Never mind the food snobs: why you should eat McDonald’s on holidays

In the latest Travel Hot Take, our Platform Editor Ross McCafferty takes aim at fast food snobbery.

‘Don’t ask me if we can go to McDonald’s.’

‘If you go to McDonald’s on holiday, are you even on holiday?’

‘Why would I eat McDonald’s on holiday when I could try the local food?’

Those are just three of hundreds of takes on social media about eating beneath the Golden Arches overseas. IRL, the subject leads to raised eyebrows at best; at worst, outright scorn.

It’s just seen as, well, a little low class, isn’t it?

People have thoughts about choosing homogenised, Americanised takeaways over international cuisine, and it tends to be considered as one step up from ordering ham, egg and chips in a Red Lion pub in Benidorm.

A bit ITV2, a bit Live Laugh Love. Dare I say it, a bit Brexit.

But as someone who doesn’t care for any of those things, I’m here to defend it.

I want to urge you to let go of the shame, to try those ‘same-but-different’ Happy Meals, to sample quirky local menu items, to gawk and point, Pulp Fiction style, at the ‘Royale with Cheese.’

Holidays are about having fun, and if fun for you is the same fast food chains you love at home, then no one should sneer at you.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting you eat only at McDonalds while on holiday, like some kind of crazed Magaluf Morgan Spurlock. 

You should always prioritise eating locally where you can, and endeavour to broaden your palate as well as your waistband. 

Even I’d be the first to judge you if you stuck exclusively to megachains abroad, even if, as a larger-than-life — ok, fat, traveller, I’ve likely got more experience than most of local fast food, especially given the amount of stag dos I’ve been on. 

In Greece, gyros rule the day for the post-drink bleary snack; in Germany, they somehow pull off a better döner kebab than you get from Istanbul, and if you’re in France, you simply have to have the ‘French Taco’, which somehow merges a gyro and a kebab in a horrifyingly delicious meal that would cause an international incident if Mexico ever discovered it.

Mention those types of fast food to people once you get home, and they’ll agree that you’ve been sufficiently adventurous in the culinary stakes, even on a lads’ holiday.

But tell them that you ventured into McDonald’s, Burger King, or even something slightly left-field like Popeye’s, and they’ll look at you like you’ve just told them you plan to have your wedding reception in a Wetherspoons.

My own experiences of fast food on holiday have been mostly positive, apart from the time I accidentally ordered the same thing three times in a KFC in Amsterdam and woke up to a Monzo notification for £47.

That hit harder than the effect of a dozen Amstels.

But aside from that, I’ve come to shake off the internalised snobbery and embrace the convenience of familiar chains.

In recent years, unable to overcome a fear of flying, I’ve found myself travelling fairly often by train to Barcelona — a scenic but undeniably agonising journey that turns a two-hour flight into a two-day odyssey.

A quirk of the Eurostar timetable means that, on these voyages, I find myself with six hours to kill in Paris in both directions.

While I always like to assume that I’ll spend that time ambling along the Seine, visiting the Louvre, or tasting the finest croissants the city of light has to offer, sometimes, you just want a half-decent coffee, a screen-ordering system that means no language barrier, and some serviceable Wi-Fi.

Don’t get me wrong, on the way out, I do tend to store my luggage and embrace being tourist.

But after 36 hours of travelling, when it comes to the final leg of my journey home, I’m more often than not found eating a Big Mac (or ‘le Big Mac’, as the French call it) and rinsing the free internet to download films for my late night train. 

Like the aforementioned Wetherspoons back in Blighty, chain fast food outlets in Europe tend to be central, massive, and near to railway stations, making them a far more attractive proposition than you might think, especially if you’ve got lots of luggage (no-fly travelling means no 20kg limit, a blessing and a curse). 

On a recent trip to Alicante, after a combined Scottish-Spanish wedding (the amount of jamon and beer consumed could have felled an army), I found myself feeling a little fragile.

And so I decided to sample the city’s Burger King, which was, in case this helps my argument, one of the highest-rated ‘restaurants’ on Google. 

There, after curing my hangover with a Frankenstein creation of a combined Chicken Royale and a Whopper burger, I was amused to note that while beer came free with a meal, an energy drink or milkshake would have cost an extra €2. 

Of course, you can get all of these things (except the beer) at a branch of Burger King at home, but it’s not the same.

Fast food abroad simply, as the kids say, hits different. 

I mean, you can easily get Fanta Lemon in the UK, but I defy anyone to look me in the eye and say it tastes the same as when you’re drinking it by the side of a pool in Spain with an uneven suntan and a bag of Cheetos for company. 

Going on holiday is about doing what you want and releasing your inhibitions, Bedingfield-style, even if those are the inhibitions of being shamed for dining beneath the Golden Arches anywhere in the world. 

So have that Berlin Burger King, enjoy that Krakow KFC, embrace that Madrid McDonald’s.

Just don’t make a Pulp Fiction joke to the staff. I promise you, they’ve heard it.