The return of the boozy, leisurely lunch

There is a particular pleasure in scuttling off to the local dive with its carpeted loos and well-worn chairs.

Photo by David Hornback/Millennium Images

Behind London’s King’s Cross Station on the Caledonian Road lies the Yellow Bittern, a restaurant-cum-bookshop that opened this autumn. It has just three members of staff – Hugh Corcoran, the chef and face of the venture, and his co-owners, Oisín Davies and Frances Armstrong-Jones – seats 18 people and is only open for lunch, Monday to Friday. It has no website and no social media presence. Bookings can be made by phone, in person or – such is its founders’ abhorrence for the digital age – hand-written postcard. Only two timeslots are available to book: one at noon, the other at 2pm. The menu is chalked on a blackboard; the mains, at the time of writing, were just two, neither of which was vegetarian. There is no printed wine list (as the restaurant critic Jay Rayner notes, “it is all in Hugh’s head”), and it is cash-only.

Corcoran has deliberately positioned himself as a man who yearns for the warm glow of yesteryear. He longs for a resurgence of a 1980s type of “devil-may-care” attitude to life, he told Interview Magazine, aspiring to “a kind of alcoholism that just doesn’t really exist anymore”. A rubicund, corpulent man, Corcoran sees the “obsession with the body and health as a little fascist, ideologically”, and in his reading of British culture, “Nobody really wants to let go. They’re all worried about smoking.”

The Bittern’s ideology is to bring back the old lunches of lore; to be a portal to the halcyon days in which they were long, boozy and beefy, and came with a side of gout. Its bolshy concept – and bolshy chef – have attracted controversy as well as praise. Contradictions abound. Corcoran is a lifelong communist, but Armstrong-Jones is the daughter of the Earl of Snowdon, Princess Margaret’s first husband. In an Instagram post last month, Corcoran derided those who come to the restaurant but don’t eat or drink – in other words: spend – enough to “justify [their] presence”. Rayner lists its food offering as including “bricks of cloud-grey soda bread”, “dreary leek and potato soup, thick as wallpaper”, and a meaty broth that “cannot disguise the fact it’s two bought-in Cumberland sausages”. And though the Bittern hopes to revive an era when lunch was leisurely, you won’t be able to have the table for more than two hours.

It’s all a bit of a gastronomic Fawlty Towers. The Bittern is somewhat divorced from reality: less the classless utopia of Corcoran’s dreams (in his words, Marxism is “to do away with all classes and to become a little bit more free in your life”), more meritocratic wet dream. Because despite his objections that any member of the “organised working class” should be able to afford a £40-£100 bill at least once a month, that is simply unrealistic in today’s economic climate. Nor do most workplaces allow their staff enough slack to take a leisurely midweek lunch.

Obviously, those who can’t afford to go, won’t. Those who could but have very legitimate concerns about being slapped with a hefty bill for average food (though the Financial Times declared the Bittern a “special” place where a lunch “has rarely been so beautiful”, its Google rating is 2.8 stars) probably won’t either. This leaves the Bittern’s old-school lunches to be enjoyed (or endured) mostly by the elite.

Corcoran is not alone in his nostalgic vision of Britain’s culinary past. Condé Nast Traveller declared “going retro” the year’s biggest restaurant trend, with comforting classics including pea and ham hock soup, meat pies, knickerbocker glories and apple crumbles arriving on fine-dining menus. Yesterday’s snacks are back – Caramac and Top Deck bars have returned, and sales of Frazzles, the most 1970s of crisps, surged 48 per cent – and even the old-man boozer, with its fading patterned banquettes and crown-glass windows, is once again in vogue. Though pubs may be closing their doors at a saddening rate, of Time Out’s top ten pubs in London, more than half are the sort where one can get lost in the furniture. Whether it’s supping at Manchester’s Peveril of the Peak or Glasgow’s Star Bar, there is a particular pleasure – an oozing sort of comfort – in scuttling off to the local dive, with its carpeted loos and well-worn chairs, that isn’t purely derived from its sub-£7 pints.

Covid also played a part in the return of school-dinner comfort food. By moving in with parents, or by reverting to cooking dinners fit for an eight-year-old (sales of baked beans increased 69 per cent during the pandemic), many young people felt as though they had stepped off the golden escalator to adulthood and instead regressed to an old iteration of themselves.

Not only is the world a scary place, it is often a soulless one, too: austerity has taken its scythe and hacked away at beauty in the public sphere. Why have cast-iron benches replete with lions’ heads on the armrests when one can sit on planks of metal with bird spikes on? With modern, urban utilitarianism comes an erosion of character from our meeting spaces – and, increasingly, a realisation of what we’re missing. People’s willingness to indulge in guinea fowl stew and lock-ins with the locals is not in spite of the rough rusticism, it’s precisely because of it.

Whether the past was “better” is subjective and irrelevant. Romanticising history is part of the human condition, and The Yellow Bittern, old-man pubs and beans on toast four nights a week are all means to satisfy the nation’s craving for the past. And in a world where the average attention span is eight seconds, maybe a two-hour lunch doesn’t sound so bad.

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