A man with a poodle, a man dressed head-to-toe in Supreme and a man on crutches walk into a bar. Oh, the punchline? There isn’t one. I’m just spending the evening at The Plimsoll. It’s one of London’s rabidly popular pubs – a place of pilgrimage for pints and roast pigeon, disco balls and Dexter beef cheeseburgers. The food is excellent, the playlist Shazam-worthy and the atmosphere electric. It’s a good time. It must have been, because I woke up the next morning without a voice.
While the founding of the NHS or the discovery of DNA may come to mind as landmark moments of the progress of Britain, we often forget how far pub food has come in the past century. It wasn’t hard for such uninterrupted, linear progress to occur, seeing as during the post-war years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a pub that served hot food altogether. Pubs were a place of escapism, to numb yourself in the tough years following shelling, bloodshed and loss. At best, lining the stomach would comprise of a bag of peanuts, pork scratchings, or the assault of a pickled egg stored in nefarious yellow fluid on top of the bar. That was, until the 1990s, when we entered the era of the gastro pub.
Two chefs cooking dinner in the open kitchen of The Plimsoll pub in Finsbury Park
The Plimsoll's famed Dexter Cheesburger
Well, technically, food came back into pubs a little earlier in the 1970s and 1980s, born as a reaction against the competition of other places for which to enjoy a drink (your sofa) and the relevant decline of beer as the mainstay of a pub economy. Restaurant-oriented pubs like Brewers Fayre, Beefeater, and Harvester proliferated between 1974 and 1984, serving ABV-absorbent meals like steaks, pies and the all-important black forest gateau. It was more hops cuisine than haute, though, and hardly signified a seismic shift in our dining habits. But along came The Eagle on Farringdon Road in 1991, and then in the 2000s, pubs began to gain Michelin stars like The Sportsman, The Walnut Tree and Tom Kerridge’s The Hand & Flowers. These establishments and the deluge of offshoots which since followed mastered the brew and chew; bastions of pig cheek croquettes, nice bread, Farrow and Ball walls and beans that came from jars, not tins. But recently, food in pubs has developed again, moving and expanding beyond this genre.
Pubs are now deemed some of the hottest places to eat in the capital, and we’re infatuated with dining in them. But it’s not as simple as well-executed roast dinners and duck-egg-coloured bathrooms. Forget your local; we’re using WhatsApp to reserve balls of dough and are voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the Hammersmith and City line to secure a pizza at Crisp W6 housed in the Chancellor’s Arms. We’re eating dinner at 4:30pm to nab a spot at The Devonshire for beef suet pudding. We’re joining snaking queues for a walk-in table at The Plimsoll with the vision of wrapping our mouths around its feted cheeseburger.
We owe a lot of this to the pub residency: a symbiotic relationship between pub landlord and chef, a little like bees and flowers, that’s become a defining feature of the London restaurant scene in the last decade. Established for mutual gain, pub landlords can rent out pub kitchens, absolving themselves from the responsibility of providing half-decent food while benefiting from the provision of grub by talented chefs, making their pub a destination. On the opposite side of the coin, chefs can use these spaces to test the waters of running their own restaurant with less on the line than opening a standalone venue. This allows for a level of risk-taking and experimentation that wouldn’t fly in a traditional restaurant setting and for people with little to no experience or financial backing to try their hand at running a food establishment for the first time. Some of London’s favoured places to eat have been birthed from the wombs of pub residencies – both Darjeeling Express and Sambal Shiok at The Sun and 13 Cantons, Papi (originally Hot 4 U) at The Prince Arthur, Ling Ling’s at The Gun, and so on.
Kaneda Pen in the kitchen at Mamapen in The Sun & 13 Cantons pub
Nic Crilly-Hargrave
“The pub residency is the perfect risk-free environment to test what you’ve got and see if people like it enough to invest time, money and emotion into opening your own place,” says Ed McIlroy, who first started his residency Four Legs with Jamie Allan at The Compton Arms before setting up shop permanently when they opened The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park. Cult Camberwell sandwich purveyor Mondo Sando by Jack Macrae and Viggo Blegvad followed a similar path to Four Legs.
