Smashed: The real reason The Yellow Bittern became a media storm

Just what you need, more words about chef Hugh Corcoran and his bloody restaurant

It was all yellow Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I first tasted soy milk in the early 80s. My next-door bedsit neighbour was Maggie, my best friend Bill’s sister. She was the first vegan I ever knew and she always made tea with soy milk. It was horrible, but she was nice. She was very committed to veganism and was generally forward-thinking and progressive. She later became a playwright although I am ashamed to say I have yet to see any of her work. She did, however, have an Achilles heel that undermined her standing as an ideological paragon - she refused to wear anything other than leather shoes. Animals have rights except when it comes to sufficiently fashionable footwear.

Chef Hugh Corcoran of the now notorious The Yellow Bittern restaurant and bookshop in Kings Cross is ‘a lifelong communist’ (I’m quoting Jay Rayner) but, similar to my friend Maggie the vegan who wore leather shoes, he’s a communist who runs a capitalist business. Oddly, that paradox has not been picked up in the recent media coverage of the restaurant. What has irked journalists far more is that commie bastard or not, Corcoran is a restaurateur that would like to make a decent profit from his business.

To make things worse, Corcoran had the damned cheek not to be humble about his desire to fill up his communist cash register, something he expressed with vigour in an Instagram post on 30 October. ‘When you come to a restaurant, it is expected that you are there to eat and drink with some sort of abandon. . . .Restaurants are not public benches, you are there to spend some money. 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 than a table at a restaurant.’

It’s difficult not to read the post and think that Corcoran might be somewhat entitled - one of his business partners is Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal (née Armstrong-Jones, daughter of the late Lord Snowden) - and perhaps a little deluded. He is after all expecting to fill his 18-seat lunch-only restaurant at the wrong end of the Caledonian Road Monday to Friday with punters willing to drop £100 a head on rustic dishes like Irish coddle, and wine chosen for them based only on a price point and their likes and dislikes.

Corcoran obviously wants The Yellow Bittern to be a different experience from most other London restaurants with more human interaction than diners have become used to. You can only book by phone or postcard (no, really), you can only pay by cold hard cash (you know, the kind that communists really like) and you have to have a conversation about wine and not just point to a bottle on a list because there isn’t a list to point to. Depending on your viewpoint, that’s either charmingly eccentric or palpably elitist. And what happens if you don’t like the taste of a wine chosen for you rather than specifically ordered by you? Can you send it back? It seems to be adding a needless element of risk and uncertainty to what should be a simple and enjoyable part of dining out, purely for the sake of being different.

Do we owe Hugh a living? Of course we do, of course we do, of course we fucking do.

Mike Daw in The Standard was positively seething about all those arch pretensions. Under the headline, ‘The Yellow Bittern's Hugh Corcoran would do well to remember the world doesn't owe him a living’, Daw wrote: ‘London seems to have been given an 18-seat piece of performance art within which diners are unsuspecting subjects of a dining diktat delivered with all the fiscal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge.’

While Daw’s piece debates the finer points of The Yellow Bittern’s concept (I’m sure that’s the last word Corcoran would use about his restaurant), the Bittern’s provocative peculiarities are mostly irrelevant to why the media has run with the story. British newspapers know that their readers suspect all chefs and restaurateurs to be charlatans who spend all their time dreaming up new ways in which to rip off their customers and they just love to have their prejudices reinforced.

The suspicion is based on a deep-seated cultural rejection of the idea of food-as-pleasure. Food never has been and never will be central to the British way of life in the way that it is in Italy, France and Spain. There are numerous reasons for that but one factor, recently pointed out to me by cook and food writer Valentine Warner is that there are no truly remote areas in the UK. There is therefore no real need for people to rely on what is available to eat around them or for them to protect and cherish those resources in the way that happens in rural areas of mainland Europe.

Food production in the UK is mostly industrialised and depersonalised and its ingestion, for many, is merely a chore. How often have you heard someone say they consider food as ‘fuel’? Therefore, the idea that you might spend more than £5 and 15 minutes on lunch during the working week is sheer foppery and should be punished by public ridicule. The British media have been more than happy to oblige.

There have been Yellow Bittern stories in The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Independent among many other papers (The Week has a good overview of the coverage), although The Sun’s headline ‘'TONE DEAF' Top chef sparks fury as he slams ‘cheap’ diners who split dishes & ask for tap water… and demands they ‘order correctly’’ is my favourite. But Hilary Rose of The Times encapsulated the Brit’s parsimonious attitude to restaurant dining the best in her opinion piece ‘The long weekday lunch is dead — it’s time restaurants caught up’ where she wrote: ‘What I find shocking is that four people might go out for a weekday lunch at all, let alone order main courses. How do you find the time, and the money? What does your boss think? I haven’t been out for a weekday restaurant lunch in decades, and even when I go out for dinner, I never have a main course’. Fuck me, she sounds like a fun date. I must drop her a line next time I’m planning a blowout at The Ritz.

