#IR1: Fully Undefined Luxury Commumemeism

Welcome to the first edition of In Review

Royal Housewives of Clapton/Yardsale Pizza

This took a little longer than planned.

When announcing In Review back in September, I wrote that the growth in independent food media over the past few years had been a double-edged sword. It has brought great work; it has brought into focus the gaps in the media that preceded it.

In that time, I wrote an end-of-year essay for Art Review that connected the rise of a certain sector of independent (food) media, largely on TikTok and Instagram, to the rise to prominence of chefs and restaurants that trade in what I have tentatively called “no-place” cuisine. These chefs and places, and the online tastemakers that gas them up, aestheticise context and politics out of view in favour of what critics praise as “aspirational deliciousness.” I like the essay and it has been germane to how I want to use this section of In Digestion; it also made clear that there was no better time to start a fresh section not at the end of one year, but at the start of another.

The remit will be largely U.K. criticism, but there will be guest appearances from other countries, as well as incursions from food discourse outside the restaurant review space.

In Review is going to become the paid subscriber portion of In Digestion, but the introduction and first piece of the week will always be above the paywall. This first edition is free.

If you are an existing paid subscriber who signed up due to the interviews, and don’t find this appealing, that’s all good. Please get in touch and I will sort you out.

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Tim Hayward | The Financial Times

Il Gattopardo, London (Zone 1)

Hayward ends his first review of 2024 with a meditation on Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal film L’Avventura, which is only a couple of paragraphs after the point that the review gets interesting. This isn’t a slight on the critic this time; Il Gattopardo sounds utterly comatose. He asserts that a critique of the film — which is part of a trilogy on “modernity and its discontents” that also includes La Notte and L’Eclise — might be that it is style over content, and suggests that this new restaurant could be taken in that spirit. In order to take it in that spirit, a person intending to leave sated would have to spend around £50 per person before drinks and service. L’Avventura is on BFI Player, which is £4.99 per month.

This concluding remark is occasioned by Hayward saying that the specificity of the PR for Il Gattopardo drew him in to reviewing it, with a heartening admission of self-awareness at the way this all works. He is disappointed to find not the visions of 1960s Siciliana promised, but the neatly summarised “undifferentiated international hi-luxe” that pervades vast swathes of central London real estate, particularly in Mayfair and particularly in a new suite of luxury hotel and department store openings that treat famous chefs and the cuisines they cook from like little collectibles. Il Gattopardo gestures at specificity with style, but the content simply isn’t there.

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After the paywall:

• How a rave review reveals a key tension in London restaurants

• Around the papers, in a quiet week to start 2024

• Why meme accounts ended up selling you pizzas

There is no paywall for this edition — this is just to show how future editions will be structured.

Jimi Famurewa | The Evening Standard

Donia, London (Zone 1)

Donia, the new restaurant from Florence Mae Maglanoc with support from Omar Shah, is high on my list to visit in 2024, and a five-star review isn’t going to bring them down that list. The duo’s Maginhawa Group is one of the more creative and exciting in London right now, and I think it is because they possess a keen understanding of the culinary hybridity — discussed in the excellent Vittles Review of 2023 (Part 1) — at the heart of what makes London the food city that it is.

A rave is well suited to Jimi Famurewa’s propulsive style, stacked with adjectives and adverbs that pile up on each other, but there was a paragraph that caught my eye:

Yes, there are flashes of modernising, technical pizazz, here and there — as with the finely weighted, vigorously vinegared sauce beneath grilled chicken inasal or the bronzed, pithivier-like geometry (and thrilling, chilli-flecked interior) of lamb shoulder caldereta pie. But for the most part, the Maginhawa team bet on rigorous simplicity and faithfulness to tradition. They bet, absolutely correctly, that pairing Filipino cuisine’s flavour principles — a relentless melding of south-east Asian, Chinese, Spanish and American culinary influences — with careful British sourcing makes for a downright unstoppable combination.

This is more praise, but it illustrates a continuing problem in the papers that I hope to see evolve in 2024: discussions of hybridity are still shackled by the kind of language seen in press releases for Soho restaurants (of which Donia is one) which use the culinary culture of a place that isn’t the U.K. (of which Donia is one) alongside British ingredients (of which Donia is one.) But Donia isn’t like those identikit places at all, and some of the word choices — is making a good sauce really “modernising,” and if it is, what is it modernising; if British sourcing is “careful,” which sourcing is careless — betray an unease at moving beyond category distinctions which can be more shackling than faithful.

Elsewhere…

• Charlotte Ivers atones for a miserably reductive preamble to Cambridge’s restaurants with some praise for Lake Road Kitchen, near Ambleside.

• Grace Dent returns from a very brief stint Down Under to praise Cookdaily’s latest incarnation in Shoreditch (Zone 1.)

• Jay Rayner greets January with a classic of British criticism: it’s grey and cold here, so go to a restaurant from a hot place! Gordo’s in Guildford impresses.

• Tom Parker-Bowles returns to the “how close can I stay to my house” beat and finds Faber in Hammersmith (Zone 2.)

• William Sitwell is in Edinburgh, at eòrna, and yes, he gets annoyed about the accent.

• Giles Coren’s patented, irrelevant intro-ramble to Wild at Bull in the Cotswolds is this week about the end of his run on BBC TV visiting luxury hotels, but fails to mention how publicly celebrating the death of journalist Dawn Foster might be a contributing factor.

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The Digestif

Royal Housewives of Clapton, Socks House Meeting, and their meme-peddling peers were always going to hit an inflection point where it became more appealing to sell Perelló olives than to talk about how so many Perelló olives are being sold.

In the first week of 2024, the former announced a collaboration with east London pizza chain Yard Sale, while the latter was presented in Tatler as a talking head on Saltburn, the narratively incoherent, remedially provocative film whose critics reserve the most ire for some mildly anachronistic music. The pizza collab naturally features those Perelló olives, but that’s about as far as it goes as a touchpoint for RHoC’s content, aside from an optional “sprinkle” of crushed up Torres truffle crisps.

Both accounts set their stall on creating a reproducible internet vernacular out of a real-world aesthetic. For the uninitiated, RHoC is a bit more generally geared towards a rotating set of snacks (olives) wine (natural) dogs (sighthounds, anxious) transport (Lime bikes which sometimes do DJ sets) and shoes (Salomons, goretex maybe.) Socks House Meeting goes a step further, and attempts to parse social groups into hyperlocal, hyper-differentiated types based on a made up language of litty lengy gorlies, and other individuals. In the course of writing this, I’ve also learned that it blocks people who even mildly criticise it. Both accounts are also anonymous, for reasons of mystery.

Their memes are fun, funny, and do, at their best, skewer the cultural homogeneity that can coalesce around taste in a way about which this country’s restaurant critics, on the whole, can only dream. But their elevation to becoming powerful cultural phenomena themselves is more concerning. As I discussed in a review of 2023, “in satirising such a small but powerful demographic, while making money on collabs with the brands they mock, [they] present a flatter version of the city than the screens on which they exist.” The accounts offer nothing on why these types exist, are so prevalent, and are so lucrative, and this is fine — they are making memes. But if they are to become more powerful, it will no longer be enough to simply aestheticise the politics of their satire out of frame.

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