Two men with big dreams, even bigger sandwiches, and no experience running a restaurant, started out in Macrae’s flat before occupying the vacant kitchen of the Joiners Arms on Denmark Hill, which was closed during the pandemic, after seeing Vincenzo’s in Bushey following a similar model for takeaway pizza. From there, they went on to two pub residencies at The White Horse and The Grove House Tavern (which is still open), before opening their own sandwich shop, Cafe Mondo – made possible with the help of 400 sandwich enthusiasts pledging almost £35,000 to the Kickstarter fundraiser.
There were loads of empty pub kitchens and chefs who needed a way to get started
“When you have no experience in hospitality or money, opening your own restaurant is impossible,” says Blegvad. “A pub residency gave us the chance to do something with no start-up costs or real overheads. You pay a percentage of what you take, and the pubs like it because they don’t have to run the kitchen anymore.” He believes the pandemic only helped to accelerate the trend: “There were loads of empty pub kitchens and a lot of chefs who needed a way to get started without it costing them the earth.”
London’s pub food offering feels like a far cry from the sausage-and-mash monoculture immortalised in the British pub food manual. Instead of menus listing scampi and sorrow washed down with an enamel-dissolving Kopparberg, at The Sun & 13 Cantons in Soho you’ll find Mamapen, the city’s only Cambodian restaurant serving XO panko pork toast with a fried egg and Khmer fried chicken buns. Should you lust for ray-wing tenders on crumpets (don’t we all?), then head to Rake, the latest residency at The Compton Arms. Chronically hungover and in need of one of London’s best pizzas? Dough Hands at The Spurstowe Arms is the medicine.
What sets these pop-ups apart from the Wetherspoons playbook is finding a niche and perfecting it, rather than listing more dishes than a cruise ship buffet. “The hospitality workforce was knee-capped by the pandemic and Brexit, meaning an exodus of professionally trained chefs with all-round kitchen experience,” says Mondo’s Macrae. “Given the state of the industry’s workforce, people starting to do pub residencies opted to specialise. Make one thing but do it really well – in our case, that was sandwiches.”
Mondo Sando’s Jack Macrae and Viggo Blegvad captured at their new sandwich shop
That’s not to say pub residencies are always a dream incubator for fledgling restaurants. “The Sun & 13 Cantons had been a drinking hole for a year because people were using QR codes to get Coqfighters down the road. So when we landed, we had to rewire the DNA of the pub,” says Kaneda Pen, the head honcho at Mamapen. “On Thursday nights during the early days, we would twiddle our thumbs because the dining area would be full of drinkers, which we couldn’t move on because we didn’t have exclusivity over the dining room, and obviously, the pub needs to make its wet sales.” Even now, Pen still gets booking requests for a quiet table or one with a view, as if diners forget Mamapen resides in a Soho boozer.
Co-founders of the Tamil Prince and Tamil Crown, two much-loved Desi pubs in Islington, experienced similar limitations with the pub-residency model. “We decided to open our own place because of all the troubles we had doing pop-ups,” says co-founder and general manager Glen Leeson. “We did one in Bethnal Green and in Deptford, and it was always a disjointed experience”. An old-school boozer with an Indian kitchen inside didn’t work for them; he explains that, “The old boys drinking pints of Guinness couldn’t care less about eating our bhajis.”
Channa bhatura at The Tamil Prince
For those establishments like The Tamil Prince and Crown, or equally The Devonshire, The Plimsoll, and soon-to-open The Knave of Clubs from James Dye and Patrick Powell, the decision hasn’t been to launch a pub residency but to open as independent pubs serving food. The obvious question follows: why not just open a restaurant in, well, a restaurant? But to ask that is to overlook a fundamental truth – Londoners would, for the most part, rather be in a pub than a dining room. That’s not a slight against restaurants but a testament to the pub as our third space.
