The Australian chain with deliberately rude staff has arrived in the UK – but is bad service funny?
asochism as entertainment has long been the 21st century’s stock-in-trade: Gordon Ramsay shouting at aspiring chefs; catty old Kevin McCloud comparing someone’s multimillion-pound Grand Design with a car showroom. Even in this #BeKind age, we remain hungry for ritual humiliation.
Some journalists go undercover in despotic regimes. Others create elaborate identities to lure the powerful into corruption. My lunchtime task was to go incognito at Karen’s in Prestwich, a suburb of Bury inonce home to the late Mark E Smith, the Fall singer whose uncompromising rudeness was less of a gimmick than a way of life. Karen’s Diner would have represented everything Smith hated about modern life, where insults come from a script rather than the heart.
A waitress chucked menus in our general direction. Another brought us chefs’ hats crayoned with insults. Work experience student Hope, no doubt rapidly reassessing her career goals, received one reading “Tory”. Mine said: “I noshed Boris.” A woman strutted past to the loos with the confidence of a supermodel, perhaps forgetting she was wearing one saying “dopey slag”.
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