British food is reactionary now

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Illustration by Arne Hoepfner
I am eating lunch in the Yellow Bittern on London's Caledonian Road. It is co-owned by chef Hugh Corcoran, a Belfast man. And so, fittingly, we are eating soda bread and butter; and then we split an expensive pie, its crust made glistening by the butter-flour ratio.
It's a carefully staged restaurant: demure to the point of austere, with old-fashioned wooden chairs; there is a looming poster of Vladimir Lenin and a slightly friendlier photograph of Samuel Beckett. Downstairs is a bookshop – I see a copy of the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by AJP Taylor. Among his influences Corcoran counts Robespierre, the Sans-culottes and Keir Hardie. Yearning for the moral cleansing such a proletarian aesthetic might provide? Head to the Bittern.
And then look to the (frequently changing) menu: sausages and potatoes in broth, turbo-charged Hibernian peasant food; beef stews; the centuries-old classic, potted crab; apple pie, just like grandma used to make it.
The Bittern is on the sharp-end of 2025's reactionary swing against the culinary frippery of the 2010s: a decade symbolised by the so-called small-plates revolution; a single ravioli split between three in a Scandi-minimalist hole in the wall somewhere 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 could not penetrate, where pan-European liberalism survived in the form of seven padrón peppers.
In the identikit restaurants of Dalston they presented the customer with crudo and hispi cabbage; at home all of a sudden we started drinking Picpoul de Pinet, the cheap stuff barely a single quality marker up from Oyster Bay, but somehow it came bearing a patina of casual sophistication.
Well, now the culture is sending that vaguely fusion cabbage salad back to the kitchen. Here is pie, here is soda bread, here is a pork chop, here is full-fat unadulterated butter, and no I don't want my feta whipped and I certainly don't want my wine to be orange.
The Yellow Bittern might have taken this project to the very extreme, but this is not a one-man crusade against the poly-crisis of small plates and bad wine. At the Devonshire in Soho, run by Oisín Rogers, another son of Ireland, desserts trend to postwar nostalgia: bread and butter pudding, sticky toffee pudding, it gets no more modern than crème caramel. And your starter is invariably a prawn cocktail, last exotic in the 1980s, maybe? If you want something to come on a small plate, expect it to be explained to you under the more traditional parlance of 'a side'.
The restaurant's deserved popularity – in part thanks to the Guinness boom of 2024 – is proof of concept. When I visited, I had bread, cold white Burgundy, salty butter. 'What could be better!' I say, with immediate guilt, as I glance over to the kitchen and to the men sweating over a literal open flame to cook meat someone else reared, killed and butchered for me. But grill it and they will come: The Devonshire has worked out how Londoners want to eat in 2025.
Food and politics never move as perfect analogues. But if we are to extract some message from this volte-face in the dining landscape it is this: take us back, the consumer pleads. To an imagined past? Maybe. Or to somewhere else entirely? But the sense that something in the world has gone terribly wrong is there; the suspicion that all this miso-charred broccoli might have had something to do with it looms. Hence the turn towards meat and custard.
The restaurateur Raymond Blanc, with typical Gallic generosity, once described this island as the 'culinary dark hole of Europe'. And before the vaunted restaurant revolution of the Nineties, prefiguring New Labour by just a minute, who could challenge him? In the Seventies, British children were eating Angel Delight; their parents wondering if quiche Lorraine was the height of elegance. It was a decade in which salads were made with gelatin and set in plastic moulds; when cheese was only to be eaten on a stick.
We cannot divine everything about a national psyche by what the middle classes make for dinner. Ham and bananas hollandaise – instructions for which you will find in the 1973 recipe book Contemporary Cooking – is a psychotic episode on a plate, not a political argument. But food is still a keystone in the development of a national identity – go and tell an Italian that the secret ingredient to your ragù is ketchup and I'll arrange the funeral. It is also a loose weather vane for the political mood.
In the Seventies, Britain endured four prime ministers and four general elections, an oil crisis in '73, such profound industrial unrest to warrant the declaration of five states of emergency, property booms, a banking crisis and stagflation.
And so, yes, I will wager that a decade as fraught and fragmented as that might also be the one that serves salad preserved in aspic as the centrepiece of a dinner party. If food is a sensory reflection of the moment, then the moment sounded something like this: agghhhhh!
