Buddies chain closes October 2020

 

*Updated post* 

View through window of closed restaurant, October 2020.

I originally wrote about my obsession with Northamptonshire local restaurant-chain Buddies in October 2018. Since then it changed ownership in late 2018/early 2019 (controversially changing the burger menu..swiftly changing it back after customers raged about it on Twitter).

Then, like every other restaurant it fell silent as lock down started for bloody flipping Coronavirus in March 2020. Whilst other restaurants began to re-open, Buddies…remained silent. There were some intermittent noises online about take away orders but nothing very clear. Mostly an eerie quiet both at their restaurants and their online presence, which to be honest has never been great. And in October 2020 it was finally announced that the whole chain of 5 restaurants (there had been 9 when I wrote about it but the new owners had closed 4) would stay closed permanently with the owners blaming a combination of Coronavirus and disagreements with landlords. It has since been announced that the original owners are to open one new restaurant, ‘81’ at a Northampton site which looks to be Buddies under a different name.

Anyway, with some slight edits including some updated pics, here’s what I had to say about Buddies, Hauntology and nostalgia 2 years ago, before the time of the plague…

This flag looked bad 2 years ago...

It looks worse now...

Buddies is an American-themed diner chain of 9 restaurants throughout Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. The one shown here is in Milton Keynes, located at the Old Stratford roundabout on the A5.

The soundtrack inside every Buddies restaurant is non-stop 80’s-90’s pop. Wall-mounted screens loop VHS footage of New York streets. The walls are covered in bumper stickers, superheroes and Simpsons imagery. The first Buddies opened in 1981 and all of the restaurants use signs and symbols which create a stubbornly 80’s-90’s aesthetic.

The Milton Keynes Buddies has a wall graphic of the New York skyline which includes the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, in part layered over with portraits of Spiderman and Batman. The part-concealment (Is the concealment consciously intentional? Unconsciously intentional? Coincidence?) of the towers means you do have to look harder to see them, but there they are. The appearance of these ghostly landmarks is the only suggestion that this soothing, nostalgic bubble can be intruded on by the complexities and traumas of the outside world.

The World Trade Center stands, Homer Simpson screams.

 

Buddies is the type of place that evokes a feeling which at once connected and dislocated from history. It is both familiar enough to feel comforting, like watching Back to the Future for the 100^th time, and    also strange enough to be described as ‘quirky’ in it’s Google listing. As a small regional chain, it exists in a class of its own. It has strong appeal to families, and is not really comparable to more recent established restaurants which take a more-deconstructed, knowing approach to nostalgia. 

 

VHS footage of New York in the eighties plays on a constant loop

Mark Fisher writes brilliantly in his book, ‘Ghosts of my Life’ about the Hauntology and how this describes the way in which the culture of the past seems to haunt the present, the preponderance of nostalgia in contemporary culture, arguably at the expense the new and dynamic. 

shutters down on closed Buddies restaurant, Milton Keynes, Oct 2020.

Vaporwave music artist 猫 シ Corp. has specifically highlighted the trauma of 9-11 as a turning point in culture, saying that some of his music provides

“an image of a (past) world that we love to escape to because our old world died in 2001…when the Twin Towers were hit on that day in September the old world died. It’s like the whole planet suddenly opened up and changed, [and] not for the better. Gone were the peaceful days.” 

The 猫 シ Corp. album NEWS AT 11 hauntingly uses samples of morning news programs from the morning of 9-11 to explore the impossibility of assimilating the trauma into ones worldview, and the instinct to deny it-

“If you listen closely you hear the samples being cut off right before they announce the dreadful event. Like it never happened. Yet it did, but your mind cuts away right before the memory.”