Master Chef, March 2nd 2007

Master Chef
87 Prince of Wales Road
Norwich
Norfolk
United Kingdom
NR1 1DG
01603 765555

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There's a sign on the door of Master Chef with the words 'fast food' written on it. I can only assume that this sign refers to the speed at which their food is served, and whilst this is only implied and never promised, I still take issue with it. I suppose it's probably a matter of context. In the context of the time it might take to formulate an Israeli-Palestinien peace deal it was practically instantaneous. Of course, in the context of how long it might take me to starve to death, the results were far less positive. The name master chef appeared a little ambitious too, considering that I was little over 10 yards from the the 'kitchen' watching my frozen pizza base being covered in toppings and sent through the pizza-o-matic machine. Again of course, it's only implied that the sign is referring to the man behind the counter, it could just be an absurdly talented machine. Lots to think about then, and all this before we'd even stared long and hard at the big laminate boards and decided what we wanted to eat. No matter, on to the food itself.

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The variety of pizzas is good here. There are plenty of different toppings, and plenty of different sizes. The process of actually producing them however, is a bit like watching people washing their clothes with mangles and basins before washing machines and tumble dryers were invented. It's just painfully slow. It was in fact so slow, that our party took to giving drunken relationship advice to a girl whose boyfriend 'pushes me and calls me fat' in the mean time. Our advice amounted to her being better off going out with a chimp, which was interesting, given that said boyfriend was outside climbing scaffolding. For the record she was fat. Still, a little uncalled for. For those who are interested, she eventually decided that for all his flaws, she loved him. I don't think we helped that much, and once our food turned up we sort of lost interest. As I've mentioned before, these sorts of restaurants don't operate under the same criteria as others. You know the food isn't going to be of high quality, and that by and large you're going to be herded through like cattle. The least you can hope for is for speed, these are afterall volume businesses. It is here where Master Chef critically doesn't deliver.