Never mind January or actual spring, early autumn has always struck me as the London restaurant world’s true season of birth, renewal and jittery, first-day-of-term excitement. August’s tumbleweed-strewn streets are violently repopulated. Post-holiday catch-up drinks clog diaries. And those of us who have turned eating well into an entire personality suddenly have a bumper crop of pre-Christmas hospitality openings, a veritable Argos catalogue of shiny new toys, to get slobberingly hyped about.
Or, at least, that’s how it usually goes. This year, amid all the customary enthusiasm about forthcoming blockbusters, the breathless conversations about Carbone and The Hart and Jeremy King’s long-simmering reboot of Simpson’s, I have detected something new and distinct. Something that feels, well, a little like jadedness.
Restaurant-obsessed acquaintances roll their eyes and gnash their teeth at the arrival of yet another smash-burger concept or rotisserie joint; exasperated longreads and snarky Instagram posts rail against the proliferation of NY-inspired pizzerias. (One friend evoked vermin to describe current proximity levels to hurriedly opened pizza businesses.) The sense – and I have felt myself fret about it too – is of post-recession malaise, a collective aversion to risk and a pervading creative funk that has nothing to do with modern gastronomy’s fondness for fermentation.
So what are we to make of it? Well, on the one hand, restaurant owners are not fully beating the allegations. From Lauretta’s and Carmela’s to Ace and Slayer, London groans with ersatz slice shops all riffing from the same marinara-spattered crib sheet. As of late summer, Carousel’s No. 23 counter space – an incubator cocktail bar that had been home to everything from progressive Mexican to Chinese wontons – will now permanently host minimalist burger brand Chuck’s. Even The Marlborough in Mayfair – a much-anticipated collaboration between Crisp’s Carl McCluskey and the supergroup of pub-whisperers behind The Devonshire – is, from another angle, yet another pizza place. At all levels, comfort-forward certainties are being tightly embraced by commercial landlords, restaurateurs and diners alike.
However, to take all this as a sign of some broader regression within the scene is, I think, to be both highly pessimistic and unfairly selective. Yes, the current mania for high-grade burgers, pizza, roast chicken, steak frites and posh pub fare seems unusually intense. Yes, there are probably larger questions to ask about the lasting impact of short-form video and the culinary categories it tends to valorise. But to focus solely on one set of similarly pitched hit openings is to ignore a city that still teems with thrillingly singular restaurant success stories.
Ambitious restaurateur Artem Login’s MOI is blowing minds in an old Wardour Street Vapiano with a genre-defying, low-lit mashup of modern izakaya cooking and impeccable British sourcing. Kentish Town’s Belly Bistro is colouring outside the lines of a traditional template with an imaginative fever dream of roe-slopped fried fish buns and purple ube tiramisu. The Dreamery in Islington (which is admittedly almost a year old) has somehow turned a trippily appointed natural wine bar and ice-cream parlour, opened in the depths of winter, into a Tiktok-famous queue-magnet.
And this is before we even turn to the new wave Portuguese tasca hiding out in a Hoxton boozer (The Macbeth), the homestyle Chinese coming to Somerset House (Poon’s), relocated South African-inspired inventiveness in Marylebone (Kudu), or a Chelsea “luxury bistro” for fans of both precise gastronomy and slightly tortured puns (Clare Smyth’s Core spin-off Corenucopia).
The idea that risk and innovation is dying out in London just doesn’t withstand even the tiniest bit of scrutiny. Yet if concerns about a homogenised dining landscape offer us anything, then it’s a reminder of what’s at stake. A reminder, really, that now more than ever, we need to actively support chefs and owners who are trying something new rather than simply iterating on what has worked previously. So, no. There is no need to despair.
Autumn promises the familiarity of innumerable heat-blistered pepperoni pies and hot honey-dribbled crusts. But it also, as it always does in London, heralds a reliable slice of the unexpected. If you cannot currently find reasons to be legitimately excited about dining out in this dogged, dynamic metropolis of ours, then I humbly suggest that you are simply not looking hard enough.