Harvester Is My Happy Place
Photos courtesy Harvester. Composite by Ruby Lott-Lavigna. 

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Food

Harvester Is My Happy Place

To visit a Harvester is to enter a portal back to a time when a free salad bar was a major restaurant selling point.

If you’re a British millennial from a regional town then Harvester probably played a crucial role in your formative years. Where I grew up on the south coast, there wasn’t much in terms of local cuisine—bar a fish and chip shop—so the Harvester that stood on the edge of our town felt like absolutely everything.

My family went there for birthdays, anniversaries, post-cinema dinners; to celebrate Nan making it out of the hospital and to commemorate her death. As a small child in the 1990s whose only previous experience of dining out involved throwing chicken nuggets into the ball pit at McDonald’s, stepping inside a Harvester for the first time was some exciting shit.

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Here was a restaurant that had a free (yeah, like, actually free) salad bar, where I would excitedly bury anything green in cheese sauce and bacon bits, as well as the luxury of warm crusty bread rolls and what felt like a million different sauces (shout out to the Red Devil). The menu also allowed me to order Tennessee ribs decades before Man v. Food made American barbecue into a legitimate trend, and when Granddad went on one of his inevitable rants about “the foreigners,” there was an adjoining pub where I could escape to try my luck at pretending to be 18.

A branch of Harvester at the O2 Arena in London. All photos by the author.

It didn’t matter that Harvester’s steak only came three ways (well done, extremely well done, or incinerated) or that every visit resulted in my grandmother complaining that her salmon was “drier than the Sahara.” Harvester, with its tagline promise of “honest home-cooked food” and family-friendly prices, made you feel welcome.

When the first Harvester—The George restaurant in Morden, South London—opened in 1983, eating out in the UK was largely restricted to basket meals in pubs. This made the Harvester’s open grill and free salad bar seem like a genuinely exciting new dining concept. At its peak, it had over 200 restaurants (it currently stands at 192), with its affordable menu a hit among middle and lower income Brits, as well as those with families.

Today, Harvester is owned by pub and restaurant company Mitchell & Butlers, but a spokesperson tells me that not much has changed there since the 1980s. “While we are evolving to reflect consumer tastes and embracing new food trends, over the years the aim for the business has remained largely true to its 1983 roots,” they say.

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A bowl from Harvester's iconic salad bar.

But what does a visit to Harvester in 2018 look like? As a twenty-something Londoner, it's usually the result of trying to find a place to eat before seeing a gig at the O2 Arena and realising that the queues for every other restaurant are too excruciating to bear. “What about the Harvester? That’s empty!” your mate Rob suggests, and with a mournful groan, you wander off to the arse-end of the O2 to find a restaurant so hidden it might as well be in the basement.

Still, I’m curious to see whether some of the magic of youth could in fact be replicated at the sight of a mixed grill. Sadly, aside from a flashy soft drink machine, which has a touch screen that pumps out Apple Tango, the O2’s Harvester feels like a time machine to the very worst parts of 1996: garish furniture, Ronan Keating songs, and a generic menu that only deals in giant chunks of meat.

I order the “Chicken Combo,” a mix of fried chicken, rotisserie chicken, and Cajun chicken, in the hope of getting some homely food. What arrives at my table tastes more like a rubbery ready meal. Meanwhile, the basic salad bar, with its huge cuts of tomatoes and manufactured coleslaw, only really inspires nostalgia for the ASDA fruit and vegetable aisle. As I take photos outside, I notice an empty promotional billboard for the restaurant; perhaps an apt metaphor for a chain that has run out of ideas. Was the Harvester ever good in the first place? Or are my generation’s positive memories clouded by the fact that it represented our only real option for eating out? Probably, but even the bad food can’t tarnish the love I still feel for Harvester.

To visit a Harvester is to enter a portal back to a time when a free salad bar was a major restaurant selling point. Back then, your £10 wouldn’t just buy a slice of avocado toast but a full rack of ribs, and even a finger bowl if you asked the waitress nicely. Yes, the Harvester chain probably hasn’t updated its décor in 35 years, but it's an unashamedly British restaurant chain—truly the last of a dying breed.

As it looks to the future, Mitchell & Butler insists Harvester is modernising amid a “highly competitive market.” The spokesperson points to the fact that it now sells its in-restaurant sauces for £3 and does lunchtime wraps as testament to this. He adds: “We recognise that we’re a brand that has heritage but we’re also in a highly competitive market, so we need to keep reminding people why they should consider us. Hence our current strap line, ‘There’s a fresh thought.’”

Whether Harvester successfully transforms itself into a Nando’s rival or builds a global home sauces business doesn’t really matter. For me, and millions of British millennials, it will always be a reminder of simpler times. When eating out was about making do and being grateful for sitting around a table that wasn’t in your living room. Harvester might be a bit crap, but it’s all ours. Meet you at the salad bar.