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Hidden in Plain Sight is a column by Yvonne Maxwell focusing on the stories, foodways, customs and traditions of the Black communities across the UK, as well as the global Black diaspora; ones that have been here for years and decades, in plain sight, yet are rarely written about.

Meet Me in Brixton McD’s, by Yvonne Maxwell

For most children, McDonald’s means magic. There is a certain association with McDonald’s – any McDonald’s – of the magic of Ronald and his friends, having that Happy Meal in your happy place, the instant gratification of non-home-cooked food. It is a place of joy, indulgence and intense anticipation; opening up that paper box to reveal golden fries, the grease-stained wrapping of your burger where just a hint of cheese is visible and, of course, that week’s toy (in my case, one of 1999’s Snoopy World Tour figurines.)

For me though, McDonald’s was survival. My mum worked there for more than 30 years of her life, with a large proportion of that time spent at the Brixton McDonald’s. She was one of the original crew members when the restaurant opened on 5th October 1992. As a child, I was able to see behind the curtain of the magic because I knew how much labour it took to do fast food. I saw the energy and hours this work required first-hand. It wasn't this abstract place where the people who worked there ceased to exist the moment I left; they featured constantly in my everyday life. They were my extended family – Godwin, Tony, Derek and the rest of the crew – who attended my birthday parties and gave life advice based on whatever childhood conundrum I would share during my visits. In our household, McDonald’s business was family business. We would stay up with my mum as she revised for food safety exams, as she prepared for inspections and visits from regional management, and helped prepare for seasonal promotions. She would come home with stories about rude customers and the heartwarming achievements of her fellow colleagues. We listened to her tales of preventing crimes, assisting in the birth of a baby and witnessing Muhammad Ali flip a burger in front of her very eyes – these were the stories of superheroes. 

It has been said that in every city there is a uniquely chaotic and memorable McDonald’s. For London, this is Brixton McDonald’s. Everyone I know has a story because it is truly one of the most entertainingly dysfunctional spaces in London. When you go through the doors it feels like anything can happen at any given time, and it is almost a certainty that something will.

The Brixton McD’s has become a nexus of chaos due to a conglomeration of different factors: geographical, political, architectural and sociological. It owes its fame in some part to the building, which is central to Brixton, sitting at the intersection of Brixton Road, Coldharbour Lane and Acre Lane (before the days of smartphones and Google Maps, “meet me outside Brixton McD’s” was the common instruction). It is also a reflection of Brixton itself: here, with its nightlife, markets and transport links, you are within close proximity to a wide spectrum of life experiences and encounters – teenagers at gigs, Home Counties pub crawlers, Pentecostal preachers, artists wearing parachute trousers. You will encounter mental health crises, extreme poverty, unexpected human connections, extraordinary kindness, abundant choices and a lack thereof. Brixton McDonald’s is essentially a condensed version of society where everything happens simultaneously.

As Brixton has been the central hub of Black liberation and social justice movements in London from the 1940s to the present day, its McDonald’s also rests at the epicentre of working-class Black culture within the UK. While Brixton may usually be segregated by race and class (think Pop Brixton, Brixton Village and even the two halves of Station Road) its McDonald’s is where the area’s contested history coalesces: Essex revellers having screaming matches over who pulled which bird, Black kids from different schools settling in separate corners of the restaurant, blazers knotted around their waists and those visiting the area for the first time clutching their pearls, clearly very discomfited by the ‘grittiness’ of their fellow diners. In my time spent in Brixton McDonald’s, I’ve witnessed drunken brawls where drinks were thrown across the restaurant and tips left from grateful strangers, rough sleepers given free hot drinks to thaw the traumas of the cold outside, angered customers attempting to jump over the raised counter, and light-skinned bum cheeks spilled out of pum-pum shorts onto the cold plastic chairs in the lobby.

Unlike the Peckham McDonald’s, which is located in an equally charged area, Brixton McDonald’s has managed to retain its unpredictable charm and dynamic. Even with the offensive graffiti-inspired decor scheme, added tech in the form of self-checkouts and reduced human-to-human contact, there is still that feeling of whimsy. Peckham, in comparison, now serves as a smooth pick-up point for food orders, while the countertop till service has been scrapped for an automated Fort Knox-style setup, no doubt a cost-saving measure following Covid-19 restrictions. This would never be allowed in Brixton.

