Opinion
Fine dining is not welcome here. Long live the depressing food court
Thomas Mitchell
Culture reporterLast week I was fortunate enough to have a day off in the middle of the working week – truly one of life’s most underrated joys. While everyone else was answering emails, I was free to do whatever I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was purchase exactly six warm cinnamon doughnuts from the Donut King at my local shopping centre.
The Donut King is an extension of the food court, a place I spent many hours as a teenager doing teenage things: loitering, pooling money together to buy McDonald’s and finding different ways to slightly alter my school uniform to attract the opposite sex.
Even at a tender age, I appreciated the food court for the unique role it played in social spaces. It has always been a meeting place of sorts, a mecca for the hopeless and the hungry, the forlorn and the fed up.
The food court: a meeting place for the forlorn and the fed up. Credit: Dionne Gain
Got a half-hour lunch break from your eight-hour shift at The Reject Shop? Head to the food court. Desperately lonely but also not in the mood to talk to anyone? Head to the food court. In the mood for a dish that has been sweating under heating lamps for the entire day? Head to the food court!
Only at the food court can you truly eat alone together, munching fast food as time slowly ebbs away.
Unfortunately, my local shopping centre is almost always undergoing some kind of renovation, so I was forced to ask a shopping centre employee for directions to Donut King (“you know, the one near the food court”), to which she replied: “The Donut King is gone. And wait, do you mean Food Hall?”
And that’s where the trouble began. The Food Hall, as it turns out, was just the old food court with a dramatic facelift. Gone was Donut King, replaced instead by a doughnut chain that exclusively sold doughnuts that sounded more like cakes: lemon meringue, cookies and cream cheesecake and red velvet.
Christmas shopping rush at Westfield Kotara. The food court at its most glorious.Credit: Max Mason-Hubers
Also absent was the cafeteria-style seating and rundown eateries featuring neon signs and, occasionally, neon food. In their place, an array of “indoor restaurants”, each with its own defined seating area and, disturbingly in some cases, waiting staff.
Desperately, I scanned the hall for familiar faces – the Colonel, Ronald, the charming Lebanese man who had run the kebab shop when I was in high school – but they were nowhere to be seen.
Instead, the options were slick, shiny and far too fancy. A steakhouse offering a mid-week Wagyu special, an upmarket Vietnamese restaurant with a set menu and, my personal favourite, a romantic wine and pasta bar by the team from Fabbrica.
Has anyone in the history of mall shopping found themselves suddenly craving zucchini flowers and a Sicilian red while strolling through Best & Less?
A pasta bar at Chadstone Market Pavilion. Fancy? Sure.
And yet, baffling as it may seem, this is not an isolated incident. Earlier this year, Chadstone Shopping Centre, a centre so famous it has its own bogan nickname (Chaddy), underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation. Its new food court boasts some of the most respected names in the culinary world, including famed Italian cafe Brunetti, restaurateur David Mackintosh (of Lee Ho Fook and MoVida fame) and Vic’s Meats – the Sydney butcher’s first foray into the Victorian market.
The fancification of food courts slots neatly into the thoroughly modern (but very misguided) belief that the more grandiose something looks, feels and tastes, the better it is. From eating oysters at the football to tasting menus at airports, this desire for every eating experience to cosplay as extravagant has robbed us of everyday delights.
The food court is supposed to be a classless utopia, where anyone and everyone is welcome to take a break from the relentless pursuit of pretending to be better than we are.
Don’t believe me? Let’s not forget when George Lucas, of Star Wars fame (and $8 billion net worth), was photographed alone eating a plate of $6 Hokkien noodles in an Adelaide food court in 2016.
The snap of Lucas, who was wearing a crumpled shirt and looked completely exhausted, was celebrated online as proof of his relatability, while also inspiring some great hashtags, including #MayTheForkBeWithYou.
While I accept that attempting to halt progress is usually futile and the humble food court may be a thing of the past, I won’t give up hope of a return to the glory days. A time when food courts were dimly lit and a bit depressing, but you could still get a doughnut that looked like a doughnut. Sure, it might seem like a stretch, but to borrow a line from Lucas’ Star Wars universe, “rebellions are built on hope”.
Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at thomas.mitchell@smh.com.au or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.