Imagining the regressive restaurant

Bitter about the Bittern

I have not eaten at The Yellow Bittern, the controversial restaurant du jour of the London food scene. I would like to, one day. By all accounts the food is excellent, the wine perhaps better, and I am loath to critique any restaurant so heavily invested in promoting the long, boozy lunch.

But critique it others have. Some on the grounds of its food, some for its idiosyncrasies (weekday lunch only, cash only, booking by phone only), almost all for chef and co-owner Hugh Corcoran’s acerbic attitude. The Yellow Bittern does not have its own social media presence, but Corcoran does, and has variously used it to lambast customers for being no-shows, critics for being cynics, and both of them for being cheapskates.

I didn’t intend to write about the Bittern, certainly not before actually eating there, and probably not after. Corcoran is right to push back against complaints that his restaurant works differently to others out there, and I didn’t want to pile on. It is not an inherent issue that he should insist you phone to book a table, that the wine list be kept in his head rather than on a menu, that he doesn’t want to take card payments. I find all these things quite annoying, but it’s his restaurant and he should run it how he likes.

But Corcoran has forced my hand. Or rather, the editors at Tribune did when they commissioned him to write a feature in the socialist magazine’s latest issue, themed on gastropolitics, thus bringing a little bit of the Bittern to me.

Corcoran’s title alone, ‘Imagining the Progressive Restaurant’, got my hackles up. That’s not truly his fault, it just triggered trauma flashbacks to one of Twitter’s daftest discourses: there would be no restaurants under socialism because no-one really wants to be a waiter, and in socialist societies everyone just does what they feel like all day long. This was an argument of such little imagination that it consumed my own for four days straight.

To his credit, Corcoran isn’t that bad. In fact, I agree with much of what he argues. He complains about chain coffee shops and packaged sandwiches, multinationals and rampant consumerism, laments the sad state of the English high street. But more than that, he rightly recognises that the restaurant itself isn’t the problem, that there would and should be restaurants under socialism, but that they should be “centres of community… convivial spaces where one exchanges ideas and meets those who live near to you.”

He’s right that we should probably have fewer restaurants in such a world, both out of a reduction of our current state of excess and because when more people have the time and means to cook for themselves, we’d have less need to eat out so often. He’s right that dining culture “must seek to make restaurants more human, from the perspectives of the worker and the consumer.” He’s right that in such a world restaurants should be spaces where “tradespeople and artists alike eat and drink.”

Hugh Corcoran is right about all those things. I just think he’s wrong that The Yellow Bittern fits the bill.