There was something of a hospitality fuss this week. If you’re blissfully offline or not deep in the trenches of food industry tattle you may not have heard about it, so let me quickly enlighten you. A man who opened a restaurant – which, according to The Fence Magazine, was funded by his girlfriend’s dad who is the Earl of Snowdon – posted on Instagram maligning diners who didn’t spend enough money in his brand new establishment which is only open for lunch and only takes cash. Its proprietor took a swipe at customers who don’t drink alcohol between the hours of midday and 6pm when he deigns to open. No, we haven’t jumped back to the Victorian era. Although it seems that we all want to.
That restaurant – which I really can’t be bothered naming for fear of giving it any more press than it has already received – serves classic, Irish food. A pie is £40. Irish coddle – a potato and sausage stew – is £20. This is hearty food, designed to fill and nourish the working classes on a modest budget, now being served to the middle and upper classes of London (usually creatives) for a hell of a lot more than a modest budget – and yet still the chef and owner is complaining that they aren’t spending enough. It’s either a really good Robin Hood swindle, or it’s being cooked and served by someone who has completely lost the ability to see the irony in their own actions.
But it’s not him that I think is at fault here. Nor is it the pie’s fault, or the overpriced sausage stew’s fault. In some ways it is the underpaying diners fault. It’s your fault. It’s my fault! We’ve all fetishised olde worlde cooking so much that we’ve allowed people like that to reach a point where they feel justified in their complaints that you, dear eater, aren’t spending enough in his establishment, because he rightfully felt that opening up an extremely niche restaurant that serves overpriced beige food would be a licence to print money because recent trends in the restaurant industry have proven exactly that. Just look at The Devonshire.
The small plate opened up an entirely new realm for cooking in London. It created a space where chefs who wanted to try something different could do so in a more accessible environment free from the shackles of either the perceived grandeur of a tasting menu or the intensity of a large-format main dish. It gave them the chance to flex their creativity, experiment with new flavour profiles, and it truly, I believe, helped to catapult London onto the world’s stage as a city worth taking seriously when it came to food. Was the small plate a victim of its own success? Absolutely. Has it become completely manipulated and often no longer a home for ingenuity but rather a direct driver in the price of anchovies crashing off the richter scale? Definitely. Were we all a little sick of sharing a pig’s head croquette with pickled onion mayonnaise between seven people? Yep, I’d say we were.
And in our search for dinner, for a meal that truly filled us up and a restaurant where you could tell your dining partner to piss off if their fork came anywhere near the county lines of your plate, we discovered big ol’ plates of meat. We discovered starters of potted shrimp and welsh rarebit and main courses of pies and suet puddings and slow-cooked meat and vegetables. We realised this food went quite well with stout and, actually, have you heard of this beer called Guinness which has been languishing on pub taps for decades, overlooked in favour of sprightly IPAs and limpid lagers? We realised that across the channel, in France, they too were cooking carb and meat-heavy main courses that used butter as a seasoning and – crucially – were served in sizes you could eat all on your own. We realised these restaurants did quite well above pubs because then you could have your required pre-or-post-dinner stout in close proximity and also because pubs, as an old school thing, were becoming quite trendy again too. People realised they could charge quite a lot for this, actually. And it was us hungry lot who were willing to pay for it. And we were so delighted to be eating a whole meal that we didn’t realise we were suddenly paying double what we’d become accustomed to paying at that wine bar/small plates restaurant where, despite our complaining, we did always end up leaving full.
For some restaurants, like St John and The French House, that have been doing this for a long time, they have revolutionised the way we eat and define certain cuisines over the course of multiple decades, reimagining deceptively simple food from a bygone era. But in our recent rampage for this kind of food, we have gentrified it to the point that it almost feels laughable. Whether you agree with – oh god, I can’t call him that man anymore, I’m just going to name him – Hugh Corcoran’s sentiment or not, I think we all need to realise that we are responsible for this man thinking that it is our job, as the diner, to keep his insane business plan alive by patronising his restaurant, and, in his own words, ordering “a main course (and possibly even a starter or dessert) and drink wine in order for your table to be worth serving” or, even better, “a grand cru to drink and a Beaujolais Villages to rinse the mouth”.
Restaurants are not meant to be something we have to compete to be in. There are some restaurants where their whole MO is being exclusionary – and that’s their prerogative. But most restaurants are meant to be places to gather and break bread with friends and loved ones. They’re meant to be places to be delighted, fed, and sometimes creatively challenged, if that’s what you’re after. You have to pay to be in them, of course. The delicate hospitality ecosystem is struggling and only works if we all do our part to keep it alive. But when the diner begins to be sneered at or ripped off, it starts to feel a lot less like a mutually beneficial relationship. It seems like that balance seemed to kilter as we all decided that paying £40 for a pie was acceptable simply because the restaurant looked like your great grandma’s living room.
