#27 | Empty Dining Rooms
A review of 'Restaurants of London,' and some good links
Welcome back to the free edition of In Digestion — a weekly digest of the best food media on the web, and why you should care about it. This week’s main focus is a new series on London restaurants; the good links are at the end.
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In the last fortnight, critic Keith Lee, whose TikTok presence makes him one of the most genuinely powerful voices in the food world today, withdrew from a culinary tour of the Bay Area in the U.S.A. Lee largely explained his decision to post just three reviews from the area as the consequence of a hospital visit for an allergic reaction, but also said some of the places he visited simply weren’t up to muster.
Reactions have been varied. Bay Area restaurateurs are annoyed he didn’t just try their place; Bay Area newspapers are annoyed he didn’t just take their recommendations; Bay Area politicians are annoyed that he directly pointed out their inaction on homelessness and poverty. From a food media point-of-view, his experience speaks to the gap between the mythos of the critic / roaming gourmand as savant, the one true guide, and the infrastructure of research, stringers, background, and, ultimately, capital that allowed the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold to fully embody that mythos, even as both willingly and frequently sought to complicate that image.
This intrinsic difficulty of even attempting to communicate a city through restaurants is what ultimately fells Restaurants of London, a new show on Amazon Prime, produced by Planet Eat Media, which should have access to the infrastructure that enables good coverage. Hosted by Stephanie Brookes, a regular food journalist and critic on BBC Radio London, it bills itself as the first season of a series covering London’s restaurants:
London is home to some of the greatest dining experiences in the world and in this series, Stephanie gives you a glimpse of the very best Instagram'able, Iconic and celebrity drenched venues London has to offer.
The timbre of the series verges on advertorial, with close-ups lingering on branding, and Brookes walking through dining rooms and bars, stopping to peruse a menu or examine a piece of design. There’s a stiff directorial tone, with hard cuts between these interstitial arrivals and departures straight into interviews with a range of writers, critics, chefs, and restaurateurs. These guests aren’t given any billing whatsoever until the credits at the end of the episode, with Brookes occasionally referring to people by first name who haven’t been introduced to the audience at all.
This is particularly jarring during an otherwise datedly interesting discussion on social media with Life Kitchen author Ryan Riley, who is asked about his company — which creates cooking classes, meals, and ingredients for cancer patients — in a hurried 60 seconds that has no bearing on the discussion that preceded it. This blights the series, which treats the restaurants more like sets than subjects: interviews are conducted in otherwise empty dining rooms, and B-roll shows chefs cooking individual dishes for Brookes and her guest. There is no life in these places, and no attempt to ask what they contribute to London as a city. This pales in comparison to even the most insipid restaurant television; even the cursed professional kitchen round on Masterchef proffers the minimal bustle of a full room, offering a window into the energy, pressure, and atmosphere created service after service.
Restaurants of London clearly doesn’t believe that five episodes of thirty minutes each can effectively convey the breadth and depth of the city, but it also doesn’t even try to scratch the surface. The venues selected are Nobu and The Ivy; Wiltons; Quaglino’s and The Windmill; Sketch and Chameleon; and Inamo. The London metropolitan area covers just under 2,000 square miles; the longest distance between two restaurants in this series, as the crow flies, is 1.36 miles, between Nobu Park Lane and Chameleon, which is temporarily closed.
This wouldn’t be fatal if the show really got under the skin of these places, but the direction makes it impossible to do so. Aside from benign gossip about Princess Margaret at The Ivy and Riley saying that food Instagram can be elitist at times, there is nothing that even remotely gestures at how these restaurants interact with their own histories or mythologies in the present day, let alone with the city that they serve. What did it mean for The Ivy to become a chain? How does Nobu’s then-revolutionary approach to sushi change as imitators pop like ikura? Was Sketch itself surprised to get three stars? Why do the founders of Inamo, open 2008, think that it predated smartphones and tablets?
This looks like it’s about to change in the second half of the second episode, which revolves around Wiltons. Guest Parker-Bowles, who has previously been limited to discussing dry martinis and the price of dover sole he likely didn’t pay for, explains that you can use food as a “prism, through which you can see history, you can see society, you can see economics, you can see culture.” He’s just finished describing his journey from greedy child, to film PR, to food critic at Tatler magazine, which, in an aside, he says was “better than the Socialist Worker, with a name like mine.” Parker-Bowles goes on to explain how each restaurant is “a story of the owners,” stories which aren’t told in this series at all. He’s right that food is a prism; Restaurants of London is more of a window blind. And that name like his, which now makes him stepson to the King, son of the Queen Consort? Aside from the credits, it isn’t mentioned at all.
The Links
Jonathan Nunn focusses on Paris as a prism for Japanese food, and how its refractions change both city and cuisine, for Vittles.
Ellie Skrzat goes on a journey into VendTok for Taste.
Nick Johnstone, the wine recommender who will never taste the bottles he picks, for FT Magazine.
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