All great cuisines steal from everywhere!
What’s the saying “good artists borrow; great artists steal?” Sometimes attributed to Picasso, but origin unknown (I think.)
see Quote Investigator article.
Absolutely and completely NOT.
It was with great sadness that I watched the Wimpy chain disappear, a weird hatred formed of them in the UK, and I have absolutely no idea why. The mistaken embracing of US burger chains as the ultimate great thing. Burger King bought out the chain, and then changed over the shops. It existed for a while in Motorway restaurants, then I think span off, and now exists in the south east of the UK, and nowhere near me. We went to one down in Kent.
The quarterpounder with cheese was (and yes, I ate there regularly in the 1980s), absolutely the best burger in the UK, before all the overpriced ones like Five Guys. Cooked from fresh. Served on a plate. With metal cutlery.
Except people wanted eat crap like Macdonalds. An inferior burger. Or BK, which wasn’t a patch on Wimpy burgers, but at least better than the crap that is/was McDs. It was a chain which went completely unfashionable for some strange reason. Something from a time where the UK wanted to obliterate it’s past.
Most people I’ve asked who seemed to view these burgers with hatred, never ate there. I know we never as a kid, we did go in for the milkshake, and it wasn’t like the ones which a US milkshake, it was thin and a mix of milk and ice cream. We couldn’t afford to actually eat there. It was the only place to eat a milkshake in my Scottish town area.
However, the myth persists that they had awful burgers. Or people remember the “bendy bun”, which was a sausage cut and wrapped in a circle on a burger. I think they still do these.
Sadly, when we tracked down a Wimpy down in Kent a couple of years ago, they’d changed the quarter pounder with cheese. It now has sauce which makes it taste like a Big Mac. Another great thing destroyed. I hark back for a real one, that sauce was magnificent and the burger superior to anything I can find now.
I was totally unaware that the the Shish Mahal got the credit for Chicken Tikka Masala, I’ve always been told it was from a Bangladeshi restaurant in East London. I’d only heard of Shish Mahal from the cookbook I bought, which gave a pretty decent vegetable pakora recipe (arguably at one point, Scotland’s favourite dish, I’m not sure now).
Having looked it up in google maps, I realise that growing up in Glasgow (a time when I could not afford a full price evening curry), that we walked past the Shish Mahal regularly in the trip between bookshops, comic shops and role playing shops on the way to the Great Western road. It is way out of the way for where we’d usually eat, but maybe we’ll go and eat there next time we’re up in Glasgow.
There is a rare Wimpy in Woolwich, SE London. Ironically it is just a couple hundred yards from the first McDonalds in Europe, whose arrival in 1974 started the eventual demise of Wimpy’s.
They are not rare in the south east, with over 60 locations, most are in London, or it’s orbit or Essex or Kent. The two not, are in Shrewsbury and Kilmarnock, those are the only two north of Coventry.
They still do a decent burger, and I’d choose them over Macdonalds or BK in a heartbeat.
I guess it’s all relative. When I was a child in the 70s they seemed to be all over the place, now when I see one it seems notable, the nearest one to me in SW London is now quite a few miles away. Back in the heyday there were waiters, food served on proper plates with knives and forks, and the ketchup came in plastic squeezy tomatoes on the table. I know they changed to a more McDonalds like model in the early 80s with food served in cardboard boxes. Have they returned to their roots?
I think it was a waiter service yes, with cutlery and plates. Pay on exit. I think they are also a bit pricier but not as much as say Five Guys. It was a burger restaurant, competing with an international real estate company, they were doomed because focus was on the quality.
De gustibus, I guess. My friend and I were underwhelmed (1982).
What group did you think Edward I was expelling in 1290 then?
Yeah, I used to love the Wimpy halfpounder. Burgers that tasted of grilled meat. Buns made of actual bread not weird sugary sponge.
There’s a Wimpy less than a mile from me in Farnborough, Hampshire. Just Eat will even deliver them for me.
Still going strong here in South Africa…
There are some in Canada. Having never dined there, cannot say how it has changed.
Interesting. How some things persist out in “the districts” when long gone in the centre.
Few people seem to realise, that Nandos, a pretty successful chain in the UK, was from south Africa.
Oddly, as someone from the US, I’ve only known it as a South African chain (only recently made in-roads nationally in the US, but has been in the DC area, I believe, for some time before expanding out here in Chicago.) I don’t remember Nando’s from the UK in the 90s, but I may have missed it (I was in the Midlands eating my way through South Asian food, so it may not have been on my radar at all.) My first encounter with it was in South Africa. Of course, you go to their website, and they play up their South African heritage, so it would never occur to me to associate them with the UK.
It would have been more a London thing at first, and more an inner-city thing. It really hit its stride there after the end of the 90s. It’s now bigger in the UK than in SA. Old Guardian article: