Restaurant Review
France and fine food. It’s impossible to
imagine one without the other. The two go together like moules and frites, foie
gras and compote d’abricot, cab sav and côte de boeuf. French cuisine is so
thunderously iconic, it even clinched a spot in the Japanese game show Iron Chef. The
western dining tradition will forever be indebted to a vast array of French
innovations: there’s the amuse-bouche,
the hors-d’œuvre, the pièce de résistance. There’s grande cuisine, haute cuisine, nouvelle
cuisine. And then there’s this.
For those who find themselves tiring of
France’s prissy approach to dining, here surely is the antidote. With its
garish shop fronts and dated 90s design, Speed Rabbit Pizza stands out at the
party of French gastronomy like a biker stands out a funeral – leather clad and
smelling of sweat, hunched in the corner with his back to the casket, blasting
death metal from a boombox held together with gaffer tape.
The baffling decision to name the chain after
a jumpy sex-crazed rodent has found some justification in recent years: since
opening shop in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1991, Speed Rabbit Pizza has spawned a
litter of over 130 restaurants across metropolitan France. About sixty of these
are spattered grossly throughout the streets of Paris, doing their utmost to
smear excrement in the face of Haussmann’s 19th Century urban vision.
It’s hard to put a finger on the secret to
SRP’s astronomic success in a country where restaurant chains are rare and the
term “fast food” borders on profanity. Could it be the compellingly poetic
title? The judicious and sensitive depiction of a typical female customer in
their TV advertising
campaign? Perhaps it’s their avant-garde range of toppings, with
innovations such as four cheese (“La Cheese”) and spicy sausage (“Spicy
Lovers”)? Or the enigmatic logo, rendering sleek design in a sophisticated
monochrome, accompanied by a toxic yellow font redolent of mustard and abscess
pus?
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| After a nine-month nationwide talent search for a new logo design, this winning entry was selected at random. |
I don’t think any of these can fully explain Speed Rabbit Pizza’s trailblazing triumph over the last two decades. More likely is that the restaurants are simply a front for the French amphetamine trade. It’d take an idiot not to spot the overt allusions to the product’s aphrodisiac qualities, the suggestiveness of their by-line “les meilleurs ingrédients font les meilleures pizzas”, or the unsubtle reference to “speed” in the company title. Suddenly their jumpy mascot makes a lot more sense.
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| What's really in this amphetamine-laced Hawaiian? |
To conclude, SRP cleverly couples a “speed over substance” culinary approach with a “speed as substance” real world sensibility, providing a refreshingly unpretentious Parisian dining experience that anyone can enjoy. Five stars.
