Stephen Bush: If you sneer at Wetherspoons, you’ve never feared splitting the bill The worst meal I have ever had in my life was at the Tramshed restaurant in Shoreditch, London. Not because […]

The worst meal I have ever had in my life was at the Tramshed restaurant in Shoreditch, London. Not because it tasted particularly bad, but because throughout the meal I was in a state of barely contained anxiety about the bill.



At the time I was so broke that my advice slip was just the word “Don’t” in big red letters, my mobile phone would periodically stop working, and I was in a state of perpetual negotiation with my bank about the size of my overdraft.

It was a friend’s birthday party and I had carefully worked out how much – or, rather, how little – I could afford to eat in order to end the month with enough money to keep me in pesto. But very early on, troubling noises about “splitting the bill” were made, and I spent the rest of the meal watching in horror as people ordered more food and more wine.

Splitting the bill

The question of whether or not a restaurant bill should be equally split or everyone should pay for what they ate is a divisive one: that is to say it divides good against evil. Anyone with an ounce of consideration for the financial circumstances of their dinner companions know that you should only offer to split the bill if you are the one who will be left out of pocket as a result.

Happily, at Tramshed, one of the other diners picked up on my evident distress and loudly insisted that the bill be split based on what people had actually bought and ate, so disaster was averted.

As for the quality of the food, I have no idea. As you can imagine, I certainly didn’t enjoy it at the time and the whole experience was sufficiently stressful that I have little desire to revisit it.

The reviews haven’t been enough to tempt me back. Marina O’Loughlin, one of my favourite food critics, described it as “good but not brilliant, and for this money, I want brilliant”.

Now O’Loughlin has turned her eye to the quality of food at Wetherspoons, and she wasn’t impressed. “The chicken has all the allure of impacted cardboard,” she seethes of one dish. A burger is dismissed as “a flat, damp sandwich”, a side of ribs as “the sort of things you might scoop out of the bottom of Hannibal Lecter’s recycling bin” and the whole thing pronounced “cheap not because it’s good value, but because it’s nasty”.

Some of the best meals of my life

I’m not going to pretend that I adore the food at Wetherspoons, but it has, nonetheless, been responsible for some of the best meals of my life. When I was working in a shop and gradually tunnelling out from under my overdraft, a monthly treat for me and the rest of the staff was a trip outside of the store’s catchment area (where we could be certain of not bumping into any of the clientele) to have dinner at Spoons.

It wasn’t good, but it was affordable, we could sit down without being hassled to move on and, crucially, you pay separately and upfront, with no anxiety about who was paying for what.

“Slating Wetherspoons in the pages of The Sunday Times shows how easy it is to forget what not having very much money is actually like, and how little sympathy we have for people who fall on hard times.”

In comparing the food to somewhere nicer where we would never have afforded to be able to eat, or somewhere we couldn’t have sat down, O’Loughlin has missed the point and the pleasure that an evening at Spoons gave us. In response, she talked about her days of having very little money and how she understood what it was like to have to scrimp and save, but she still wouldn’t have taken solace at Wetherspoons.

I’m not saying that O’Loughlin is knowingly lying, but a fundamental truth of human psychology is that we tend to look back on the hard times in our life with rose-tinted glasses. When I looked at the Tramshed menu in order to write this piece, I was astonished to realise there was a time when the prospect of paying more than a tenner for a meal out made me almost anxious enough to vomit.

There’s a bigger point here than appreciating the joy of a sit-down meal you can afford in the company of people you like. Slating Wetherspoons in the pages of The Sunday Times shows how easy it is to forget what not having very much money is actually like, and how little sympathy we have for people who fall on hard times.

That’s why punitive policies which punish the poor – like the cap on child benefit after the second child, or sanctions for missing appointments at the Job Centre even if it is due to sickness or bad transport – are so popular: because increasingly large parts of society can’t comprehend what it’s like to be frightened of splitting the bill.

Stephen Bush is Special ­Correspondent at the ‘New Statesman’