Plain food, loyal customers

Text 1: The Old Chop House, by Ambrose Tilney

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Down a dark alley off Cornhill, behind a door that has not been painted since the Regency, stands the chop house where I have dined at one o’clock every working day for twenty years. It is not elegant. The boxes are of black oak, worn smooth by a century of elbows; the sawdust upon the floor is changed on Saturdays; and the bill of fare consists of chops, steaks, kidneys and a pudding, as it did when my father dined here before me.

The head waiter, William, knows the order of every man before he sits. He sets down my chop and my pint without a word, and if a stranger should ask for anything French he is regarded by the whole room as though he had asked for a dancing bear. Clerks and merchants, a judge and two ship’s captains sit elbow to elbow, and nobody troubles to know anybody’s business.

They tell me a new restaurant has opened in the Strand with gilt mirrors and a band. I wish it well. But while the world outside goes racing off after every novelty, I find a great comfort in a place where nothing has changed and William still remembers that I like my chop well done.

Text 2: In Defence of the Greasy Spoon, by Kieran Mbeki

An original contemporary article.

Tucked between a vape shop and a phone repair place, with a faded sign that still advertises a telephone number from the 1980s, is the café where I have eaten breakfast every Friday for fifteen years. It is not trendy. The tables are Formica, the chairs wobble, the tea comes in mugs the size of buckets, and the menu is eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and toast in roughly forty combinations.

Maria, who has run the place since before I was born, starts making my order when she sees me through the window. If anyone asks for oat milk she looks at them with genuine pity. Builders in dusty boots sit next to students, taxi drivers and a man in a suit who I am fairly sure is a barrister, and nobody pays the slightest attention to anybody else.

Our high street now has six coffee chains and a restaurant that serves cereal in jam jars. Good luck to them. But in a city that changes its mind every five minutes, I take enormous comfort from somewhere that has stayed exactly the same, where Maria still remembers that I like my egg runny.

Both writers describe a favourite eating place.

What are the similarities between the writers’ descriptions of these places and why they value them?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.