I as soon as met a woman so posh that she didn’t assume it outstanding that her golden retriever’s most well-liked snack was bresaola. I not often flip my nostril up at indulgence however this did stretch my “reside and let reside” philosophy a little bit skinny. It got here to thoughts as I used to be wandering via Harrods Meals Halls and the dry-aged beef caught my eye. OK, Boz the retriever is actually upwardly cell. However is he “olive-fed wagyu bresaola at £15/100g” upwardly cell? Sorry in your hardship, pooch.
I’m inspecting the state of England’s luxurious grocery behavior. There was a time when the Harrods Meals Halls, with Selfridges in a supporting function, have been the first technique to serve the wonts of west London’s elites and their bresaola-inclined canines. From the late Seventies, with its fishmongers and butchers and parsimonious recent produce sections, Harrods operated like a patrician Tesco for individuals who wouldn’t countenance the fluorescent lighting and freezer sections of Britain’s normal supermarkets – these Warburtons, Heinz and Viennetta meccas.
In 2025 I discover one thing moderately completely different in Harrods Meals Halls. It is a Disneyland for vacationers; American accents swirl across the pomegranate counter. I look about – why is it so busy on a Monday? Not everybody right here will be reporting on London’s costliest shallots. It was AA Gill in 2013 who known as this place an “edible Madame Tussauds”, and he was proper. If Harrods ever operated as an actual grocery retailer, it’s all potemkin now.
I discover 33 lobster rolls, lined up with the care and precision of the King’s troopers at Trooping the Color, £18 a go. Your cat may like these. And as for the “topped carrots” at £6.40 every (every!) – nicely, I’m positive Flicka the palomino wouldn’t sniff twice. However it is a relic. Head out of Knightsbridge and also you shortly be taught that there are such a lot of extra vectors for wealth than malls, irrespective of how a lot they dominated the twentieth century. Harrods’ hegemony among the many rich epicure is gone, as boutique luxurious supermarkets invade the leafiest postcodes.
Enterprise to W11. “Grocery store of Goals” caters to the Holland Park set as of late. It’s a small room, so small actually that the pasta, chocolate, tinned sardines, chilli oil, espresso, cannellini beans, crackers, apple cider vinegar and raspberry jam are in the identical cupboard. The road between dream and nightmare is skinny. The chickens, I be taught, have been consumed a balanced cereal-based weight loss plan, thank goodness. In the meantime, the bottarga di muggine (a fist-sized, cured mullet roe pouch) goes for £19.95. No, after you. I insist!
In 1997 Bayley & Sage first opened its doorways in Wimbledon, but it surely was solely in recent times the idea actually took flight. A brand new department on Hampstead Excessive Avenue seems to be remarkably like a grocery retailer, however I do know a museum exhibition once I see one. Every show comes bearing an explanatory label, as if you might be parsing a Monet on the Nationwide Gallery. I be taught that Comté is constructed from the milk of Montbéliarde or Simmental cows. On the saucisson exhibit I be taught this cured sausage is the product of Roman and Gallic built-in preservation methods.
However what I be taught most of all is that none of that is actually about meals. Or, it’s actually not about cooking. As a result of at Harrods I had tried to assemble the substances for a bolognese, however was thwarted by the truth that they don’t promote tomatoes, tinned or in any other case. At Bayley & Sage I encounter “parmesan and basil salt” for £10 – which anybody who can cook dinner will let you know is functionally ineffective for making something aside from piles of parmesan and basil salt.
And so, if it’s not about meals then I ponder what all this consumption is a symptom of. In downwardly cell Britain, it’s changing into more durable for the higher center to sign standing. The costly cheese, the fish, the lectures in historic meat curation: it’s all a means of claiming, “Hey – I’m nonetheless within the recreation.” Even when that recreation is 20 bucks on cured fish or bresaola for the canine. London’s wealth has moved to Zone 2, we all know that a lot. And maybe it simply doesn’t stretch to date as of late.
[Further reading: What we can learn from Beaujolais nouveau]