Do you remember the Cereal Killer Café? The year was 2014: a time of sleeveless plaid shirts, Mr Pringle moustaches, man buns and undercuts. This was the era of proto vapes and misplaced millennial hope, of the indie band Vampire Weekend and trilby hats mistaken for fedoras. When the Cereal Killer Café opened in Brick Lane that year to sell cereal and milk for stupid prices, it signalled the acme of hyper-gentrification and the ‘peak’ east London aesthetic. Many of us saw its pandemic-related closure in 2020 as a sign that sanity had returned to the capital’s restaurant scene.
We were wrong. The Cereal Killer Café might be gone but the public’s credulity for overpriced Instagrammable restaurants is piping hot. And, while the era of the gimmick restaurant is in its twilight, London’s food scene is still in trouble.
A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with friends at one of east London’s trendiest restaurants – designed, like all such restaurants, to be the least comfortable dining experience imaginable. Polycarbonate roof? Check. Zippered sailboat material for walls? Check. The preliminary menu explanation: ‘Are you familiar with the concept of sharing plates?’ You betcha.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of this meal. If you’ve eaten at a chic restaurant in London, you already know the score. It cost £62 each, was exceedingly underwhelming and left me hungry enough to eat a whole bag of Rowntree’s Randoms afterwards.
London’s food scene can be divided into two neat factions: restaurants that are worth the money and restaurants that are not. Unfortunately, the latter camp is stronger in numbers and munitions. Take Gloria (or any restaurant in the Big Mamma group), The Ivy (including the original), Sketch, Eggslut, food stalls that have truffle on the menu, Padella or Dorian. These restaurants vary from reasonable to I-need-to-start-selling-pictures-of-my-feet expensive – but not one of them is worth the price.
Sketch may hold three Michelin stars, but don’t pretend you want to pay £150 per person for any other reason than to get a photo in what several Instagrammers have called ‘the world’s coolest bathroom’. A restaurant needn’t be expensive to be bad value, either. Padella sells pasta dishes for as little as £9.50. It just so happens that they’re not very good and, thus, not worth the price. Eggslut is a quick and edible lunch but £14.95 for a mushroom bun the size of a stress ball is nothing short of a boondoggle.
Underpinning all of this is an unearned pomposity. These restaurants can get away with the bare minimum because the public (read: social media influencers) are on their side. As long as they can generate media hype and queues – these restaurants would be nothing without their queues – customer satisfaction takes a back seat.
The capital can be divided into two neat factions: restaurants that are worth the money and restaurants that are not
For my birthday last year, my girlfriend booked us a table at Story Cellar, the Parisian-inspired bistro and sister restaurant to the two Michelin-starred Restaurant Story. Sitting at the counter watching the chefs diligently plate dishes, we studied the menu: £34 for half a chicken; £115 for a T-bone to share; £20 for a ‘snail bolognaise’ starter. Expensive? Perhaps. But we knew what we were getting into when we booked the table – after all, this was a special occasion. And influencers had assured us it was a ‘banging meal’.
Reader, let me make this clear: the food at Story Cellar was fine. In fact, some of the dishes were good. The ‘snail bolognaise’ was fantastic but not £20-fantastic. Story Cellar is a well-oiled restaurant and the team knows what it is doing. I’d expect nothing less from Tom Sellers’s second outfit. But, again, I left underwhelmed and asking myself the same question: was that really worth the hype?
It gives me no pleasure to bash London’s food scene. The UK has one of the highest rates of VAT for hospitality in Europe (20 per cent). The public understands the financial burden this puts on businesses: a YouGov study found that 79 per cent of the public were in favour of a reduced rate of VAT for hospitality and tourism. Hard-working independent businesses struggle to keep afloat. Even Heston Blumenthal – the man famed for producing a dish with edible sand and an iPod in a conch shell – is closing his two-Michelin star Knightsbridge restaurant next January, citing rising food costs as one of the reasons.
Having worked in the industry, I understand how hard it is for a restaurant to make ends meet: high rents, staff shortages, shrinking profit margins and decreased footfall. It would also be remiss of me not to point out that there are plenty of London restaurants fighting the good fight, from O Barros to Chez Bruce, Sentosa to Camille. But the over-saturation of middling restaurants charging exceptional prices needs to stop. My heart can’t take another portion of Pink Fir potatoes and ‘truffle cream’ for £17 and nor can my stomach.
We are all feeling the pinch right now. A restaurant wants to make money and a customer wants their money to be well spent. Go ahead: charge £100-plus for a T-bone steak. But don’t slap it over an open-flame grill and hope for the best. By doing so, you leave us, the paying customers, with nothing more than a sour taste.
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