Little Chef – Why Heston?

Big Chef Takes on Little Chef

Watching Heston Blumenthal add oysters to a Lancashire hotpot confirmed two things.

1) He is not the cuddly,  Ramsey, shout-at-you-with-a few-home-truths, business-sorted-by-the-end-of-the-episode kind of chef

2) Little Chef management are either daft, out of touch, or not very well trained in the art of media

Seeing Ian Pedley, Chief Exec of Little Chef,  unwilling to give out the chain’s gross profit margins on camera did not bode well for a trusting and healthy relationship. Pedley hangs up on Blumenthal later in the program when he asks for targets and projections that Pedley cannot or will not provide.

Heston is given a restaurant, 6 months, and a budget of 350,000 pounds and given a fairly muddled remit to reinvent the menu (which is not what customers want, apparently) while retaining a sense of the Britishness of the Little Chef brand.

They wanted a Gordon Ramsey to come in and revamp the business. But they chose experimental Michelin three-star chef Heston Blumental, who does not appear to be a good organisational fit.

Pedley also comes across as a bit of a tool, parroting meaningless management jargon like “blue-sky thinking” and “thinking out of the box”, which when all is said and done, really mean risk-taking, but with positive results, something that’s very easy to ask for and very difficult to fulfil.

One is reminded of the episode of the Simpsons where Krusty the Klown and the TV execs are describing to the writers how they want the new character Poochie – brought in to revamp a flagging Itchy and Scratchy – to look and sound.

“He’s gotta be in-your-face!” says Krusty. “Oh, yeah,” concurs the TV executive, “he’s a totally outrageous paradigm.”

“‘In-your-face’, ‘paradigm’?” scoffs one writer, “aren’t those just buzzwords that stupid people use to sound important? [pause] I’m fired, aren’t I?”