Away with your service station food

I hate British motorway services. I haven't driven enough in other counties to know if this is something peculiar to this country, but they are truly dreadful. At this time of year, with families driving off for a summer holiday, they pretty much hold them to ransom.

You either pack a picnic (which isn't a bad idea, there's nothing finer than a poached chicken torn apart and put into sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise - or the humble and undervalued scotch egg) or put up with hugely expensive, very bad quality, chemical laden junk.

It's not entirely the vendors' faults though. They have to pay a huge sum to get a franchise, so that the only way they can make money is charge a lot for something cheap.

There must another way, and maybe there is. There are little villages and towns just off every motorways all over the country with perfectly brilliant little cafes and the like. For the sake of the 2 minutes to drive an extra half mile you could be having tea made in the pot and some homemade soup with a crusty roll, a lovingly hand made sandwich or, best of all, a full english breakfast without taking out a mortgage. Of course, the problem is finding them....

All it would take would someone to organise a network of cafe and food lovers to start sharing where these places are, rate them etc, then create something to work with your smart phone's GPS so you could find them. In a couple of years, new cars will be connected to the web and have all sorts of apps and stuff, like this or this.

Then you would only need to stop at a service station for petrol, sweets or a magazine. If you wanted good food, you could get it.

Comments

[CF]

Couldn't agree more. British services are appaling.

There are a couple of solutions to the problem already, though, just not very joined up.

This is ons http://www.5minutesaway.co.uk/ - there's a book too, but I didn't find it very useful. The site is true to its word: things are 5 minutes away - but that doesn't mean they're very good.

The other is very low tech indeed. We bought a copy of 'Eating out in Ppubs' - it's a Michelin book so the maps are good and the pubs aren't all pricey, just really nice. It lives in the glove box and has provided some brilliant lunches, normally about 15 mins drive off the motorway.

[gemma]

I had an appalling M1 service station experience on Saturday (wrote outraged email to Costa's chief exec and everything).

But on the trip down on Friday I stopped at a retail park just off the m-way - you get the same loos and food court set up but decidedly better shops for leg stretching & window shopping :-)

The A1 is better generally for random places to stop I find - lots of farm parks, national trust places and the like.

[CF]

Looks like this is a hot topic at the moment - there's a free downloadable guide out now that the Guardian has just written about...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/blog/2010/aug/06/road-side-cafes-motorway?page=all

[northern]

Ha! I should have known it was too obvious for somebody not to be doing something.
However, it still needs pulling together, I'd want all that information baked into an app that works with GPS so you're never lost for something decent to eat. Even better, it evolves with the people who use it.

[herbal sexual enhancement]

I hope there could aside a program for locations like these.