There’s something about McDonald’s particularly that inspires this pandemonium. Perhaps there’s an energy born out of childhood wonder and nostalgia that makes grown adults act this way. Recently, I asked my mum again about the Ali visit. It was part of his tour of the area in February 1999 in support of Jubilee 2000, a movement to cancel Third World debt. My mum was doing her usual rounds through the restaurant when she saw Ali himself standing at the entranceway with his security detail. He greeted her and asked if he could have a tour – she obviously said yes and walked him around the lobby, through the restricted doors onto the shop floor and into the kitchen, where he apparently said he had always wanted to make a McDonald’s burger. One of the grillers handed him their meat spatula. Ali then went on to place an order for a Filet-O-Fish with no sauce, built the burger and then added lettuce, tomato and cheese. My mum claims that this soon became a trend and was unofficially added to the Brixton menu for an extra charge, due to several customers placing similar orders upon overhearing Ali’s modifications.

Maybe it’s this role as a beacon – for famous boxers on tour, for drunken revellers, or for children relaxing after school – that makes it so important, that offers a feeling of safety despite the chaos. Once, when I was 12, I fell asleep on the P13 bus on the way home from my Aunty Sandra’s house in Dulwich and woke up lost and in a state of confusion having realised that I was now in Streatham. I made my way down Streatham High Road, sobbing dramatically, and was eventually stopped by a kind stranger who put me on a bus headed towards Brixton once I had told him that my mum worked at the McDonald’s.

There was a crowd at the entrance way that I had to push my way through, and what I saw next was a phantasmagoria: to my left was a group of Black women dressed as if they were paying homage to Neeta, Sweeta and Nastie from Babymother. One of the women sported large gold bamboo earrings and a long, braided ponytail with her edges laid for the gods; another was rocking a classic beehive hairstyle with blonde and electric blue streaks and a fishnet jumpsuit; while the last had a pixie cut with finger waves, long acrylic nails and gold sovereigns rings on each finger. They were Brixton Fabulous! I could see a man in my periphery who had a mouth full of gold teeth and shaved slits in his eyebrows. Meanwhile, someone ran past me singing REM’s Everybody Hurts and I heard the faint beeping sound of the fry machine going off in the background. I signalled to my mum who was in the kitchen area salting the beef patties and she lifted the fry basket as she walked towards me. 

After explaining my ordeal on the bus, she called out my order to Godwin. He slammed a quarter-pounder patty down onto the hot grill and the meat began to sizzle and hiss as it seared under the heat. I watched as Godwin flipped and salted the beef patty, toasted the sesame seed bun and began to assemble the burger so carefully. He placed the top of the bun upside down in the clamshell box and added generous swirls of ketchup, mustard and mayo to the bun, followed by slivered onions, pickles, leaf lettuce and tomato, and two slices of American cheese, which were gently fused to the burger. It was pure artistry, a cinematic performance of gastronomical brilliance! 

My mum brought me my burger, to which she added a small fries, a strawberry milkshake and an apple pie, and she sat with me making up Happy Meal boxes while I demolished the food and cheered up immediately. For me the rhythm and magic of Brixton McDonald’s has never been about the place or the food – it is in the people.

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Hidden in Plain Sight is a new monthly column by Yvonne Maxwell focusing on the stories, foodways, customs and traditions of the Black communities across the UK, as well as the global Black diaspora; ones that have been here for years and decades, in plain sight, yet are rarely written about.

This column will usually be paywalled, but today the article is free to read for everyone.

Profiling the Restaurant, by Yvonne Maxwell 

In October last year, a group of Black diners posted videos on Twitter and YouTube detailing confrontations with management at a Turkish restaurant in Woodford, near Walthamstow, called Lokkum Bar & Grill. The argument started when one of the diners, celebrating their birthday at the restaurant, found a crying girl in the toilets. She told the diner that her brother, a new member of staff, had been abused by his colleagues with the word “darkie”. When the kitchen staff were pulled up on their language the diners were met with hostility and anger; Lokkum staff can be seen on camera arguing with a Black woman and a Black man who comes to join her: both were visibly disturbed by what had taken place. Things escalated as diners rose from their tables and left the restaurant in coordinated fashion. Management at Lokkum acknowledged these accusations once the incident had gained traction on social media, and posted an apology on their Instagram page – one of those generic “we do not tolerate discrimination… and yet, here we are” responses. Lokkum turned off the comments on this post.

