Austin’s Dad may not yet have a kitchen, but it has already found its signature ingredient: outrage. Over the past few months, the apparently nascent fast-food brand has courted controversy online with all the subtlety of a deep-fat fryer fire. Last month, founder Will McIlroy said he only wanted to employ young men to help him build a restaurant group capable of rivalling Domino’s and McDonald’s. He has also made much of the fact that the business won’t serve halal meat or cater to what he calls the “septum-piercing, vegan brigade”.
Then there is the company he keeps. The brand is closely associated with cancelled MasterChef judge Gregg Wallace, who helped introduce the mysterious McIlroy to the public through an interview conducted, naturally, aboard a luxury yacht. McIlroy also says he is working with The Apprentice contestant turned right-wing influencer Tom Skinner. Meanwhile, his posts frequently evoke ‘the good old days’, when restaurant food was cheaper and, one assumes, nobody had blue hair.
It is a marketing recipe assembled from the familiar ingredients of populist politics: nostalgia, grievance, manufactured enemies and the suggestion that a once-great country has somehow been brought low by vegans and halal chicken. Reform UK, but with a side order of keenly priced loaded fries.
McIlroy is also taking aim at the restaurant brands he hopes eventually to compete with and, if his rhetoric is to be believed, destroy. Good luck with that. As he puts it in one of his many videos: “You’ve got to have an enemy.”
Austin’s Dad’s first post - evidently created with the assistance of AI - depicts McIlroy standing with his arms crossed as Ronald McDonald, KFC’s Colonel Sanders and Burger King’s King cower in the background. “Ronald, The Colonel and The King are going to fall like Domino’s,” it declares. “Move aside, Papa.” The brand’s tagline is Le Morte Del Domino, which translates as ‘the death of the Domino’. Subtle it is not.
Austin’s Dad will major on US style pizza but will also sell fried chicken, burgers and - perhaps - lobster rolls. One strand of its content sees McIlroy and others in his circle sample these menu staples from the big brands. In a recent video, McIlroy and Food Review Club founder Matt Binge dine at Pizza Hut and take issue with both the quality and the price, which they say was £127 for three pizzas, three drinks and two sides.
But the attacks have already strayed well beyond the food itself. In a collaborative video with Austin’s Dad, Binge attempts to smear Greggs by citing a 2017 report about Colin Gregg, a member of the bakery chain’s founding family who was jailed for sexually assaulting boys. Gregg never ran the business and had left its board nearly 16 years before his conviction, making the description of him as the ‘Greggs heir’ a stretch at best. Binge then doubles down by suggesting that some of the UK’s biggest food businesses are “full of corruption, full of pedos and full of weirdos”.
Austin’s Dad appears poised to launch at least two sites: one in Warrington, located moments from a Greggs, and another in the Lincolnshire town of Stamford, within the former Adnams shop at Bath Row Warehouse. The brand’s rather curious website also alludes to a presence in Camden and Shoreditch, although there is no evidence of either.
The website contains pricing information, supporting McIlroy’s assertion that Austin’s Dad will significantly undercut the bigger players. Whole pizzas will start at £5, while a double cheeseburger meal will cost £8 and a basic cheeseburger meal will be £5 before 5pm and £5.99 after 5pm. Sides, including homemade chips, will all be priced at £2.
McIlroy says his former career as a food commodities trader will enable him to maintain these eyebrow-raising prices while using better-quality ingredients than the brands he is proposing to significantly undercut. The sourdough pizza bases, we are told, will be proved for 120 hours.
It all feels far-fetched. And it doesn’t help that so little is known about the man making the claims. Wallace introduces McIlroy as a self-made millionaire and several of the videos make a point of showing him getting into and out of a Bentley. McIlroy has spoken of having built and sold several successful businesses, yet there is little obvious trace of him on Companies House or elsewhere online.
But, like it or not, this does appear to be happening. We’re about to discover how far a restaurant brand can get by adopting deliberately provocative positions on wedge issues including gender, religion and social change to generate attention and cultivate a politically sympathetic customer base. The comments beneath its posts are not recommended reading, but they do suggest that plenty of people are already on board.