In chain restaurants like Nando's, nobody knows who we are—maybe that's why we love them

Group pictures are usually taken at a celebratory meal, with everyone sat in front of the remnants of their food and with the dregs of their drinking all around. Like many other people, my go-to pose in this situation is to seize onto my near-empty glass or my plate of curry and tilt it enticingly toward the camera with a pleading look of manic good cheer. Look, the pose says with merry desperation, we are celebrating—and here are the tools with which we are doing it!

I know the pain of that awkward snap, so I couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit sorry for the Independent Group members who appeared in a now widely-derided Nando’s group selfie. Anna Soubry is idly fondling her strange, sad order of salad and chips while looking at the camera with chillingly dead eyes. Chuka Umunna is leaning back with the mildly banterous acknowledgement that his mouth is full, giving us the thumbs up—what a laugh we have, he is saying. Heidi Allen is also looking at the viewer with a full mouth but she wears an apologetic, shamed expression, presumably having realised her mistake after ordering an entire wing roulette to herself.

https://twitter.com/ChukaUmunna/status/1100121204093009921

The choice of Nando’s as setting for the slightly panicked portrait of the new not-quite-party was received universally as a strategic play, rather than where the motley crew just happened to end up at the end of a long day. A few commentators tweeted that it was a smart move, while most people cringed at the familiar sight of politicians trying to pose as ordinary folk. As Ed Milliband’s bacon sandwich attack and Theresa May’s attempt to eat chips proved, there is something eternally compelling about watching politicians fail to do things the rest of us do without thought.

Often these staged events are coordinated to illustrate the authenticity of the politician—as with Owen Smith’s ill-fated attempt to order the most working-class coffee possible (apparently believing that lattes and cappuccinos belong exclusively to the metropolitan elite, Smith received what he called a "frothy coffee" during his leadership bid in 2017, expressing shock at it being served with a saucer and biscuit). But Nando’s, famously, is a sort of class neutraliser. It’s not working class, but it’s not posh either. You’re as likely to find upwardly mobile late twenties professionals eating there as suburban teenagers.

So it wasn’t a misrepresentation of their class, exactly, which riled people complaining about The Independent Group Nando’s expedition. It was that they were just—somehow—doing it wrong. They were in the most normal place on earth, and they were getting it wrong. Despite the fact that it’s a chain restaurant on hundreds of UK high streets, Nando’s customers have forged very particular bonds—the kind of bonds which make us bewildered and furious to see that some blow-in has ordered the wrong coating on a chicken breast and not added the correct flavoured dust to their chips.

Nando’s became its ubiquitous, beloved, meme-able self by doing something not many big brands manage to. We en masse ignore Dolmio's shrill demand to pick our weekly time to eat jarred tomato sauce but are willingly seduced into weaving a “cheeky Nando's” into the fabric of our social lives. They created in their consumers personal and specific relationships—relationships layered with self-awareness, perhaps (it must, after all, be years since someone uttered the phrase “cheeky Nando’s” with full sincerity), but real relationships nonetheless.

Greggs is another chain which induces such fondness in its customers that they produce masses of what is essentially free advertising. Greggs is a different class register than Nando's, certainly, but they have cultivated a similar willingness to be seen partaking, a desire to be part of the gang. When the vegan sausage roll launched it was celebrated genuinely—it wasn't only that a mass-produced, affordable vegan snack was now available everywhere, but that the cosy Gregg's brand was embracing some people it had previously excluded.

It might seem perverse or naive on the face of it that we establish the intimacies we do with enormous chain brands, but I believe they flourish because—not in spite of—their anonymity. Perhaps the very blankness of chains is what lets us feel comfortable enough to do build the years-long, evidently fierce bonds that we do. Nando's isn't especially good food, and it isn't especially good value—it isn't much of anything really, which has lent it the power to become something to everybody.

Chains like Nando's are simultaneously atomising in their anonymity and unifying. We all know what we are talking about when we talk about going for Nando's; we can feel the weird safety of the knowledge that thousands of other people around the UK are eating the very same meal as us, at the same time; we can pride ourselves on lashing on the hottest Peri-Peri Vusa or lampoon someone for being strictly Lemon and Herb.

Supposedly, what we should all want is to drink is a cute artisan barista-owned coffee shop down the road from our house, and to eat in a neighbourhood bistro where the staff recognise us when we come in every Sunday evening. But actually there's immeasurable appeal—and immeasurable relief—in the blissful anonymity of chains. It doesn’t accord with my politics to support Wetherspoons over a local restaurant, but I eat there anyway, and it’s not only because of the price point. It’s also because I am nobody in the grand scheme of Wetherspoons, and sometimes that’s what I want to be.

Being isolated is difficult, sure, but being noticed is no treat either. I don't necessarily want to chat with a server who knows me, and has noticed I've not come in with my boyfriend in several months. Sometimes—most of the time, to be honest—I want to be left alone when I'm out, want to be able to get on with trying to enjoy things, no matter what else is going on in the rest of my life. It feels good sometimes—as awful as it is to admit—to be nothing but a customer, instead of an individual.