ALL-INCLUSIVE holiday buffets, all you can eat buffets, the rolling buffets that are Yo Sushi conveyor belts – carousels for little baggages of congealing grub. Ah, self-service, now brought to a logical conclusion at new London Chinese Shuang Shuang. Here you grab raw materials off the belt and cook your own meal in a hot stockpot. Teppanyaki, only messier. Like fondu, not my bag.
Phew, what a relief to roll up to Vapiano, where all you have to do is ‘inter-act’ with the nearest available open kitchen chef, ordering each course with a swipe of a card. No table service as such, each dish compiled at the serving station, so essentially a buffet but with a flummoxing pressure of personal choice. That’s because you can randomly pick what you want to be sprinkled over your pizza or to coat your pasta (12 kinds are made in-house each day, which is a plus).
Call me old-fashioned but I like assiduous service and, especially with Italian food, the traditional marriage of a certain kind of pasta with a specific sauce. I’ll even splash out a little extra for the privilege.
Still, Vapiano must be doing something right when across its London branches alone (Hamburg-born, it is an international phenomenon) it draws in 30,000 customers a week.
Our new Corn Exchange branch boasts 400 covers spread out across two huge, dazzling floors, the upper looking out across the atrium to all its chain rivals bar its fellow Italians. High profile rival Gino d’Acampo is directly below and Salvis even further down in its basement extension. I reviewed the latter last week and absolutely loved it. Not just because it is a plucky local operation – we don’t do parochial – but because of the quality of its raw materials and attention to detail. Oh, and it’s very authentic Italiannness.
All the attention to detail at Vapiano seems to have gone on its design courtesy of Milan maestro Matteo Thun. A huge picture of that city’s Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele fashion arcade adorns the walls along with folksier shots of Italian families. An improvement on Rosso’s old shtick of Rat Pack posters and I’m happy enough with the cute pots of basil on the democratic, light wood sharing tables and the 100 year-old olive tree in situ.
Less so with the ‘we’re here in Manchester’ murals and mottos, where George Orwell’s soundbite from the Road to Wigan Pier is scrawled: “Manchester, belly and guts of the Nation” and there’s a Big Brother figure toting a guitar (Manc) and wine glass (Italia) watching over you.
It all smacks of a heavy branding charm offensive. There’s a heavy hand in the kitchen concept, too. I wanted to try a pasta dish AND a pizza and was told by my behind the counter server to order my Pizza Fiorentina first. It would be 10 minutes in the making. I could scoff my Granchi di Fiume (crayfish) with my personal pasta pick of tagliatelle before tackling my freshly baked and loaded crust.
You guessed it, shortly after we sat down the little buzzer I was given summoned me to the distant pizza counter. By the time I’d sat down again with my Fiorentina one of the servers broke ranks to tell me they’d been trying to summon me for the pasta. The acceptable white wine from a simple, covers-all-bases list (they do bring drinks to you) was already warming rapidly, so I concentrated on the pizza – at £8.75 the best dish of the meal with a crisp base and a well judged topping (apart from over 20 industrial-tasting olives I piled to the side).
Pizzas and pastas are divided into three groupings on the menu – Classico Italianio, Vapiano della Casa and Internationally Inspired. Suffering a little from its enforced sojourn under the heat lamp, my crayfish pasta (£10.25) came from the latter category (like, say a Tropicale Pizza with ham and pineapple) and was well-endowed with little pink crustaceans and veg shreds, but the muddy lobster sauce didn’t do the dish any favours.
The same applied to my companion’s Risotto Gamberetti e Pomodoro (£10.95), which lacked true risotto consistency – unctuously sloppy but with an al dente edge to the rice. Here it was an unattractive, tomato-heavy rice soup that looked disarmingly from a distance like baked beans. The ample prawns were poor relations to the beauts we had eaten at Salvi’s, the accompanying grated Grana Padano, an even poorer relation of the proper stuff, let alone Parmesan.
To follow, two contrasting pud experiences (each £4.75). The Cioccolata Foresta Nera, Vapiano’s deconstruction of Black Forest Gateau with dark and white chocolate, nutella, sponge fingers and vanilla cream, was a sad, sickly thing; their baked lemon cheesecake more like it.
Unlike less upmarket canteens, we didn’t have to load our finished plates on a tray, but a canteen experience it still was and not particularly cheap.
You say goodbye to Big Brother Manchester and hand back your card on the way out. All quite disorienting and, well, Orwellian.
Vapiano, Unit 13, Corn Exchange, Exchange Square, M4 3TR. 0161 834 8961. Click here for the full menu.