There are multiple conflicting versions of London and the UK – when I was approached to write this series of columns, I knew that I wanted to share the stories of those that I experience; stories that reverberate throughout Black spaces. The situation at Lokkum is particularly striking as a story of Black London because while we expect to be met with racism in outsider spaces, it is not something we expect to navigate in spaces that we deem partially our own. Turkish restaurants, to a large extent, are Black spaces in that they have been adopted by Black communities across London and form part of a common experience. Black diners flock in droves to the numerous Kervan branches across North London and the grill houses that line Green Lanes. These restaurants benefit and make their money from catering to a Black consumer base; when a restaurant treats its Black workers with disrespect it makes explicit that our presence within the dining space is conditional.

Often these incidents often go unreported at a mainstream level; the incident at Lokkum, by the way, was not covered by a single food publication. Three years ago, Shaun Beagley – the former chef at the East London restaurant Som Saa who was exposed for his caricatures of Thai and Chinese people – was rightly made an industry pariah, yet his earlier YouTube videos where he could be heard calling Black market sellers “monkeys” slipped below the radar. When accusations of racism are treated as quantitatively different, we miss the opportunity to discuss how these racisms intersect and manifest in qualitatively different ways. A restaurant that made headlines last year with shocking visual racism against the East Asian community has long been infamous among Black Londoners in a more insidious practice of everyday exclusionary racism in the form of heavy-handed use of racialised entry requirements disguised as dress code. Oh, how quickly do the ‘no trainers, no hoodies’ policies mysteriously morph into mechanisms for racial profiling!

The mistreatment of Black people within dining spaces is a global phenomenon – replicable enough to cross borders and cultural lines yet local in its execution. I have been racially abused and profiled in restaurants from London to Manila, from fine dining restaurants to holes in walls. I have been left hungry and humiliated on a global scale, whether it was being intrusively photographed while eating, casually being called racial slurs, or point-blank refused service and entry into a Soho brunch establishment. In an account of dining as a Black woman working within food criticism, the American restaurant writer Korsha Wilson explains that, for many Black diners, “being in a dining space can often mean choosing between being ignored, interrogated, or assaulted”. These situations have become normalised or embedded in standard hospitality practises; from the over-policing of who gets to enter an establishment to the careful dance that undulates between hyper-attention and snubbing. In the end, I have always opted for the non-confrontational route, leaving without uttering a word in response. 

This makes the process of evaluation for Black restaurant writers like myself all the more complex and nuanced. By nature, the restaurant writer is traditionally anonymous at the table, hoping to receive through food and through service, the median level of hospitality an establishment has to offer. Black diners have no option to fly under the radar in this way. There are countless restaurants I could reel off which have been given rave reviews, featured in every food publication under the sun and recommended to everyone as the ‘go to’ spot, where I can guarantee that a Black person will have a completely different dining experience. I envy the frictionless ease with which my white counterparts slot into the frame of most dining rooms; a luxury both my Blackness and womanhood do not afford me. I cannot forgo my Blackness or cover it with a cloak of anonymity – it is an everyday existence with no way of switching on and off. 

I sometimes think about the Black staff member who was racially abused by their co-workers at Lokkum, and how exhausting it must be to navigate such hostility. This feeling of exhaustion from having to constantly negotiate one's very own existence in a space is felt by so many Black people; a reminder of the unspoken conditions placed on us as we move through these spaces. Of course, this issue of racism within the hospitality industry cannot be extricated from racial hierarchies that exist across all other institutions. The restaurant space merely mirrors these pre-existing attitudes which are inherited from the racial hierarchies embedded in the city, the country and society at large.

Yet, I find myself inspired and uplifted by the outcome of that story, that the diners simply got up and left. It displays a type of collective power among the Black communities who have been at the helm of call-outs and boycotts of known racist dining establishments. Retreating into invisibility is no longer a viable solution, but it is through the sharing of our experiences in public forums that we demonstrate that the Black Pound is a force to be reckoned with. After all, we want more than to be barely tolerated; we want to be seen.

Yvonne Maxwell is a documentary photographer, cooking enthusiast and traveller, whose work focuses on telling stories of food, culture and people across the African Diaspora. You can find her on Instagram at @passthedutchpot.

Pictures of tweets credited to a thread by @hewantswealth