‘If you come for anything other than meat: mistake, big mistake’
We’re wandering around the chain-stored commercial centre of Chelmsford, and I’m literally vibrating with terrible, metrocentric food snobbery. And here’s my destination, just past the Zizzi and the Nando’s. Past the Costa and McDonald’s. Everything I’ll usually go out of my way to avoid, reckoning that the tiniest bit of effort on my part, staggering the extra 500 yards or doing a bit more research, will turn up food that costs about the same, but isn’t delivered in giant vans. I live in hope.
Chop Bloc inhabits a striking 18th-century building, formerly a brewery and a branch of Field & Trek. Now that every mid-range chain restaurant has annexed the industrial loft look – bare brick and tiles, and exposed ducting plastered on every mood board from here to the seventh level of hell – it doesn’t look quite as edgy as it thinks it does. Unless you count the lightboxes telling us, for instance, “I knew it was true love because I thought about her and then I thought about steak.”
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