Former royal butler Grant Harrold worked for the royal household from 2004 to 2011.He shared that royals—just like the rest of us—aren’t immune to an occasional guilty pleasure.Case in point? Brothers Prince William and Prince Harry both love fast food, Harrold said, and would often go pick it up themselves so it didn’t have to travel through the hassle of royal security.
Royal butlers certainly know the inner workings of the royal household, and one is speaking out about some members of the royal family’s “guilty pleasure”—including one that is “quite unusual.”
Grant Harrold worked at Highgrove House—King Charles’s country home—from 2004 to 2011; he was also frequently around the former Prince of Wales’s sons Prince William and Prince Harry. As for William and Harry, they are both fans of fast food, Harrold said—maybe a relic of their childhoods with their mother, Princess Diana, who used to take her boys to McDonald’s.
Prince William, Princess Diana, and Prince Harry on March 30, 1993.
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To avoid the hassle of having to get the fast food through security, William and Harry would often go out and grab the fast food themselves. (Can you imagine being at, say, a McDonald’s, and here walks in Prince Harry?)
“For the boys, their main guilty pleasure is fast food takeaway from the local village,” Harrold said. “They would always go and pick it up, because there was so much security to go through for something to come to the house, so it wasn’t unusual to see Harry running into the shops in town.”
Prince William and Prince Harry on April 26, 2018.
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Harrold added that “Harry even offered me a takeaway when I first started working there,” via Marie Claire. As for William, the future king once told the co-founder of chicken restaurant Nando’s that he is one of the chain’s “biggest fans” and should “buy a stake” in the company (via Hello!).
Former royal chef Darren McGrady—who worked for Diana from 1993 until her death in 1997, and who had worked for other members of the royal family like Queen Elizabeth since the 1980s—said of Diana’s former home at Kensington Palace that, when it came to food, “It was so much more relaxed over at Kensington.” Some evenings he’d all but get the night off, as Diana would take the boys to McDonald’s—her way to keep William and Harry grounded and normal.
“I said, ‘I can do burgers better than McDonald’s,” McGrady recalled, adding that Diana replied, “I know that, Darren, but they want the toys in the Happy Meal.”
“They would get fast food sometimes, just like normal families with children,” he added.
Princess Diana, Prince Harry, and Prince William in September 1995.
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William loved ice cream—chocolate chip, in particular—and the boys would eat “pizza, chicken nuggets, French fries, potato wedges, macaroni cheese,” McGrady remembered. These days, according to a BBC Radio 1 interview William and wife Kate Middleton gave in 2017, Kate loves curry and William enjoys pizza and Chinese food. William—then the Duke of Cambridge—explained that the food “doesn’t usually get ordered to the palace [Kensington Palace, where they too lived at the time], we tend to go and pick it up,” with William adding, “Not ourselves!”
King Charles on April 7, 2025.
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As for other royal guilty pleasures, Harrold said of Charles that “the King likes to watch old TV series—he is a huge fan of watching Dame Edna shows, which people find probably quite unusual. He would also watch The Goonies.”