I drive past the gas-flaring petrochemical plants and divorce lawyers’ billboards of New Jersey with a mounting feeling of despair. It’s not just that the evening traffic is making me late; it is that I have been handed one of the least appetising assignments in Lunch with the FT history.
I am heading to a McDonald’s beside Route 1 in Rahway — home of the East Jersey State Prison — to meet Chris Kempczinski, the chain’s chief executive.
If you judged such things by the 65m customers his 39,000 outlets feed in a day, you could call Kempczinski the world’s most successful restaurateur. But few gastronomes rhapsodise about his prix fixe and we will have no wine list to savour.