecting a salad because it tastes of children’s confectionary is a new one on me. There is another problem. It is made with oak leaf lettuce, by turns brown and rust coloured. It makes the plate look like it has already started composting.
In an attempt to show willing, we order Forrest’s Seafood Feast, which is “No 1 Guests Favorite”. Yes, of course it’s spelt like that. The item pictured is a red metal contraption holding four paper cones. One has breaded shrimp, the next fried battered fish, and the third “hush pups” which are deep-fried tumours of fish with sweetcorn. Our waiter is moved (or trained) to tell us that the cones aren’t full of these items. They are laid on top of chips. Lots of chips.
I admire the honesty. Like everything else here it isn’t cheap. At £15.50 is it too much to hope the chips will be cooked? There is half a field of flaccid potato on the table. The deep-fried items taste of all hope lost. Next to them are dipping sauces made with so much emulsifier your own bodily fluids start to bind with the dish. We have a dessert sampler of various sugared carbohydrates alongside cream from a can. I expect a “cease and desist” letter from my pancreas any day soon.
But that is not the whole story. For we also order a bucket of their skin-on prawns – the Shrimper’s Net Catch – with Cajun spice. And they’re seriously bloody brilliant. They are cooked sensitively, have real bite and the seasoning is bang on. If some street-food truck set up offering buckets of these poured out on to newspaper, bearded hipsters would travel from all over for the pleasure of getting their fingers sauce- and prawn-slicked. They would be Instagrammed to within an inch of their lives. I am minded to dismiss this outbreak of good cooking as an aberration, but it’s not. We order the Jambalaya and, again, it is full of perfectly cooked fat prawns, which gives real heft to the mix of sticky rice and spiced sausage.
And there’s something else. The staff are terrific. I travel a lot. I have been subjected to service from sweet human beings who have been beaten into the ground by humanity-sapping training manuals. Even if the waiters here have been forced to drink the corporate Kool-Aid, it doesn’t show. They are sharp, funny, engaged and on it. Yes, the premise behind Bubba Gump is excruciating. Yes, a lot of the food should be classed as cruel and unusual punishment. The prices are high. But there’s a reason people come here. They want to feel safe and they want to be looked after. I might wrinkle my nose in oh-so-sophisticated disdain, but for some, that’s what matters.
Jay’s news bites
■ A critical piece about a corporate restaurant chain demands a positive recommendation of a corporate restaurant chain, so here goes: Pizza Express still does the thing. The fact that it gets bitched about is a mark of how successfully it is stitched into middle-class culture. It’s a reliable product, at a reasonable price, which allows parents of small kids to feel like adults while eating out as a family. My choice: an American hot (pizzaexpress.com).
■ Gin is still in. Stovell’s in Chobham, Surrey (reviewed here in 2012), has launched its own brand, Stovell’s Wildcrafted Gin, made with local wild botanicals. If it’s as good as their unprissy food it will be worth trying (stovells.com).
■ So farewell then, Food For Thought, the homely vegetarian restaurant which has been on Neal Street in London’s Covent Garden since the 1970s. As they themselves put it: “For more than 40 years Food For Thought has withstood the corporate march, refusing to be processed, packaged or pocketed.” Sadly, it seems they are unable to withstand rising rents. It will close on 21 June.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
Follow the Observer Magazine on Twitter @ObsMagazine
