Not long ago, I absent-mindedly ordered chicken in a famous seafood restaurant. The waiter made a disapproving comment. “Well, it’s on the menu,” I replied. My dining companion informed me that it was only really there for people who could not eat fish. But, having made my choice, I dug my heels in.
Top-end restaurant proprietors and their passionate and well-trained staff are perhaps the last group of high street retailers to hold out against the saying that the customer is always right. Certainly, that is true in the case of Hugh Corcoran, chef and co-owner of the new Yellow Bittern restaurant in Islington, north London.
After becoming incensed at the number of diners who don’t want wine, who ask for free tap water and then only order a starter, Corcoran really went off on one on social media earlier this week.
“It is now apparently completely normal to book a table for four people, say, and then order one starter and two mains to share and a glass of tap water. There was at one point an etiquette in restaurants that if you booked a table in a nice place, you at the very least had to order a main course (and possibly even a starter or dessert) and drink wine in order for your table to be worth serving,” he wrote.
“At the very least order correctly, drink some wine, and justify your presence in the room. And in the case that a plate of radishes is enough for you and your three friends for lunch, then perhaps an allotment would be a better investment.”
He also noted: “Restaurants are not public benches… you are there to spend money.”
He probably should not have said the quiet part out loud like that, but as it happens he is a man after my own heart. For many years it was part of my duties as a political editor to go to lunch at nice restaurants with senior politicians (tough job, someone’s got to do it).
And there is no doubt that the best contacts were made among those who ordered with gusto. In the old days, many MPs cleared space in their diaries for “a proper lunch”. I recall asking one Labour MP if he fancied a drink and getting the reply: “I’ve got my car outside, so I better not. Let’s just stick to wine.”
Of the modern MPs, very few embrace this cavalier spirit. Naturally Nigel Farage is a leading exponent of the proper lunch. Back when I worked as his spin doctor, a decade or so ago, I recall thinking that his ability to come out of a three-hour fine dining experience and then immediately be word-perfect in a radio studio was almost supernatural.
Going back further, Winston Churchill was one of the great bon-viveurs, known for insisting upon a multi-course lunch accompanied by an imperial pint of Champagne. It didn’t seem to dull his leadership qualities too much.
Politics is my bag, but theatreland is also replete with stories of actors who ate and drank heroically and yet then delivered pitch-perfect performances to packed houses.
In the media, one old Fleet Street editor was notorious for announcing after a difficult board meeting that he was heading out to an expensive restaurant to “fine the company”.
Unfortunately for Mr Corcoran, the demands of the modern workplace do not allow many in mid-career to live like medieval lords. Long ago, the proper lunch was ousted by the work-dominated “power lunch” and then, dismally, by a sandwich at the desk.
Corcoran sounds like a proper eccentric, only accepting payment in cash and only taking bookings over the telephone or “by postcard” rather than online.
Perhaps the biggest mistake he made was to set up in Islington, the British Ground Zero for tee-total beanpole vegetarians.
Out in the sticks, far away from zone one London, we tend still to approach restaurant lunches with that lost spirit of panache that he craves. A proper one is, for most us, an every-once-in-a-while delight rather than a weekly habit.
But what a way to spend a late autumn afternoon.
By the way, my name may have been mud in the kitchen when I ordered chicken but it was very tasty. I wouldn’t order it again though given the higher-level deliciousness of my companion’s fish course. So this customer is happy to concede that taking direction from the house would have yielded a better outcome.
The Yellow Bittern meanwhile has started to wield a gravitational pull upon my psyche. “When you come to a restaurant, it is expected that you are there to eat and drink with some sort of abandon,” says Corcoran.
That really doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world.
