Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes! Nice pizzas, but what the fuck is that dip all about? I've tried all of the ones they offer and they are all atrocious.

dary

On an unrelated note, I've just come out of this:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013 ... 013-review

It was much funnier and less annoying than that makes it sound and well worth checking out if it ever runs near you.

That stuff is utter poison, but the buffalo dip is ace.

Oh Christ, don't do that. Paypal are fucking tossers for deciding your account has "malicious activity' and freezing it for six months. They're not a bank, legally, so they don't have to do the legal customer service stuff a bank does. Never keep money in Paypal.

I can't bring myself to buy anything from them now as all I can think of when I consider it is the horrible consistency and taste of that shite. It's genuinely mind boggling anyone would think it edible, never mind actually worth paying for.

You work in canary wharf. I can't remember the last time I used notes and coins there.

Am I the only person that doesn't like the herb mix Papa Johns covers everything in? It's a bit... floral. And the dip stuff is weird. I can't even figure out what it's supposed to be.

Around here, there's a number of choices for first-rate "posh" pizza (e.g. basilico) but they're all thin-crust stone-baked ingredients-in-Italian authentic things. If you want something with too much cheese and too much dough and six types of meat, there's a number of third- and second-rate indie places, or the second-rate chains (Dominos, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns.) There's a gap in the market there I think.

Lol, that website is one of the smuggest, most ridiculous things I've ever seen. I have no doubt their food is delicious but fucking hell, what twats they are.

Also, having recently switched back to Swype from something else I remember anew how irritating it is to have to teach a new keyboard how to fucking swear. Even 'hell' was a fight there. Fuck sake.

Fuck sake. Should have got a cab. Bus will not drop me in time for train. fuck buses.

40 fucking minute wait for cab

Got another cab. Talked about Beeching cuts and the role of mass transit systems

Are you supposed to use cutlery at Pizza Express, or can you just grab the slice and stuff it down your throat? I never know.

"Slightly less guilty"

It's very well tuned to appeal to their target market, i.e. the kind of people I live amongst. I don't know that they are twats so much as cunning businesspeople (see also: the guys who opened the cereal cafe in Shortditch.) The pizza really is good though, so I put up with it. It's not like I stop to read the website on the way to the online delivery ordering page anyway.

Also, to give them some tiny amount of credit - they genuinely do use good ingredients, it's not just puffery. Proper buffalo mozzarella, great imported prosciutto and salami, Iberian ham, and whatnot. The exact kind of stuff I buy to put on my homemade pizzas, basically.

You make a good point that there's nobody making good quality bad pizza.

There's also almost nowhere doing Chicago style pizza pie or cornbread crust pizza, both of which is a damned shame.

I shall mention this to some people and see if there is a reason.

Probably lack of familiarity restricting the possible market.

Best take-out pizza I ever had was a jambalaya pizza (spicy prawns and peppers, basically) on a cornbread crust from some place in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I've been chasing that high ever since.

Speaking of fast food, I discovered Five Guys on my most recent trip over. Their burgers and fries were really tasty.

I've been to one place that does proper chicago style pizza in the UK, and that was in Newcastle of all places.

Annoyingly overpriced in the UK though. They took a $5 burger and made it an £8 one.

Foreign cows, coming in here and pushing up our burger prices...

there's a 5 Guys in nottingham, I think.

And Birmingham.

They seem to be expanding rapidly. The UK arm is a cross-licence deal founded by Charles Dunstone, the founder of Carphone Warhouse, so it was always going to be a large scale nationwide chain I think.

Weird, though-are they better over here? I thought it was pretty standard fast food in the States, and priced accordingly; here it has a bit of cachet.

The 5 guys burgers are nothing special. I go for the hot dogs and the magic drink machine.

I'm starving and reading this thread hasn't helped.

In the US, it's pitched as "a good deal better than McDonalds, and a little more expensive." Which is a fair description, I think (I really like their burgers, although I prefer In-N-Out.) Here, they've taken the same food and service and priced it on par with a gastropub or GBK or Byron, which feels a little off to me. Presumably they did market research and concluded there's no room for a £5 and they couldn't come downmarket so they went upmarket instead. Seems to be working for them, based on the expansion.

Is 5 guys not that good, then? We were out a few weeks ago and bang in the middle of Gourmet Burger Kitchen and 5 Guys, and we just plumped for the Gourmet Burger Kitchen more out of chance than anything as we had previously never been to either. On balance, was that the better of the two?

I didn't know they had opened up over here. It was great fast food at $5ish, and far better than MaccyD's, but for the prices others have mentioned I'd go with GBK.

I hate decorating. I just knelt in the paint tray.

Depends on what you are after. 5 guys is a lot dirtier than GBK.

IMHO:

McDonalds: the baseline. Flavourless beef, uninspired toppings. Decent fries.

Five Guys: McDonalds++ i.e. gussied up fast food. Better beef, better toppings (but nothing elaborate; bacon, cheese; that sort of thing.) Very good fries. Counter service, food comes wrapped in foil and cardboard.

GBK: Lowest rung of the higher end burger chains. Bland-ish meat, overcompensated for by lots of novelty toppings and bread (bacon jam and chilli relish and on a brioche bun.) Excellent garlic aioli. Order at a counter but they bring your food out on a plate.

Byron: GBK++. Tastier meat (that they'll also serve rare), a bit less novelty in the toppings (could be good or bad depending on how you feel about that.) Not fast food ie. table service and you pay at the end of the meal. They do courgette fries, which are excellent if sometimes underseasoned.

Above this are the properly good indie places.

Because I'm doing The Painting I've had to have a shower. I'd been wandering about the bedroom trying to find some clothes to wear in the big pile of stuff I have created in the middle of it, and then I remembered I'd removed the net curtains for <reasons> and the lady over the road will probably get over the shock.

Is the shock seeing you doing manual labour?

Focus groups have shown it should increase my appeal in key demographics.

Yeah, that seems to fit. I suppose I'm just surprised that in an area where there are plenty of options - as you nicely list below - and in which information and people flow so easily from country to country, that you can take a chain like that and make it fly at such a different price point. Could I take Primark to the US and sell clothes at Abercrombie prices?*

*Well, no, silly example, I'm sure.

The shock of not having net curtains at the window.

The man's no better than he should be.

Here's a bit of a random letter from the bank....

We're giving you back £20 plus interest, from four and a half years ago.....

I'm pretty sure they could have got away with it, although I'll take the £22.57p, obviously.

I'd say this is probably Mrs Hearthly's transaction, there's no way an ATM would get away with conning me out of £20.

5 guys is very greasy, far more so than McDonald's. The meat seems a little better, and the burgers appear to be hand formed, but this could easily be done by machine. There are more toppings and you have a choice. They also have free peanuts as everything is fried in peanut oil.
Do the ones over here do all you can drink root beer?

"The Hitchhikers guide to the future"

#playepisode1">http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4 ... ayepisode1

Didn't know Marc Almond was on that flight.

Out of an impressive gallery, Grant Shapps really is a technicolour cunt.

Fucking gale force winds. I hate them. They have a habit of blowing tiles off my roof.

They woke me up at 4am and I haven't been able to get back to sleep. Today is going to be simply awesome.

http://m.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/new ... _hotspots/

Bradford amongst the worst crash hotpots and for uninursed drivers. This is why the premiums are so high. having to drive through Bradford West twice a day, I can believe this.

For some reason my mother keeps sharing lost pets posts on facebook. Todays is a classic though, picture of a spaniel with a caption "Lost, missing, possibly stollen"