This massive billboard for McDonald’s Yass is the funniest sign on the Australian highway network. Imagine the word “kiss” in front of it and you’ll soon see what I mean.
But there’s nothing funny about the roadside dining options on Australia’s highways, which generally range from gross to inedible to botulism-inducing.
I did plenty of driving over Christmas, in a loop of SE NSW that included a south coast beach holiday and three days camping in the Snowy Mountains. Kilometres covered: about 1,200. Memorable road meals: zero.
By far the worst meal was at McDonald’s Sutton Forest, which is about 170km and two McDonaldses down the road from McDonald’s Yass.
Why did I stop at Maccas at all? Because the kids were starving and there’s no other freakin’ place to stop on the Hume Highway unless you want to eat at a truckstop dump with bain-marie crumbed something which has been sitting there since Harold Holt disappeared.
According to the dude taking out the garbage (or stocking the kitchen with fresh food – who can tell the diff?), McDonald’s Sutton Forest has up to 50 staff working in peak periods, and is the second busiest Maccas in the southern hemisphere.
I’ll just say this. If Al Qaeda wants to portray images of the ultimate spiritual and cultural (not to mention culinary) vacuousness of the west, they should forget screening Jerry Springer re-runs. Just send a camera crew to McDonald’s Sutton Forest.
There, they will discover a vast room full of fat, bethonged morons eating regurgitated cow shit served with a plastic toy made in China’s Guangdong province.
A notable feature of the “diners”, if they can be called that, is that the children will usually be better dressed than the parents, if only because the children have been given new thongs for Christmas.
This isn’t elitism. I, too, was bethonged. I was wearing a dumb yellow trucker’s cap. I even ate a Quarter Pounder (onions removed of course, because they resembled something that actually grew once).
Believe me, I’m well and truly in the Joe Hildebrand camp on the important national issue of rampant foodie wankerism.
But surely, there’s room on our highways for food which falls between Chicken McTesticles and aged, organic wankyu beef, or whatever it’s called.
I’d have settled for a simple salad sandwich. Soggy bread would have been no problem. But forget it. No chance.
What I want to know is, where are the Boost juice bars and Sumo Salads that have colonised our shopping malls? Not by the roadside, that’s for sure.
My greatest ever road trip meal letdown came in the WA town of Denmark, on the south coast near Albany. “Hey,” I said to my wife. “We’re in Denmark. Let’s go the bakery and grab a danish! Yeah, that’ll be hilarious.”
You wouldn’t believe it. Two bakeries in Denmark and not a danish to be seen. Chalk up yet another disappointing road meal experience.
Occasionally, in far flung corners of Australia, I have found the odd rare gem. One such spot is Hanna’s Lebanese Restaurant, on a lonely, cold stretch of highway about five km west of Cooma (although I’m now told it may have moved into town).
The windswept plain out the back of Cooma is the last place on earth you’d expect to find the best Lebanese food on earth, but there it is, or was, complete with rugs, thick syrupy Lebanese coffee, pictures of the snow-clad Cedars of Lebanon and kebbe you’d kiss a camel for.
Sadly, such places are the exception. If you know of any great spots on the highways of this wide brown culinary wasteland, for God’s sake share them. You’ll be doing us all a massive public service.
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