Burger & Lobster is a -restaurant for capitalism in crisis, an existential moan for something simpler and less awful. Either that, or it is restaurant for small boys with jobs, who cannot make up their minds what they want and miss that -restaurant where you could get custard and a beating from a woman who looked like your mum but might conceivably shag you. Because it is simple — you arrive, and you order a burger or a -lobster, or both of them, or none of them. There is nothing to confuse, baffle or upset the small boy with a job living in a crisis of late capitalism, who may also have an Oepidus complex. Burger or Lobster, Oedipus? What’s it to be?
As a gimmick, removing choice from your customers obviously works, because the first branch of Burger & Lobster, in Clarges Street, Mayfair, a haunted street stinking of Graham Greene’s despair and possibly undergarments, had queues outside for three hours sometimes, and so I never went.
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