Me giving Mc D a 5 star review is, to date, almost unheard of. So the why is the reason.
The why answer is vegetable soup or as the staff described it, soup made with legumes.
So in an airport, in a Mc D, 300 mls of hot veg soup is priced at under £3 with a wooden spoon plus salt & black pepper to add for taste, served in a lidded paper carton so likely microwave heated.
It was served to us with a smile by a charming young lady from India who studies at university all day and works at night to pay for her studies. She took a minute to practice her English on us. It was faultless and impeccable. They are just so courteous and curious and eager to succeed.
The soup was tasty, filling and healthy. Soup was a daily mainstay of my growing up. It kept my generation well fed for a small cost. It was almost always vegetarian (not through any health gig just cheap, full flavoured) with local ingredients where carrot, potato, onion and table celery dominating taste, salt, white pepper which was far cheaper and less harsh than black pepper with dried split red lentils, dried peas and pearl barley all adding additional nutrition, fibre and texture. These were put together long before people thought of these things an calorie wasn't in the dictionary of most working folks.
Occasionally a shin bone was added so it was no longer a veg soup but still 90% veg. This added an unctuous full flavour to soup from the bone marrow and the remnants of meat on the bone were chopped finely into the soup. Many was the time I ladled my soup from a huge pot pushing the bone (now hollow in the centre) out of the way. In those days dogs got the bone but we didn't know then that cooked bones were dangerous for dogs.
I still make soup this way and serve with wheaten bread and butter. The smell from cooking is glorious too but it's rare to find it in homes now when it was a mainstay for hundreds of years.
Anyway I meander but soup and Mc D are two (or 3) words you don't often see together. We both enjoyed our soup so much that we indulged in ice cream sundaes - a strawberry for me and caramel for my wife. These no longer feature in the UK or Ireland.
It's 5 stars too for their very good decaf espressos at £1.45 each. Do remember that these are airport prices.
As I ordered I noticed that they also sold potato sauce at 55 pence and I've no idea what it is exactly. Nor did I try it but I did muse at adding it to the legume soup to give it greater thickness. Mc D and soup who knew. read more