restaurants chains...best/worst

best nandos worst mcdonalds by a country mile

redbag, apart from the Big Mac I suppose Macs is pretty poor. its just that one product that does it, so maybe a poor choice on my part...

anything with the word 'chain' is suspect imo   

Best Pizza Express.

Worst Pizza Hut and Nandos.

The latter two are the creche and trainer bra of restaurants respectively.

only good thing about overpriced pizza express is they sell aspells cider.subway breakfast menu another load of  s h ite.pret a manager overpriced for what it is . coffee is nice though.

One of the great mysteries of the universe is the amount of McDonalds food that is consumed and washed down with fizzy drinks. I can only assume fans of it haven't tried much else, and are so permanently inactive they can't feel the difference of what a sharp intake of saturated fat does to their energy levels.

Another great mystery about McDonalds is how they get away with it.
Imagine saying to somebody "I've got this great idea for a restaurant. The customers will queue up for the food. We'll serve it up in a cardboard box and a paper cup and when they've finished they can put the remains into a nearby waste bin."
They'd probably say " dont be daft no-one's going to stand for that!"

Another mystery is how Ronald McDonald stays so thin.

Yo Sushi and Nando's best

KFC worst

The last thing McDonalds food can be described as it tasty, I think this is one of the main reasons for it's success though.  No matter which one you go into you know you are going to get the same inoffensive bland burger served up to you.

Best Pizza Express (by some distance)

Worst

Pizza Hut
KFC

Honourable mentions

Nandos(quickish service,reasonable food soso portions)
Yo Sushi (always seems well run and efficient)
Macdonalds(simply on a business level what they do they do well)

Well, as the oracle at Delphi had it; 'Μηδέν  άγαν'.

I've eaten at some very famous restaurants and I'm a keen amateur cook and I'm pretty confident my palate is decent in nick.

McDonalds is good fast food imo - I've eaten bloody awful fish and chips that make a big Mac and chips look like 2 Michelin starred haute cuisine. It's fashionable to knock McDonalds these days, but its success isn't an accident.

Personally, I think pizzas are universally horrible in this country and Subway sandwiches are revolting (although I've only ever had one!)

As a child, when my parents visited me at school, the big treat was a trip to the local Berni Inn for a steak.

Nice

I'm not a big fan of subway.

The ingredients have been lying around all day and are pretty stale. The meat is processed and pumped with water.

Mcdonalds/burger king/ KFc are all much of a muchness. Good if you sre starving hungry and want something quick but that's it.

Best, by a country mile, imo.  The lunchtime menus are superb.

Brasserie Blanc

Worst, plenty to choose from, but bottom of the pile for me -

Pizza Hut

KFC---breast bones look plastic

considering pizza express and ASK are essentially exactly the same restaurant, I'm not entirely sure how the OP can list one as the best and one as the worst. A bit dubious imo.

Best - Pizza express.

Worst - Frankie and Benny's by far. The food isn't bad, but the service is absolutely abysmal, you spend half the evening waiting for your food, and it is always full of screaming brats.

Pizza Express and ASK are not he same product in my opinion. One is better than the other. Pizza express is more enjoyable IMO.

Excuse my dumbness but how are Pizza Express and ASK essentially the 'same' restaurant anyway Whippet? In that that they serve pizza et al. Not all curry houses are essentially the same are they?

...how are Pizza Express and ASK essentially the 'same' restaurant

They are both owned by Gondola Holdings plc as is the lesser known Zizzi chain.

Gu!nness, Johnnie Walker and Baileys are all owned by Diageo, but they are decidedly not the same thing.

Ask is hardly terrible though. Not great, but not terrible.

As I said on a thread a month or so ago, Pizza Express might not be brilliant, but you get a better pizza there than in a random Roman pizzeria.

Pizza Hut, on the other hand is below contempt.

I'd completely forgotten about KFC, which is indescribably awful too.

McDonalds is at least better than your bog standard no-name burger bar, and the chicken is much better than KFC ('cept the nuggets).

Subway is also awful. The only one in which the food is so repulsive the smell seems to permeate the restaurant.

Strange imo in that i find most chains in the uk pretty grim, whilst the USA seems to have quite a few similar franchise set up's that are good quality.

Good point cooperman.But in the usa it tendS to be all theyve ever had (in recent history) so the corporates tend to set the tone and ARE the norm,where over here theyve slowly swallowed up the independents and got away with a level of mediocrity the yanks wouldn't tolerate.

dennys in the states is superb

I'd add Cafe Rouge on the "worst of" list as well,hopeless faceless souless long standing corporate effort at french brassieres,pretty p1sspoor.

Honourable "grimness" mentions also go to

Burger King (though their whopper is easily best burger)
ASK
Bella Pasta(not much better than Pizza Hut imo)

I aslo find the uk version of Frankie and Bennys beyond belief in the crapness stakes,if they operated ont he same qualoty level in us theyd be shut in 3 months,the service is lamentable and the food(while passable)is about as "new york italian" as  a smartprice pizza

i'm with orioles (and as it happens the youngest ever 3* michelin chef in the uk, namely marco pierre white) on the subject of mcdonalds.

it's not at all bad, and a great deal better than you will get at plenty of restaurants across the country, in terms of freshness, consistency, quality and value for money.

as for comments about the healthiness of the food, as orioles said it's about moderation. i've yet to see morgan spurlock's documentary where he eats at michelin starred restaurants serving french cuisine for 30 days solid, but i know what the results would be.

it will soon be considered a treat to stay at home and cook a meal if only for the quality of food experience.

F/food companies raison d'etre has always been about serving fast food ,not great food

I like La Tasca in York. I have not not been to any of their other restaurants
A mate of mine says The Deep Pan Pizza company do the best pizzas. I have only been to one of their restaurants and it was good.

I think there is a bit of harsh comment around for KFC.  As fast food goes, its the best out there for me.  And I find it something of a consolation to see fast food meat in the same shape as the animal it came from.

my local one is poor

i like kfc, mcdonalds and subway