Gordon Ramsay's Street Burger

St. James Quarter

Edinburgh

by Beau Cadiyo

When my son was a toddler, sometimes he spilled things.  Naturally.  Because he was so little, we tried to do things to minimize the potential damage - we only gave him plastic cups, say, or small amounts of food, so that we would only need to clean up a little bit if he dropped a cup or plate.  If he spilled something, we would, of course, clean it up for him.  

At some point, we started getting him to take more responsibility for his mistakes.  When he was ready, if he spilled something, I would ask him to go get some tea towels or cloths to soak up water, milk, etc., and then walk him through the cleanup, helping as necessary.  

Then, last week, something miraculous happened.  

We were eating breakfast, and he reached for a cup of water and knocked it over.  It was full, so the water rushed across the table in a thin puddle.  He said, "Daddy!  I spilled some water!"  I looked at it, then looked at him, and just said, "Cool.  Fix it."  

He immediately got out of his chair, then paused, his feet staggered, hands out, like a photo of a man of action.  He looked at the water, then said to himself, "I need some blue cloths."  He dashed out of the room, then returned with one cloth; dabbing at the water, he realized he would need more, so he ran out again, coming back with an armful.  He placed them around the spill, then edged them in toward the water, soaking it up as he went.  

When he was done cleaning up, and he had put all of the wet cloths in the washing machine, I asked him to come over.  I hugged him, and told him I was proud of him for admitting that he had messed up, then doing what it took to fix his mess.  The reason: I didn't want him to feel like he had done something bad, because he is a kid, and he is going to make mistakes, and this was absolutely an honest error with no real negative ramifications.  He didn't need me to make him feel bad about it; if I had, he would have tried to cover it up.  Instead, I wanted him to start associating mistakes with a question: What do I need to do to make things right?  No child, no matter what, will do their best work when someone else is making them feel like an idiot, or an inherently bad person, for messing up, and no kid is going to be better off for someone making them feel wrong; indeed, they will just start justifying their actions to themselves, and blaming the other person - a parent, a teacher, a peer - for being a dick.  Indeed, they will find themselves resenting that other person, no matter how right they are.  

Recently, it seems that a lot of Republicans are stating, publicly, that "this is not what I voted for."  They look at Trump, Vance, and Musk, and are unsure as to the proper response; they feel uneasy, but, because they voted for the ticket, feel as if they can't be fully against the administration, because they, in effect, enabled this behavior.  Democrats, in response, seem to be acting like what I would say are ineffective parents; their response, in effect, is, "We told you so; you decided to fuck things up, so fuck you."  

I get it.  I kind of feel the same way.  If the first few weeks are any indication, the next four years are going to be an absolute shitshow.  I was actually talking to a friend, and I first said that if China was going to invade Taiwan, they would have done it on January 25; they would have known, because the Chinese are smart people, that the new administration was going to be completely chaotic, and would have taken advantage of it.  Then, I thought: no.  They are smart, the Chinese, and they probably know that their best chance of success is in 2027, when everything has gone completely awry.  

And Republican voters are the ones who bear this responsibility.  

But it will do nobody any good to remind them of this fact.  It will not help if Democrats keep saying, "Fuck you, assholes; you made your socio-economic bed, now sleep in it with everyone else who has to put up with this shit."  Instead...

Well, we have to help them fix it.  

We need to be able to step aside and say, "Yes, it was a bad move, but it's not too late.  Help us do something about it." 

We need to help them help themselves to make a better America.  

In other words: we need to be bigger.  

If any Republican seems to be having second thoughts, embrace them.  Ask them what they think needs to be done now to right the ship of state.  Enable them to do what they can to mop up the mess that they created.  Just don't push them away by making them feel like idjits.  

We have been to this Street Burger a bunch of times, and it was, generally, a good experience.  This time, though, everything was a bit off.  The lighting was terrible, which, really, would not have been a big deal from the getgo except that the menus were printed on medium-brown paper with black ink and 10-point font, making them all but illegible in the gloom of the back wall.  They have changed the food; the burgers are now packaged with fries, for £18.  This is a hefty increase, and might be reasonable, except that the burgers and fries are all smaller than they used to be.  Then, we were told that we needed to scan a QR code to order; the app was incredibly hard to navigate.  Just after being told that we would have less human interaction, I saw that we would also be charged a 12.5% fee on top of our bill for "service" - this might be a normal ask in America, but in the UK, this means that we were paying upwards of £21 for a burger and fries that, around the corner at Bonnie and Wild, would have been 2/3 the price for a much, much better product.  The only thing that Gordon Ramsay has over El Perro Negro: constantly-visible televisions showing food being prepared, and Pacman, which, for parents trying to avoid screen time, is actually a downside.  Ergo: we won't be blaming them for making terribly stupid decisions about how to run their business, but we also won't be returning until they fix their mistakes.