The restaurant year generally ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but a prolonged, flailing frenzy. Sudden closures and rush-released openings offer a mixed picture of a twitchy industry; dining rooms roar and throb with paper-hatted Christmas party inebriates, blundering into storage cupboards on the way to the loos; WhatsApp groups called things like ‘Festive Dinner’ become inadvertent performance art pieces about the futility of modern social planning. And in addition to all that, if this year is to be believed, there is an unlikely, last-gasp play for the title of hottest place in the country from, um, a pop-up hatch in Soho serving massive jacket potatoes clattered in cheesy baked beans.
If that last sentence sounds like an elaborate wind-up, then you are not alone. Reading about Spud Bros Express – a new, rabidly popular, London spin-off of a TikTok-famous Preston food cart run by a pair of droll, digitally savvy young siblings – I had the nagging sense that I was being punked. But, no. This temporary take away (open until February) is very real and truly is causing diners to form snaking, hour-long queues, all so they can sample the sort of thing that would have once been shovelled thoughtlessly into gobs amid the chlorinated waft and clinical lighting of a leisure centre cafe circa 1995.
I have not tried Spud Bros’ supposedly excellent, garlic butter-dribbled behemoths, which come strafed in crispy onions and weighed down by a compacted blob of fillings including tuna mayo and something called Tony’s Tram Chilli. Yet I think I can say with a degree of confidence that their success tells us as much about the current mania for dish virality, the allure of inexpensive, “authentic” stodge, and vlogger culture’s creep into virtually every aspect of modern life (the brand’s anarchic, self-aware TikTok account has more than three million followers), than any sort of culinary exceptionalism.
And it is this aspect of its emergence which most interests me. From one angle, food in 2024 was shaped by the supercharging capabilities of the digital world; by the scrum for Sandwich Sandwich’s precisely layered doorstoppers or a line of Edinburgh pastry obsessives waiting outside Lannan bakery for some hyped piece of limited run viennoisserie. But, from another angle, dining in the past 12 months has been about nostalgia, old-fangledness and a self-conscious rejection of internet age noise. Of analogue, Italian-American glamour, throwback pubs, new wave French bistros and the tussle between embracing the future and forcibly retreating from it. So the curious case of Spud Bros feels like a useful means to both look back and forward. For a gastronomic year to begin with scrums of people piling into dim-lit, analogue blockbusters like The Devonshire and The Dover, and then end with an internet-fuelled, deeply unserious hysteria over jacket potatoes feels, the more I think about it, sort of perfect.
Let us start with those exercises in nostalgia. The fact that, in January, arguably two of the most in-demand spots in the country were Oisin Rogers, Charlie Carroll and Ashley Palmer-Watts’ Anglo-Irish superpub and grill room, plus Martin Kuczmarski’s clubby, Instagram-averse ode to red sauce-coded Manhattan glitz (both opened in late 2023, for the record) is instructive. Both restaurants feature spaces where photography is discouraged or outright banned. Both take an avowedly retrograde culinary canon – steamed domes of beef cheek and Guinness suet pudding; a plate of glossy, hazelnut-studded, chocolate praline – and apply enough skill and detail to engender a kind of ineffable, twinkling magic. And both of them are, from The Dover’s handwritten reservations book to The Devonshire’s warm bulbs of complimentary bread, expressions of a collective desire to go back to a time when a restaurant’s “virality” was a matter for the food safety inspector.
There is, of course, an irony to the fact that these are exactly the sort of spaces that normally go on to break the internet. In this light, something like The Yellow Bittern – the cash-only, website-less restaurant that melted heads and became a sort of all-you-can-eat discourse buffet after its chef criticised diners for not spending enough – makes even more sense. Here was an establishment using Instagram and favourable online write-ups to make a great show of its technology-averse approach. Line up some of the year’s more obviously digitally conscious hits alongside it – the brilliant Roe in Canary Wharf, Medlock Canteen in Manchester, the fast-expanding Alley Cats (somewhat covertly owned by the same entity as Angus Steakhouse) – and it feels, despite the stark difference of methodology, that there is a uniting instinct. More than ever, restaurants in 2024 made a play for an aesthetic-conscious and chronically online public, caught between a desire for digital detox and active, doom-scrolling addiction.
So what does all this portend for next year? Well, I hope it doesn’t sound too bleak to say that it is likely to be more of the same under greater financial pressures. 'Survive until ’25' is a mantra across a lot of industries at the moment, and it feels especially applicable in hospitality. There will be abrupt closures, pivots and disappearances; there will be ambitious, big-name openings, left-field surprises and the glimmering prize of Jeremy King’s long-awaited reimagining of Simpson’s in the Strand. There will, I’m afraid, be more of those opportunist smashburger and boba places that seem to multiply like Gremlins.
But if I have a dream for next year then it is that we collectively learn to appreciate restaurants that sit in that middle-ground between shiny, box-fresh plaything and venerated, decades-old institution. One of my most deeply pleasurable recent meals involved a return visit to Rita’s: Gabriel Pryce and Missy Flynn’s three-year-old, Soho-set exploration of the cuisines and cocktails of the Americas. There was a jolting blue cheese-stuffed, jalapeño gilda, sharply roasted boats of pumpkin on an ethereal mole, and a pointedly unsmashed bistro burger, plump and dripping, beside the lord’s own skin-on fries. It was, long after the first rush of attention and excitement that greets a new opening, a study in confident, playful and electrically creative cooking and hospitality. Queues dwindle, internet fame evaporates and supersized, phone-eats-first dishes loses their lustre. I am crossing everything that 2025 will be the year for post-hype stability, and longer lasting culinary highs.
