Love/Hate The London Dining Scene
London is the best city in the world to eat out, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a liar or a fool.
London is the only place in the world where you can get French food to rival France (See 64 Goodge st), Spanish food to rival Spain (See Brat) and Italian food to rival Italy (See The River Cafe), not to mention modern British (St. John anyone?) and the near ubiquitous 'modern European' (Rochelle Canteen, or a million other excellent places) - great news for lovers of small/sharing plates.
If you want street food try Camden, Borough or Netil markets. Want to go more niche, more local, more specific? Forget Chinatown, try Koreatown in New Malden, which has one of the world’s highest densities of Korean restaurants outside Korea. Prefer Turkish? Take your pick, my friend, probably picking something with ‘Mangal’ in its name.
Virtually every single neighbourhood has at least one standout Chinese restaurant and one standout Indian. Excellent Thai food abounds at a near absurd number of our pubs. Fancy Vietnamese? Try the stretch of Kingsland Road dubbed Little Hanoi, aka the Pho Mile. (Mentioned in a past article.) And though there may not be as many as there used to be, everyone still has a local favourite caff, greasy spoon, and increasingly, posh bakery.
That's before we even get to the highest echelons of London dining (RIP Le Gavroche). With one of the world's highest densities of Michelin star restaurants - Marcus, Heston, Clare, they’re all here - if you've cash to splash there's few better places to be. Any international chef or restauranteur looking to expand is likely to consider London among their first new locations.
Every week brings exciting new openings. Every year brings another unexpected trend (whole turbot anyone?), and every night brings a new opportunity to try something heartbreakingly delicious.
So what's the problem?
Did you guess?
Like transport, housing and basically every single other element of this city, it's SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE.
Fortunately, the sky high prices mean that profits are usually passed on to hospitality staff, who are better paid than many of their office-dwelling counterparts.
JUST KIDDING!!!
We remain poorly paid, often overworked, and totally unable - except possibly with a staff discount - to eat and drink at the places we keep afloat. Sure, there are apps, newsletters and promotional offers to keep an eye out for, which can make your bill slightly more palatable, but regular eating out is simply beyond most of us, at least unless it’s on someone else’s coin. Of course we take care of each other - if a hospitality pal turns up where you work, it’s a free starter, free drink, extra desert, 20% discount etc, but if you don’t happen to know any of the staff, honey, you’re on your own.
Here’s three recent meals I had in London - as a chef, I can justify regularly eating out, for ‘research’...but I also have a side-hustle alongside my full-time chef job to support this endeavour, and have done since I started cheffing and saw my first disappointing pay-check.
In ascending order of cost:
Bun and Sum: Burger and tater tots with a BBQ honey dip. £11.
A delicious but dainty smash burger (I could have had two, three if I was really hungry) and tater tots almost certainly from a frozen sack, but nonetheless tasty. 50% off as I collected it from the site, a small kitchen down a dodgy road in a Bow industrial park below the train tracks, surrounded by garages, and ate it outside, standing up, off an old barrel. A bargain, and hit the spot, but I probably wouldn’t say that if it had cost the full £22.
Chishuru: Adejoké Bakare’s smart Fitzrovia location does a £35 3-course set lunch of dazzling west African delights, with the only choice being between a meaty and veggie main. Between me and a friend we got both, and were blown away. The wild watermelon seed cake with punchy fermented chilli sauce, the deep smokiness on the chargrilled guinea fowl, and the smoothness on the ‘rice-cream’ dessert all shone. £89 for two with service and one coke zero each, no booze. The quality of the cooking and unfamiliar flavours here made it feel good value, but £45 each when you’re not drinking is hardly a cheap lunch.
“I collected my food from a small kitchen down a dodgy road in a Bow industrial park below the train tracks, surrounded by garages, and ate it outside, standing up, off an old barrel”
Mountain: Lunch for two - £276. Full Disclosure - this was on someone else’s coin, in return for a huge favour, so we really went all out. You could eat there for far less…or far more, if you really get stuck into the wine list. But you’d struggle to get away with less than £60/head without booze or service, which is what you get for eating at the newest location of Tomos Parry, one of the city’s hottest chefs. That said, much of what we ordered was transcendental - the wild mushrooms, the sweetbreads, the pork collar and the smoked potatoes were standouts, supported by a robust rosé, then a sumptuous dessert wine to finish.
