band-wagon-zine: We rate the current fads in restos for making life difficult for punters

We’ll declare our hand here and state that we like our dinner to look like dinner, our lunch to be recognizable and our breakfast familiar.

So what is with restaurants these days going out of their way to make it harder and harder for us to eat? Bandwagon marks these current trends out of ten for hardness.

First try and find the place. It’s usually down an alley, up some stairs, across some roof and don’t bother looking for any signage, there won’t be any 8/10

Harry Potter can suck on this!

As they don’t take bookings there’ll be a queue. 7/10

Is this the Pink Floyd Reunion queue?

Then there’ll b the inevitable communal tables. 7/10

It stays cleaner without customers

These places are usually staffed by people who rotate from one hotspot to another and in the process become dulled to any kind of enthusiasm for the job or the people they serve. 8/10

Those bitches are giving us a bad name on MKR?

Then there’ll be the drinks list of obscure stuff no ones ever heard of and all the wines are orange-even the reds. 6/10

They offer bread. Great I hear you say. However it will probably arrive in a box with a lid as it did at an establishment we recently visited AND they are stingy with it! What’s next, a padlock on the box as well? 5/10

How the fuck do I open this?

The menu will be a fixed price set menu. It’s too bad if you’d hoped to choose your own dinner. 8/10

Predictably the menu will have a Nordic/Spanish/Japanese undercurrent or whatever the San Pellegrino 50 best restaurant list decrees to be the next new culinary country hotspot. Except, no Antler powder? Det er OK, we’ll just substitute Crocodile fingernails. A lack of native Andalusian sea lettuce, no hay problema, we’ll just bung in some seaweed from Bronte beach. 7/10

We are NOT Reindeer fuckers!

Goooooooooooooooooal!

Please dont put me on the Kimodo

In fact nearly everything on the menu will have been scavenged from night-cart laneways to festering city creeks. 8/10

Excellent! the shit-cart hasn't collected yet!

We search high tide and low tide

Sadly you’ll probably be served by some grubby, black finger-nailed, lank-haired, unshaven or ridiculously bearded, heavily pierced and/or inked, saggy-pants wearing chef. 7/10

Hi I'm Hansel & I'll be serving youse tonight

The so-called Restaurant Garden, more accurately described as a nature strip with a tired and woody rosemary shrub will provide the solitary purple petal which adorns the meagre amount of the only protein you’ll be offered this evening, a postage stamp sized shave of -semen score 9, wagyu testicle. 9/10

We're proud of our our kitchen garden, "Wozza, keep the Camira off the strip will ya!"

'You've really got to get in close, you, know, to check freshness'

The same place is probably already busy trying to locate sizeable quantities of farmed spiders like this one in the hip town of Santa Antonio da Platina in Brazil, rumoured to be the current foodie hotspot but they’ll probably have to make do with Daddy Long Legs. 7/10
You won’t be able to hear your partners voice as the hens night next one side of you and the Deaf couple on your other side will be competing for aural superiority. 7/10