It doesn't get much bigger than this.' Ah, famous last words. No sooner had the owners of Cosmo, the pan-Asian chain, launched their 800-seater in Croydon than some bright spark in Bristol thought they could beat it and so lucky Bristolians can now gaze in dribbling awe at the 1000-seater Za Za Bazaar, newly opened and ready to indulge your every dining whimsy.
Just take a moment to consider those numbers. All thoughts of intimacy and quiet pleasure can stop right there. You'll be elbow-to-elbow at the all-you-can-eat buffet, standing on tiptoe peering over heads at the live cooking demos, weaving around tables with a teetering tray trying to remember which exact quadrant you left your small children in. . .This, dear readers, is the future of restaurants. And it's only going to get bigger. The aforementioned Cosmo already feeds 30,000 people a week across its eleven branches; Za Za Bazaar is set to roll out another seven across the country. Za Za Bazaar, with 300 dishes on its menu, apparently reckons it will be using 1000kg of beef per week. Vegetables arrive by the lorry-load. It's all terribly terribly... well... big.
Interestingly both these chains have based their menus on the Asian or, more broadly and accurately speaking, the street food scene. And street food markets are a genuine pleasure, wandering as you please picking up a morsel here, a skewer there, tasting and discovering as you go. But that's not how it works indoors, and they know it. It's pile-it-high and then go back and pile it higher. And it's not like you would have a tasting of Thai, followed by a finger-licking rib. More likely, with the numbers and concomitant queues, curries would slosh into fajitas, which would get mixed up with the pickles. Where the real thing at least has the merits of avoiding any nasty cross-cuisine clashes, the margin for error here, with your plate its own melting pot of con-fusion, seems huge. It's hardly ringing bells for gourmet dining.
Is it even about the food at all? Isn't it actually about the experience and being a crowd-pleaser and everyone, whether you're a party of four or forty, being able to get something they want to eat instead of someone sulking because there are no chips or cottage pie? Wouldn't it be lovely to know even the fussiest of eaters could chow down. On the other hand, is it food snobbery to feel that eating out shouldn't be about mass catering on such scale, but rather a more intimate, balanced affair? Or is this exactly what we've been waiting for? It's the world on a plate – dig in.
The sound of 800 people all eating. Not for me.