I used to order a takeaway once a week; Chinese, pizza, Indians etc. However, over the past year, I genuinely don’t find them as nice anymore. Whenever I get one, I find cooking a meal with meat I’ve bought from the butchers is so much nicer.
I used to look forward to ordering, but lately I’ve found myself disappointed & feeling ripped off. As well as feeling crappy with how greasy they often are.
Maybe it’s because I’m buying better produce at the butchers, but it got me wondering how often people order them? And do you think it’s good value for money?
26 comments
You’re getting old like the rest of us
They’ve always been like that. You just started cooking your own food and realised how much quality gap there is.
You can take the worst quality meat put a lot of salt, msg and fat and it will taste decent for an inexperienced taster
My nearest Fish and Chip shop doesn’t even do chippy chips anymore, just really shit fries, their quality took a nosedive when lockdown started and they took advantage of switching to deliveries to jack the prices WAY up.
Couldn’t agree more. In the last few years they’ve become 50% more expensive and 50% worse.
There are more and more of them all over the place and the prices have had to be competitive meaning cheaper options used for the food.
But also I think most people once they are making their own higher quality food will notice the difference big time.
Even if you go back decades the average person could cook far better than most takeaways.
I bought an Ooni and there’s no pizza joint that can compete with that for the price they’d charge.
Getting older is realising you can make food ten times better at home.
But also I think takeaways have changed – growing up they were always a treat that happened once or twice a year, and you could order from a couple of places and that would be it. Now every restaurant is takeout, or has a dark kitchen, people treat takeaway like going to the supermarket. I have friends who order 2-3x a week no issue. The volume of that means the quality is going to get worse, plus cost of food and restraints having to make up the fees means cutting corners so it all just becomes crap.
Nah they have, the past year I just stick to the same pizza place because it’s always the same.
This fancy take away place that wants to charge £20 for a burger and chips the burger was raw in the middle, it wasn’t cooked you could tell. Most places idk what’s going on but the chips are always stale, hard and cold.
I think everyone’s just cutting corners and it’s really affecting the quality. I know it’s a take away and it’s not gonna be a fancy restaurant but they keep putting the prices up and it just gets worse
Especially when takeaways are sometimes more expensive than eating out. It would be different if they were a cheaper alternative.
Third party delivery services ruined everything with their service charges and commission.
I make my own. But I enjoy cooking, so…
Half the problem for me is the takeaways don’t do some of the things I like. None of the own-brand KFCs near me seem to do actual chicken on the bone anymore, it’s all popcorn chicken and ‘tenders’. KFC got rid of the Variety Meal which is the only thing I ever got (and ordering a ‘Bucket for One’ is frankly depressing). None of the kebab shops do Manchester-style kebabs with mango sauce, yogurt sauce and chilli sauce, with shredded cabbage. It’s all lettuce and garlic mayo and precooked nan.
So yeah I just make it the way I like it at home. Iceland doner kebab meat and southern fried chicken is all pretty excellent and reliable compared with the 8-hour-old greasy nonsense you get from the takeaway sometimes.
I’m in total agreement here. I’m a sucker for a good kebab, but the shops are just buying in really low quality meat now and I’m just not paying for it. It’s not even lamb anymore.
Takeaways have definitely 100% taken a dive the last few years.
I just think there are good takeaways and shit takeaways and when you don’t have a lot of money you notice the shit ones less
Can only stand a Nando’s now, all the others seemingly fell off. McDonald’s / KFC just isn’t sitting right and £10 for a large Big Mac meal is insane to me since they were £6 for the longest time.
I believe it’s more of a shift in consciousness..seems everyone including myself just don’t fancy a takeaway anymore somehow it feels like more effort lol.
I realised this when I was like thirteen and ever since would cook for my family every Saturday with the most bougie ingredients
Since covid they all think they can serve crap , plus id say about 90% of then are just money laundering places that just happen to cook if you ring up
Everything is going downhill
Same, I know originally it was supposed to be a cheap alternative to cooking, snd then it become a treat tea (my childhood) now it feels like I’m paying half a weekly shop on a semi decent meal that does us 2 nights at best. And it’s not that great anymore either.
If prices weren’t so expensive it would bother me but I’m not a great chef snd I’ve started preferring my own “fake aways” instead
I don’t think they’re necessarily getting worse, I just think we have too many of them now. Once upon a time it was a very rare treat. Now, they’re everywhere. We used to take our time over what we would order, now people tend to stick to the same things over and over so it gets quite boring.
It used to be Chinese did the Chinese food, Indians/ Pakistanis/ Bangladeshis ran curry houses, Turkish did kebabs, itallians ran pizza shops.
Now it’s got to a point where kebab shops just do a bit of everything, but dont do much, if anything, actually well.
A lot of it is partly down to the people who came over and opened takeaways 30-40-50 years ago sent their kids off to university for a better life instead of following on the family buisness. Nobody is keeping the good authentic(ish) takeaways going.
Too expensive now. A meal for 4 from our local Chinese is getting on for £70.
I find them the same quality but the increases in price make them harder and harder to justify.
McDonalds especially. It used to be great for a quick stop for some cheap food to keep you going. Now it’s like £10+ for anything substantial. Not worth it
For me, I don’t think the quality has changed much, it’s the prices.
Our chippy order, 3x sausages, chip barm w/ curry sauce, chips cheese & gravy, 1 large chips and 2 cans, is costing almost £30.
Two medium pizzas and two cans are coming in at a similar price too.
For those prices, I’m expecting very good food, and when you get it and it’s mediocre, as most takeaways usually are, it’s just disappointing and makes it seem like it tastes worse than it does.
When you finally find a chippy that’s asking like £3 for chip barm with curry sauce instead of £5-6, it just automatically tastes better even though the quality is basically the exact same.
When I was in the frozen pizza industry we had a phrase called salamism
We would make dozens of incremental cost savings to our pizza, comparing one to the other you could not tell the difference.
But over time we would notice that market share was dropping, promotions were not as effective and that the consumer had caught on that the pizza’s were ‘just not as good’
At that point we would re launch and bump the quality starting the whole process again
i believe this is called growing up
Do you all like to moan about everything? I had an Indian last night and it was fantastic, lots of flavour and spice and hot large portions too. I’ve recently moved to a new local Indian but used to go to the same one for nearly 20 years and they were always top notch so I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of good restaurants and takeaways out there just find the right ones, of course some aren’t going to be great.