Heston's toast with egg...on his face

We're returning to a favourite subject because I think that world-class asininity deserves to be acknowledged whenever it is witnessed. Yes, we're going to Little Chef, the company which has had its heart ripped out and stuffed with some over-priced and out-of-reach organic something or other, and then blasted with a blow torch by moonlight on a slab of Portland Stone by Heston and his friends at RCapital.

After six wrong-headed years they've seen the infra-red heating light and shown Heston the emergency exit, because they've finally realised that their customers don't care for his concoctions and they want the kind of food they associate with Little Chef, you know, the stuff its name was built on. At times like this it's hard not to slip into Littlejohn-speak. In fact it can't be avoided. You couldn't make it up!

What happened here was that the vanity and ambition of a chef was fed by a television company, who then blinded the owners with the stardust they sprinkled on them, thus rendering them blind to, as Basil Fawlty so eloquently put it, 'the bleeding obvious'. And it's been fun to watch, but not funny at all if you happen to be one of the people who were made redundant whilst they continued with their redundant repositioning exercise.

The person who has benefited most from this farce is the titular chef, who accrued a lucrative deal with Waitrose (amongst others) on the back of the publicity generated by the Channel 4 programme. The people who have most definitely not benefited are the staff and the customers. Call me quaint, but I don't think it's supposed to be that way around.

Did RCaptial and their consultants do any research at all? And if they did they must have binned it, because even a fleeting chat with their customers would have told them that they were flogging the wrong chef.

This piece in last Sunday's Mail on Sunday was perhaps the best of the bunch and contains some choice quotes from staff and customers alike and the relief that he's now off-menu literally (as of this Monday) and figuratively is tangible. If you missed it it's worth a read so you can quote from it the next time one of your clients acts like they've been on the magic mushrooms.

I can't cook at all, Heston. Even putting something in the oven to warm up carries the possibility of a trip to A&E, but I can make a decent bit of toast. Lovely stuff.

The stuff they want.


For you, Heston...