The food was never brilliant. So why do I miss Little Chef?

DISPTACH

Forget the drive-through coffees and identikit motorway services. I miss the days when stopping for food was part of the pleasure of a road trip.

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Photograph: Stacey Harris (Geograph) under cc-by-sa/2.0 Creative Commons Licence

A proper road trip deserves a proper stop. Not a hurried coffee from a petrol-station machine or a sandwich eaten in the car. An actual break, preferably involving something hot, greasy and accompanied by chips.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, stopping was part of the adventure. For us, that meant Little Chef or one of those motorway service stations with a canteen-style restaurant and a newsagent. My Little Chef order was usually a Bacon & Egg Bap at breakfast, or the magnificently named 7th Heaven Burger if we stopped in the afternoon. Neither was haute cuisine. That was hardly the point.

There was something exciting about ordering food you wouldn't normally have, stretching your legs and browsing the shelves for a magazine or book to keep you entertained for the rest of the journey. Even an otherwise unremarkable drive could feel like an outing.

These days, with notable exceptions, roadside food often feels as though it's been condensed into a handful of familiar brands: Costa, Starbucks, drive-through McDonald's and petrol stations dispensing coffee at the touch of a button.

Convenient? Absolutely. But where's the fun in that?

Of course, there's an irony in complaining about big-brand uniformity while reminiscing about Little Chef, itself a national chain with decidedly inconsistent food. But there's a difference between somewhere familiar and somewhere utterly forgettable.

Not every motorway service station needs to become a gastronomic destination. Places such as Tebay and Gloucester Services demonstrate that roadside food can be more interesting than another identikit collection of coffee shops and sandwich counters.

Perhaps it's not Little Chef I really miss, after all.

I just wish travelling still came with a few more stops worth remembering.

Do we really miss Little Chef, or the days when a roadside stop was part of the adventure? Save this Dispatch to Pinterest and come back to the argument later.

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