I feel like The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.
Hello again.
We all have those impactful holidays that basically become the only thing we can talk about; the funnel through which all life flows. “Did I tell you about that beach in Mexico? The restaurant in Cape Town? The vintage place in Japan?” Yes, you absolutely did. In literally every conversation we’ve had since.
Anyway, my version of this is the pair of trips I took to Madrid this spring: a gorgeously sunny cumulative eight-day jamboree of eating, drinking and carousing that caused me to fall very hard for the Spanish capital and, by degrees, turn into someone incapable of shutting up about all the ways I adored it. I loved the sense that a lack of neighbouring beach or coastline has forged an urbane, relatively under-touristed metropolis of plazas, galleries and vermut-soaked tabernas. I loved the verdant, shimmering vastness of El Retiro Park, the looming regal architecture, the thickly furrowed spears of hot churros beside cups of rich dipping chocolate.
But perhaps most of all, I loved the fact that it is the done thing to eat pintxos, small sharing dishes and the beginnings of entire meals – gildas, hefty griddled toasts, boquerone-draped, rustling towers of lacy olive oil crisps – while huddled around an upcycled barrel, counter or jutting rail. This, of course, is the form of vertical dining that is especially prevalent in bars all across Spain and Italy; a vaguely harried, continental mode of sharp-elbowed eating that feels incompatible with the British need for respite, comfortable chairs and shelter from gloomy conditions.
Yet vertical dining, holiday-coded as it is, has got me thinking about the ways that London tends to eat out (or not) during the summer months. I thought of all the restaurateurs who have privately told me how bad sweltering temperatures and the advent of pub pavement season can be for food sales; the Thirsty Thursday casualties I often see devouring emergency Leon or McDonald’s dinners on late-night trains out of Charing Cross. And I increasingly started to wonder whether a vertical dining revolution, creeping in at the margins in the form of a few recent openings, might yet be exactly what this city’s heatwave-wilted restaurant scene needs.
Let’s kick off by dealing with the standard objections. For all that many of us will embrace this mode of eating when we travel – gulping Venetian cicchetti, Basque pintxos and Manhattanite pizza slices in the crush of some guidebook spot – my general sense is that, back home, it’s viewed as a bit undignified and grim. The thought of consuming anything substantial in a restaurant without a seat implies low status or some sort of booking calamity; the culinary equivalent of riding in cattle class. I mean, after all, who wants to attempt to eat a steak or bowl of pasta while hunched over a glorified window ledge?
My response to this would be that you are looking at it the wrong way. The glory of vertical dining cultures in Spain, Italy and beyond is that the food generally fits the form. Rugged, open-faced sandwiches. Skewered pickles and fanned plates of charcuterie. Seething dishes of garlicky prawns, served with miniature forks and hunks of bread. Beyond that, this culinary approach builds on the idea that the line between salty accompaniments for drinks – think the sacrosanct British practice of placing splayed packets of Scampi Fries and Tayto crisps on a pub table – and a more expansive meal can be blurred.
Throwing back pints in the sunshine (non-alcoholic or otherwise) massively impinges on evening meals in the summer so it makes sense to port some of dinner’s characteristics into those moments when we perch, people watch and yap on some thrumming London street corner. Drained oyster shells neatly stacked on a ledge outside a pub; a tub of craft gelato balanced on a junction box. The incongruity is the point. And rather than being about slumming it, at its best, vertical dining brings a raffish, improvisatory glamour to an eating position more commonly associated with idly snaffling slices of ham before the glow of an open fridge.
So where are London’s best places to take a stand? Naturally, ersatz tapas bars, cervecerias and tabernas – I’m especially thinking of Jose, Tollington’s and the casual front section in Legado – are places where you can gulp down pan con tomate, bifanas and more from a teetering, elevated surface. Similarly, south east London newcomers Cantinera and Cantina Boccone introduce Mexican and Italian elements to that Iberian pavement-hogging formula. But it’s also worth noting that even Osteria Vibrato has a standing area in the rear (absolutely the spot for a bagna cauda and red pepper crostino chased down by perhaps the best Martini in the city). And, also, that there is something thrillingly hard-charging and Soho about stopping in for a stomach-lining slice of Breadstall pizza at one of the raised tables in its tiled Berwick Street flagship. Although, as at most of these places, there are of course chairs and stools for those who want to take a load off.
This is an important aspect of it. My yearning for continental-style vertical dining is as much about a certain culinary spirit as the act of literally having a meal while upright. Really, it is an urge for a city where the summertime drinking culture feels less ruinously single-minded and more pleasurable. The fact that our climate now more closely resembles southern Europe probably means we should adopt some of its practices. It’s an epiphany I had during a trip to Madrid earlier this year. Though, of course, I don’t really like to talk about that.
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