Managed to tear myself away from the Barack Obama inauguration coverage for another fascinating episode of Big Chef takes on Little Chef last night.

Again the people running Little Chef came over badly.

At the end of programme Heston – surely the UK’s most amiable chef – was threatening to walk out because there was no sign of any commitment from Little Chef.

He had redesigned the famous Olympic Breakfast and was quite fairly asking them to commit to five test sites instead of just one. Heston’s biggest fear about the project was that they were using him for publicity and not to really make a long-term change to the menu.

With one programme still to go, it increasingly looks that way.

At every turn the chief exec of Little Chef came over as insincere and false. His mouth was saying that he thought he had a real connection with Heston, but his eyes and actions were saying otherwise.

When the Little Chef board trooped into Heston’s restaurant to taste his new menu, they looked like a board. A bunch of suits who had lost touch with what was really happening in their restaurants.

If Little Chef’s goal for this was to reach people like me who haven’t eaten there for years and show me how much they’ve changed for the better (or are starting to change) – then so far they’ve failed. Let’s see what if tonight’s final episode turns this PR disaster around for them.

Tags: Heston Blumenthal, Little Chef

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Bad PR, In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.