I’m consuming lunch within the Yellow Bittern on London’s Caledonian Street. It’s co-owned by chef Hugh Corcoran, a Belfast man. And so, fittingly, we’re consuming soda bread and butter; after which we cut up an costly pie, its crust made glistening by the butter-flour ratio.
It’s a fastidiously staged restaurant: demure to the purpose of austere, with old school wood chairs; there’s a looming poster of Vladimir Lenin and a barely friendlier {photograph} of Samuel Beckett. Downstairs is a bookshop – I see a replica of the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by AJP Taylor. Amongst his influences Corcoran counts Robespierre, the Sans-culottes and Keir Hardie. Craving for the ethical cleaning such a proletarian aesthetic would possibly present? Head to the Bittern.
After which look to the (often altering) menu: sausages and potatoes in broth, turbo-charged Hibernian peasant meals; beef stews; the centuries-old basic, potted crab; apple pie, identical to grandma used to make it.
The Bittern is on the sharp-end of 2025’s reactionary swing towards the culinary frippery of the 2010s: a decade symbolised by the so-called small-plates revolution; a single ravioli cut up between three in a Scandi-minimalist gap within the wall someplace in E8; when the wine was cloudy and the vibes set by the super-restaurateur Richard Caring. This was a culinary universe that the spirit of Brexit couldn’t penetrate, the place pan-European liberalism survived within the type of seven padrón peppers.
Within the identikit eating places of Dalston they offered the shopper with crudo and hispi cabbage; at residence swiftly we began consuming Picpoul de Pinet, a budget stuff barely a single high quality marker up from Oyster Bay, however in some way it got here bearing a patina of informal sophistication.
Nicely, now the tradition is sending that vaguely fusion cabbage salad again to the kitchen. Right here is pie, right here is soda bread, here’s a pork chop, right here is full-fat unadulterated butter, and no I don’t need my feta whipped and I definitely don’t need my wine to be orange.
The Yellow Bittern may need taken this venture to the very excessive, however this isn’t a one-man campaign towards the poly-crisis of small plates and dangerous wine. On the Devonshire in Soho, run by Oisín Rogers, one other son of Eire, desserts development to postwar nostalgia: bread and butter pudding, sticky toffee pudding, it will get no extra trendy than crème caramel. And your starter is invariably a prawn cocktail, final unique within the Nineteen Eighties, perhaps? If you would like one thing to come back on a small plate, count on it to be defined to you underneath the extra conventional parlance of “a aspect”.
The restaurant’s deserved recognition – partly due to the Guinness growth of 2024 – is proof of idea. Once I visited, I had bread, chilly white Burgundy, salty butter. “What might be higher!” I say, with fast guilt, as I look over to the kitchen and to the boys sweating over a literal open flame to prepare dinner meat another person reared, killed and butchered for me. However grill it and they’ll come: The Devonshire has labored out how Londoners wish to eat in 2025.
Meals and politics by no means transfer as good analogues. But when we’re to extract some message from this volte-face within the eating panorama it’s this: take us again, the buyer pleads. To an imagined previous? Possibly. Or to some place else totally? However the sense that one thing on the earth has gone terribly unsuitable is there; the suspicion that every one this miso-charred broccoli may need had one thing to do with it looms. Therefore the flip in direction of meat and custard.
The restaurateur Raymond Blanc, with typical Gallic generosity, as soon as described this island because the “culinary darkish gap of Europe”. And earlier than the vaunted restaurant revolution of the Nineties, prefiguring New Labour by only a minute, who might problem him? Within the Seventies, British youngsters have been consuming Angel Delight; their dad and mom questioning if quiche Lorraine was the peak of magnificence. It was a decade wherein salads have been made with gelatin and set in plastic moulds; when cheese was solely to be eaten on a stick.
We can’t divine every little thing a few nationwide psyche by what the center courses make for dinner. Ham and bananas hollandaise – directions for which one can find within the 1973 recipe ebook Up to date Cooking – is a psychotic episode on a plate, not a political argument. However meals remains to be a keystone within the growth of a nationwide identification – go and inform an Italian that the key ingredient to your ragù is ketchup and I’ll prepare the funeral. It is usually a free climate vane for the political temper.
Within the Seventies, Britain endured 4 prime ministers and 4 normal elections, an oil disaster in ’73, such profound industrial unrest to warrant the declaration of 5 states of emergency, property booms, a banking disaster and stagflation.
And so, sure, I’ll wager {that a} decade as fraught and fragmented as which may even be the one which serves salad preserved in aspic because the centrepiece of a cocktail party. If meals is a sensory reflection of the second, then the second sounded one thing like this: agghhhhh!
