Food courts appear to be everywhere in London at the moment and, for reasons too boring to go into here, I found myself at three of them across the capital in the space of four days last week. (Yes, before you ask, I am beginning to question my life choices as a result.)
Not that there is anything innately wrong with food courts as a concept, of course. If you’ve been to one, you’ll know the drill, which is essentially that they are semi-industrial spaces lined with vendors plying all manner of street food from locations that aren’t too challenging to the average British diner.
The fashionable new breed of food courts are often branded as ‘food halls’ or ‘food markets’, but essentially they still offer the same sort of experience as the shopping mall and airport food courts of old. There’ll be lobster rolls, there’ll be ‘premium’ fried chicken (a misnomer if ever I heard one); there’ll be California rolls, pad Thai, pizza and the kind of gout-inducing burgers that look better on Instagram than they feel in your stomach. There’ll also be a bar, music that is just slightly too loud for anyone to comfortably hold a conversation and a lot of non-plastic ‘sustainable’ cutlery.
But although, at 47, I’m probably too old to truly enjoy the whole food court experience, my reason for never returning to the likes of Mercato Metropolitano (in Elephant and Castle) and Between the Bridges (on the South Bank) is down to something else entirely: the truly unedifying spectacle of being in close proximity to Gen Z while they eat.
Table manners, I regret to report, have gone the way of Rodney Bewes and rotary dial telephones. I can’t decide if the incoming generation of diners never learned how to use cutlery, or they have simply elected to dismiss it as being an antiquated, recondite invention as relevant to their lives as weaving or making eye contact.
Either way, let me recount what I’ve witnessed over the past few days. People chewing while somehow letting half their tongue hang out like a pink ticket stub to a destination nobody in their right mind would ever want to visit. Khaki-teethed men making mastication noises that put me in mind of a bag of cat litter being tossed around a spin dryer. Spongy, mozzarella-coloured, unwashed hands plunging into seeping cardboard tubs of nachos.
Most young diners seem to believe that serviettes should be used as something to rest your phone on while you wipe your hands on your jeans
There seems to be complete bafflement as to the purpose of serviettes (there’s no napkins here, trust me), with most diners believing that they should be used as something to rest your phone on while you wipe your hands on your jeans. Perhaps the nadir was having to watch a man with a face the colour of withered lichen attempt to lever an entire pizza slice into his mouth in one go. He failed, rendering the narrow end of the wedge to take on the form of a second tongue. His mates didn’t seem to mind. I, however, nearly fetched up my salt cod fritters on the spot.
Of course, I understand that ‘dude food’ is supposed to be messy, and nobody is expecting diners to eat their deep-fried chicken wings with a knife and fork, Donald Trump-style. But something has clearly gone awry when people, evidently dressed to have a good time, are leaving food courts with their attire speckled as though covered in guano deposit due to their total inability to get food from tray to mouth without disaster.
Well, you may argue, so what if there’s a generation upon us who have no table manners whatsoever? They barely ever eat at a table anyway. But in the end, table manners are not about snobbery but signalling. They are a shorthand for attentiveness, self-restraint and a basic willingness to meet others halfway. When Gen Z waves them away as oppressive or pointless, it isn’t so much the napkin that’s being rejected as the social contract it represents.
Older generations like mine still have the ability to read these cues instinctively. If younger eaters fail to observe them they may still get the thing they’re after (a promotion, a financial gift, a better hot-desk location at work) – but they won’t get much respect. And respect, inconveniently, remains something that’s not available to order on Deliveroo, or in a food court alongside the gyros and gelato.
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