As London recovered from the downbeat Seventies, it took a while for the restaurant scene to catch up. Paris was still teaching the world how to eat. But good cooking crept in slowly and by the 1990s the demi-monde was eating sun-dried tomatoes and all of a sudden posh mums knew not only what Chardonnay was but that their preference was for the French stuff, not whatever the arrivistes in the New World managed to come up with.
As a decade, beset by the ambient presence of Marco Pierre White, it taught the British elite something simple: here was a new way to signal your belonging; screw Mozart and Veronese, gen up on the River Cafe and ricotta.
And so in London, as in New York City, the bourgeoisie were trading the trickier fine arts for the secretly low-brow universe of eating (basil oil, no matter how carefully considered, is not providing the same intellectual challenge for the consumer as Proust).
A proper critical framework emerged, and the rock star line-cooks headed for the television: MasterChef, 1990; Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea, 1995; Jamie Oliver's Naked Chef, 1999. In 1995 the veteran Delia Smith triggered a nationwide run on cranberries after she put them in duck rillettes. The Nineties were haunted not by the end of history, but another perennial question: what if we put pesto on that?
The collision of the new gastronomic landscape and the political moment was perhaps no better captured than in that picture of Tony Blair with his wife Cherie at the devastatingly fashionable Le Pont de la Tour with the Clintons in 1997. They ate ballotine – a kind of layered, stuffed poultry first associated with 19th century French cuisine, but really, this carnal swiss roll was a star of the Nineties kitchen.
These left-ish tribunes, now with Jamie Oliver emerging as their standard bearer, were winning. All their affinities for the continent were cropping up, not just at the hard-to-get tables, but even in your pantries. And it continued through the rest of the New Labour years; their affection for Chianti creeping into the home kitchen; neoliberalism with a Caprese salad; the Iraq War drizzled in balsamic glaze.
The year 2025 is gripped by something closer to a reactionary nostalgia. The Yellow Bittern and the comparatively more accomplished Devonshire are not sole-traders in the shift toward the traditional – their culinary ancestors at the Quality Chop House and the St John have been making similar arguments for years. Copycat menus of the Devonshire are cropping up; Ashton's in Dublin offers a near-perfect replica.
This is all part of a natural culinary evolution. Brexit deflated the elite vision of Britain as somewhere with endless capacity for cosmopolitanism and reawakened a belief in the proud meat-and-two-veg nation. Even if it is all served to bourgeois executives under a Potemkin trad aesthetic.
But this is not an instinct reserved for the restaurant-goer. Just look to the redemptive arc of our most ancient foodstuff: butter. Since the Eighties, the public health commissars across the Anglosphere were committed to a simple message: saturated fat was killing you.
In Ireland, the dairy farming class exported cream and butter but bought hydrogenated vegetable oil for their own kitchen tables; pale and insipid margarine filled supermarket shelves; low-fat yogurts and semi-skimmed milk landed on breakfast spreads. The idea was fully realised by the 2000s when Special K told you to eschew fat and eat cereal.
Restaurants never gave up on the stuff: any chef will tell you the secret to good cooking is knowing how much butter to use, and having the confidence to use it. But a counter-revolution was brewing for the consumer too, whose lives existed far from the Michelin Guide. By 2014, Time magazine staged an intervention with a cover story beseeching the world to 'Eat Butter'.
The experiment was a failure, it argued; we cut saturated fat, people only got sicker. And butter's redemption was in motion, no matter that it continued to run counter to British health advice. Finally, by 2025, the grip of the low-fat regime is loosening: demand for butter and whole milk is recapturing ground in the United Kingdom, once stolen by their margarine and skimmed counterparts. One raffish young chef, Thomas Straker, found viral fame (and possibly a restaurant empire) with an extended series about the stuff.
It stands as a slippery, greasy, yellow shorthand for the Great British Nostalgia Drive: a nation yearning for a custardy past, where Irish peasant food is served to counter-signalling elites on the Caledonian Road; where the very-modern anxiety about saturated fat is discarded for ancient wisdom. It is almost as if Britain looked in the mirror and said 'quite enough modernity, thank you!'
[See also: We should be eating oily fish – but what's the catch?]
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