At its core, the public house’s single origin is the moment when a domestic space is opened up to the public in order to sell drinks – the convivial blurring of the public and private worlds. Pubs are where we gather to celebrate and commiserate, date and break up, rekindle and reminisce. It’s a love affair that goes way back to medieval times when we frequented ale houses, taverns and inns, which later evolved into what we now define as the public house. George Orwell loved them for their “solid comfortable ugliness”, Samuel Pepys enjoyed them for a “claret and a tumble”, and Samuel Johnson, author of the English dictionary, in his famous encomium, said: “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
We find solace in pubs’ predictability, familiarity and beer-stained carpets
Over decades, while the pub has experienced extraordinary transformation and reimagination, reflecting and sometimes shaping broader societal and cultural change, it remains tethered to a certain collectively established sense of itself, remaining timeless. We find solace in pubs’ predictability, familiarity and beer-stained carpets. Maybe that’s why the average Brit spends over 14 months of their life at the pub. It is, therefore, an ingenious idea for chefs to open their restaurant as a pub. Exceptional food served in our mecca of carefree good times? Yes, please. Even if, like The Tamil Prince, The Camberwell Arms or The Devonshire your establishment operates more as a restaurant under a pub’s aesthetic, people still feel the magnetism of dark wood, lincrusta ceilings and sopping beer mats.
Beef cheek and Guinness pudding served at The Devonshire
“We like to be cosy in this country because it’s wet and freezing, and that lends itself to the structures we inhabit,” says Nick Stephens, landlord at The Gun and The Compton Arms, a pub famed for nurturing culinary talent including Four Legs, Tiella and now Rake. “There’s beer there, you’re being cooked for, you catch up with friends. It feels like home.” Chef and co-founder of Rake, Jay Claus, agrees, “Especially in London, where you feel like the ground is moving under your feet constantly, the pub feels like a place you can go and know what you’re getting.”
There was a gap for good casual dining, like you’d find in Barcelona or San Sebastián
As the rising cost of living pinches even harder, this wish for dependability, consistency, and value (even if it’s illusory) has become more pronounced among London’s diners. Where once in the golden age of the restaurant critic, the most desirable places to eat tended to be the most expensive, the landscape is shifting. Those who we now trust to tell us where to eat, whether it’s Action Bronson on Fuck, that’s Delicious, Dave Portnoy’s One-Bite Pizza Reviews or Eating with Tod covered in sweat or gravy (or both), are often pointing towards more casual establishments. “The issue is that so many restaurants in London exist in the middle, not fine dining or casual, and they’re pretty expensive,” says The Plimsol’s McIlroy. “There was a gap for good casual dining, like in Barcelona or San Sebastián, and good food in pubs feels like the beginning of our version of it in the UK.”
Founders of Rake, Jay Claus and Syrus Pickhave
Sian Blewitt
Dough Hands Pizza served at The Spurstowe Arms and The Old Nunshead
This shift isn’t solely about price (there are plenty of £50 pies on the menus of London’s most popular pubs that would make Orwell choke on his shortcrust); it’s about how we want to eat. Maybe it’s because the future seems particularly dystopian at the moment, but our appetite for comfort food, nostalgia and old-school-ness has never felt greater. Instead of looking forward, we want to hark back to retrograde culinary canons and food that’s hearty and sentimental. Those undeveloped folds in our brain that throb at the thought of the Devonshire’s warm bread rolls or the Tamil Prince’s lamb curry mopped up with buttery roti don’t ignite when presented with foams, gels and protracted verbal menu explanations. In a weird way, the evolution of London’s pub food seems to devolve back to where it all began: the OG taverns of the 17th and 18th centuries. Establishments of free-flowing ale, good food, wine, companionship, debauchery and, presumably, Dexter cheeseburgers.