Reader, I ate well last month. I have many happy memories to savour, an ever-swelling gut, and a lot of excellent pictures to share with jealous cheffy friends.
But please don’t ask about my bank balance.
So what can be done? How can we make the London dining scene more accessible to the workers that keep it running?
For starters, a higher minimum wage. If you’re ‘lucky’ enough to get London living wage - recently calculated at £13.15 an hour - and many of us aren’t - without tips that’s still scarcely enough to make ends meet.
“If we are doing it for the love - because we certainly ain’t doing it for the money - perhaps we can start by looking after our own a little better.”
With tips - well, it’s not unheard of for restaurants to keep service charge and use it to pay wages, only passing on cash tips to staff. Which, in a largely cashless economy, is a big ol’ nothing burger. Or maybe they pay minimum wage but share the tips more evenly - great if it’s a busy month, but if you work in a central London restaurant and everyone goes away in August, good luck paying your rent and bills with just £1,100, after having two shifts cancelled cause they simply didn’t need you in as there were only 4 people booked for lunch!
Just as well you’ve got that side-hustle dawg!
Maybe some venues could introduce specific hospitality discounts (currently more common in bars than restaurants), or cheaper sittings for fellow hospitality staff, when we will often have irregular days off, and would happily trek somewhere otherwise out of our price range for a Tuesday lunch if it’s 50% off. Maybe restaurant groups could go into partnerships with each other, where staff from one could enjoy discounts at the other’s locations for say, one month a year. CODE Hospitality, an app that already does this to an extent, with some very good offers at some appealing locations, exclusively available to hospitality staff. But could groups and individual venues be doing more?
The problem is that even the most successful restaurants’ margins will only be perhaps 10%-15%. Most places would be happy with more customers, but if it doesn’t move the bottom line because those people have discounts, then why bother?
If you want a big, money-spinning operation, opening a restaurant in London where rent is extortionate, bills have sky-rocketed and competition is fierce, is probably not your best bet. Unless your name happens to be Gail.
This means that most people who start something - a restaurant, pub, café, deli or whatever - will do so to share something they love, in the hope that, with enough dedication from the right people, it is successful enough to stay afloat. If we are doing it for the love - because we certainly ain’t doing it for the money - perhaps we can start by looking after our own a little better. Like insider trading, but legal, and with small plates and negronis instead of stock tips.
Most people in hospitality love to shout about the places we adore and admire. I don’t think any of us would balk at seeing a few extra perks and I can’t see any place’s reputation suffering for becoming known as a venue that looks after other hospitality staff.
This of course would just be the tip of the iceberg of what needs to change (wages! Better wages please!) to make the industry more fair and sustainable for those who make it, but at least it would be a start…
Dave Bard works at the Dusty Knuckle, at their Dalston site and original home.
Final UAD round up:
What did Up After Dark see this week-
This week we treated ourselves to the 4th in the series of NADC, we just couldn’t keep ourselves away! Not Another Drag Competition. Taking place at the RVT, Monday’s show featured performances from the final seven contestants, (actually six acts - get well soon Will Power). Monday’s category was burlesque night, featuring strong performances all round, with twists provided by host of NADC, Me. Here at UAD we don’t want to pick favourites but we think an honourable mention should go to a certain top hat; a delicately sexy moustache and a snowman with a conveniently placed carrot. Mournfully we had to say farewell to the hottest Zorro this side of the Thames, King Papi Cox. However, we felt there are worse ways for this year's wildcard to leave than to be doing it to eardrum bursting screaming and extended applause.
Art We Are Into-
Photo credit: Raccoon_meme_daily
Raccoon memes: they echo our truest and darkest internal thoughts which we can’t help to relate to.
If you made it this far, we would like to let you know, you are loved, by all of us here. See you next week, trash panda!