Lowri Griffiths investigates how more people are eating well and fewer people can afford the areas where they are eating

Reporting from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

I have a theory about London’s restaurant scene that I have been developing over seven years of eating in it, and the theory is this: the quality of food available at the middle of the price distribution has improved significantly over the period, meaning that a thirty-pound dinner in North London in 2026 is substantially better than a thirty-pound dinner in North London in 2019, which is partly because thirty pounds is worth less in 2026 than it was in 2019 and partly because the pool of skilled chefs working in mid-range restaurants has grown as fine dining has contracted and as the pandemic produced a reconfiguration of the restaurant economy whose effects are still being worked through.

The theory has a complication, which is that the areas where the quality improvement has been most visible — Dalston, Stoke Newington, Tottenham, the better parts of Walthamstow — are also the areas that have been gentrifying fastest over the same period, meaning that the improvement in food quality and the displacement of the populations that made the areas interesting enough to gentrify are happening simultaneously and are causally related, because the food quality improvement is itself both a product and a cause of gentrification.

The Chicken and the Egg

The specific causal sequence in food-led gentrification is documented by urban economists and is as follows: a neighbourhood’s existing food culture — often the product of immigrant communities with specific culinary traditions and lower cost structures — attracts adventurous early adopters; the early adopters’ presence increases the social capital of the neighbourhood; the social capital increase attracts food media attention; the media attention attracts higher-income diners; the higher-income diners support higher price points; the higher price points make the neighbourhood attractive to higher-rent operators; the higher-rent operators replace the original food culture that made the neighbourhood interesting in the first place.

The Time Out London restaurant coverage participates in this process by directing attention to the neighbourhoods it covers, which is a media function whose consequences the coverage acknowledges imperfectly. The Londonist food coverage is more attentive to the communities and economies behind the restaurants than most food media, which is the correct approach and which I try to apply when I write about food, which is: eat at the restaurant because it is good, write about the restaurant because it is good, acknowledge the neighbourhood context because it is real, and accept that the writing is part of the system it is describing, which is uncomfortable and true.

Every column is an argument about what a city or a neighbourhood or an institution is, made by a person who has decided that describing it carefully is worth the time. The argument is never finished. The subject keeps changing. The description must keep up, or acknowledge where it has fallen behind, or find the moment when the gap between the description and the reality is itself the story. That gap, in London in 2026, is almost always the story. The city produces it continuously. The writing tries to keep pace. It does not always succeed. It is always trying, which is the correct posture for anyone covering a city that does not wait for its coverage to catch up.

The Craft of Writing About a City

Writing about London — or any part of it, any institution within it, any person navigating it — requires a specific combination of attention and detachment that is harder to maintain than either alone. Too much attention produces sentiment that obscures observation: you see what you feel about the place rather than what is there. Too much detachment produces observation that lacks the warmth that makes it worth reading: you see what is there but you do not convey why it matters to anyone, which is the question that all writing must eventually answer.

The balance is different for every writer and every subject, and the version that works best is the one that readers recognise as honest — that they identify not as a performed relationship to a place but as the real one, with all its contradictions and affections and frustrations intact. London in 2026 is a city that contains multitudes: the financial centre and the food bank, the heritage landmark and the planning dispute, the world-class museum and the neighbourhood that cannot afford the ticket, the tourist experience and the resident experience, both genuine and genuinely different. Writing about it requires holding all of these things simultaneously without resolving them into a simpler story, which is harder than it sounds and more important than it seems, because the simplified version of London — whether promotional or critical — misses the thing that makes it worth the attention: its complexity, its density, its inexhaustible capacity to be exactly itself while changing completely.

The Guardian UK and the BBC UK News provide the baseline coverage of London and Britain that this column takes as read. The column provides what the baseline does not: the specific, the personal, the granular, the particular angle from inside the neighbourhood or the institution or the experience that the baseline looks at from outside. Both are necessary. Neither is complete without the other. The column is the inside view. The city is the subject. The city continues.

Also at https://www.thedailymash.co.uk.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism