Lowri Griffiths on the forty-two-pound small plates, the waiting list for a restaurant she could not describe to her mother, and the moment London stopped feeding people and started performing food at them

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

I love the London food scene. I want to be clear about this before I say what I am about to say, which is that I think the London food scene has peaked and is now doing something that I can only describe as performing food rather than serving it, a distinction that seemed pretentious when I first articulated it to a friend over brunch — twenty-two pounds, two eggs, sourdough, “heritage butter,” whatever that means — and that I stand by absolutely.

The evidence is everywhere once you start looking for it. It is in the restaurants where you book six weeks in advance and then arrive to discover that the table is a bar stool, that the menu is a QR code, that “small plates designed for sharing” means four items that are objectively not enough for two people, and that the total bill before service is ninety-six pounds for what is technically still lunch. It is in the tasting menu trend that has metastasised from Michelin-starred establishments to neighbourhood restaurants that serve twelve courses at eighty pounds a head and require you to block out an entire Tuesday evening because the kitchen has opinions about pacing. It is in the bread courses that cost eleven pounds separately and arrive wrapped in linen as though they are a jewellery purchase.

What Happened to Restaurants

The London restaurant industry’s shift toward the higher end of the market is partly a rational response to economic pressure: rent, business rates, food costs, and post-pandemic staffing costs have all increased substantially, and the restaurants that have survived have done so partly by increasing prices and partly by moving toward a price-per-cover model that extracts more value from each diner. This is understandable as a business response. It has produced a dining landscape that increasingly excludes the people who made London’s food scene interesting in the first place.

The original energy of London’s diverse food culture — the Sri Lankan places on the Tooting high street, the Turkish restaurants in Stoke Newington, the Vietnamese spots in Hackney, the Jamaican patty shops that have been in Brixton since before anyone in Brixton was calling it “vibrant” — came from communities who were cooking their own food for their own communities at prices those communities could afford. The critical and broader London public eventually discovered these places, which is how they became “scenes.” The scene’s discovery subsequently drove rent increases and neighbourhood changes that have displaced some of the original establishments and transformed others into higher-priced versions of themselves for the audiences that discovered them. This is the gentrification of food, and it operates by the same mechanisms as all other gentrification: authenticity is discovered, commodified, and eventually priced out of reach of the people who created it.

The Performance Problem

The specific thing that makes me feel that London food has peaked is not the price, though the price is genuinely not fine. It is the performativity. There is a category of London restaurant now whose primary product is not the food but the experience of eating in that restaurant: the room, the lighting, the aesthetic, the sense of being somewhere that other people want to be. The food is part of the experience but not the point of it. Instagram is not the cause of this phenomenon but it is its most obvious symptom: the dish that is designed to be photographed before it is eaten, the restaurant interior that is a set for the photograph rather than a room for the meal, the entire apparatus of dining as content production rather than dining as eating.

I am not immune to this. I have photographed dishes. I have been to restaurants partly because I had seen them on social media and wanted to see if they were real. I have stood outside restaurants at ten past eight waiting for a table that was booked at eight and been annoyed and gone inside and had a very nice time and paid eighty pounds for two and called it a reasonable evening. The London food scene has peaked and I still participate in it, which is perhaps the most honest statement of its condition: it is doing something wrong and we are complicit in it and we keep going anyway because when it is right it is more right than anywhere else. London food at its best is better than anywhere. The question is whether its best is worth the distance it has traveled from its origins, and whether those origins, displaced by the success they created, are still accessible to the city that created them. I think the answer, increasingly, is no. I think this while booking a table for next Thursday. I am not proud of the contradiction. I am accurately reporting it.

The specific economics that have produced the performative food scene deserve a moment of examination, because understanding them makes the diagnosis more useful than simply lamenting the outcome. London restaurant rents have increased substantially over the past decade, driven by the same commercial property market dynamics that have affected retail and office space. A restaurant in a desirable North London neighbourhood pays rent that would have seemed extraordinary fifteen years ago and that requires a revenue-per-cover model calibrated to extract maximum value from each customer. The small-plates format is partly a response to this pressure: more covers per seating period, higher margin per plate than a traditional three-course format, a menu structure that is difficult for customers to benchmark against expectations. The tasting menu that takes four hours and costs two hundred pounds is, from a pure operational standpoint, an efficient way to fill a table once and generate the revenue that the rent requires. The fact that it has also become a genre whose conventions have taken on a life of their own — courses arriving in ritualistic sequence, servers delivering descriptions of provenance and technique that require a certain performance of attention to receive — reflects the social dynamics of a dining culture that has internalised the expense and built a ceremonial framework to justify it. I do not want to eat a twelve-course meal with matching wine on a Tuesday. I want to eat excellent food at a table I can book the same week and pay for without a financial planning conversation with myself beforehand. This is, apparently, an increasingly specialised request.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths.

Also overpaying at The Daily Mash | NewsThump | The Poke

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/london-food-scene-peaked-lowri-griffiths-small-plates-performance/