As London recovered from the downbeat Seventies, it took some time for the restaurant scene to catch up. Paris was nonetheless instructing the world the best way to eat. However good cooking crept in slowly and by the Nineties the demi-monde was consuming sun-dried tomatoes and swiftly posh mums knew not solely what Chardonnay was however that their choice was for the French stuff, not regardless of the arrivistes within the New World managed to give you.
As a decade, beset by the ambient presence of Marco Pierre White, it taught the British elite one thing easy: right here was a brand new option to sign your belonging; screw Mozart and Veronese, gen up on the River Cafe and ricotta.
And so in London, as in New York Metropolis, the bourgeoisie have been buying and selling the trickier nice arts for the secretly low-brow universe of consuming (basil oil, regardless of how fastidiously thought-about, isn’t offering the identical mental problem for the buyer as Proust).
A correct vital framework emerged, and the rock star line-cooks headed for the tv: MasterChef, 1990; Rick Stein’s Style of the Sea, 1995; Jamie Oliver’s Bare Chef, 1999. In 1995 the veteran Delia Smith triggered a nationwide run on cranberries after she put them in duck rillettes. The Nineties have been haunted not by the top of historical past, however one other perennial query: what if we put pesto on that?
The collision of the brand new gastronomic panorama and the political second was maybe no higher captured than in that image of Tony Blair along with his spouse Cherie on the devastatingly modern Le Pont de la Tour with the Clintons in 1997. They ate ballotine – a form of layered, stuffed poultry first related to nineteenth century French delicacies, however actually, this carnal swiss roll was a star of the Nineties kitchen.
These left-ish tribunes, now with Jamie Oliver rising as their normal bearer, have been profitable. All their affinities for the continent have been cropping up, not simply on the hard-to-get tables, however even in your pantries. And it continued by means of the remainder of the New Labour years; their affection for Chianti creeping into the house kitchen; neoliberalism with a Caprese salad; the Iraq Battle drizzled in balsamic glaze.
The 12 months 2025 is gripped by one thing nearer to a reactionary nostalgia. The Yellow Bittern and the comparatively extra achieved Devonshire will not be sole-traders within the shift towards the normal – their culinary ancestors on the High quality Chop Home and the St John have been making comparable arguments for years. Copycat menus of the Devonshire are cropping up; Ashton’s in Dublin gives a near-perfect reproduction.
That is all a part of a pure culinary evolution. Brexit deflated the elite imaginative and prescient of Britain as someplace with infinite capability for cosmopolitanism and reawakened a perception within the proud meat-and-two-veg nation. Even when it’s all served to bourgeois executives underneath a Potemkin trad aesthetic.
However this isn’t an intuition reserved for the restaurant-goer. Simply look to the redemptive arc of our most historic foodstuff: butter. For the reason that Eighties, the general public well being commissars throughout the Anglosphere have been dedicated to a easy message: saturated fats was killing you.
In Eire, the dairy farming class exported cream and butter however purchased hydrogenated vegetable oil for their very own kitchen tables; pale and insipid margarine crammed grocery store cabinets; low-fat yogurts and semi-skimmed milk landed on breakfast spreads. The thought was absolutely realised by the 2000s when Particular Ok instructed you to eschew fats and eat cereal.
Eating places by no means gave up on the stuff: any chef will inform you the key to good cooking is understanding how a lot butter to make use of, and having the boldness to make use of it. However a counter-revolution was brewing for the buyer too, whose lives existed removed from the Michelin Information. By 2014, Time journal staged an intervention with a canopy story beseeching the world to “Eat Butter”.
The experiment was a failure, it argued; we reduce saturated fats, individuals solely bought sicker. And butter’s redemption was in movement, regardless of that it continued to run counter to British well being recommendation. Lastly, by 2025, the grip of the low-fat regime is loosening: demand for butter and entire milk is recapturing floor in the UK, as soon as stolen by their margarine and skimmed counterparts. One raffish younger chef, Thomas Straker, discovered viral fame (and probably a restaurant empire) with an prolonged sequence concerning the stuff.
It stands as a slippery, greasy, yellow shorthand for the Nice British Nostalgia Drive: a nation craving for a custardy previous, the place Irish peasant meals is served to counter-signalling elites on the Caledonian Street; the place the very-modern nervousness about saturated fats is discarded for historic knowledge. It’s nearly as if Britain regarded within the mirror and mentioned “fairly sufficient modernity, thanks!”
[See also: We should be eating oily fish – but what’s the catch?]