The Yellow Bittern is just one in a long line of restaurant-related press faux-outrages. Who could forget ‘Tom Kerridge defends price of £87 steak at his two Michelin-starred pub’ (The Daily Mail), ‘Tom Kerridge's 'tourist trap' fish and chips in Harrods is slammed by disappointed customer whose £70 meal included 'food leaking water' (The Daily Mail) or ‘Tom Kerridge blasted for charging £19.50 for a jacket potato at his posh pub’ (The Daily Mail). What is it about Tom Kerridge and The Daily Mail? He’s not even a communist.

You will find similar scaremongering stories about plumbers and car mechanics in the press, but they tend to be one-offs. A single story doesn’t tend to get picked up by other papers in the way that restaurant-related items often do. That’s because plumbing and car mechanics are viewed as real jobs, something that most people need to pay for; those overcharging for their services are viewed as rogue operators and not indicative of an inherent problem with the trade.

But anyone can cook their own tea, so paying for a chef to do a domestic chore can never be a legitimate expense and will always be seen as frivolous at best or a grudge spend at worst in the eyes of, well, people who read The Sun and The Mail. If McDonald’s can sell a burger for £1.19 why is that non-communist Tom Kerridge charging £19.95 for one (‘Tom Kerridge slammed over new eight inch-tall burger inspired by popular 70s cartoon’. The Daily Mail)?

The Yellow Bittern (named after the Thomas MacDonagh poem about the marsh bird that the Irish poet and playwright saw as ‘shy and apart’) has amassed so many column inches with its £6 slices of soda bread and £40 pies that I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and Tom Kerridge to announce the opening of The Blue Tit. The intimate ‘Irish-inspired’ Dalston bistro, will take bookings via morse code, semaphore or carrier pigeon only, it will only accept payment in guineas, the wine list will be communicated via the performance of traditional Irish dances and customers will indicate their choices by beating out rhythms on a bodhran which they will be required to learn in advance of their booking. The menu will consist entirely of boiled potatoes priced between £35 and £75 depending on uncooked weight. Customers will not be able to choose which potato they get. If that doesn’t put him back on top of the restaurant clickbait league, nothing will.

There’s a mask you’re wearing

I have to admit that, at first I was highly irritated by what I read about The Yellow Bittern. It seemed to run counter to everything that is good about British hospitality when done well. But sympathetic articles by Ed Cummings (‘Customers in restaurants are constantly wrong – owners are right to fight back’ and Jonathan Nunn in Vittles (a particularly thoughtful and nuanced piece) made me go back to read Corcoran’s original Instagram posts in full. I realised that he is a man very much after my own heart. ‘At the very least, order correctly, drink some wine, and justify your presence in the room that afternoon. . . .This justification of one’s presence is something which I have always been acutely conscious of whether it be a docker’s bar in Belfast or a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Basque Country.’

When I go to a restaurant, I want to try as much of what’s on offer as possible, otherwise, what’s the point? I take an almost hobbyist approach to dining out, which I imagine most readers of Smashed will share, but many Mail/Sun readers may not. Nine times out of ten I will have planned the visit, looked at the menu and wine list in some detail in advance and will be keen to find out if the place lives up to expectations. The idea of not ordering a starter is an absurdity. Desserts are only skipped if the restaurant has been too generous with other courses, and then I reckon that’s on them.

Corcoran continues: ‘An atmosphere of conviviality and abandon to the pleasures of food and drink. This is what I encourage. Not the timid and meagre approach to the table, but one of joy and celebration. Yes, I will have pudding. And a chartreuse too!’
I’m not sure about the chartreuse but I’m with him all the way otherwise.

I’m not a raucous, roaring drunk, life-of-the-party kind of character but when I do manage to leave the house to eat out, I do my best to turn up on time (full disclosure: I was fifteen minutes late for dinner at Long Chim last night because I was boozing at St John with a friend, but that doesn’t make the above untrue), be polite, not mess the front of house team around too much (there are a couple of people I see about once a year for dinner and every time we yak so much the server has to come back to the table three times before we are ready or order. I am so sorry), order all the good stuff, enjoy it and leave without having made too much of a mess.

Corcoran talks about tables being ‘worth serving’. That might sound a tad cynical, but if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant or run your own supper club (I’ve done both) you’ll understand completely what he means; it is very hard work. He mentions ‘the effort of dressing the table, of picking and arranging the flowers, of polishing the glasses etc and reserve the table for 2 hours for someone to order a meal which ends up costing £25 a head. It’s not worth us opening. We can either jack up the prices, punishing everyone else for those who don’t play by the rules, or simply not have our types of tiny, family-run restaurants anymore.’

No other business on the planet would be expected to operate at a loss but for some reason we (and when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘they’) are unwilling to make the mental leap that cooking in a commercial environment is nothing like cooking at home and that frying an £87 steak or baking a £40 pie is as much about turning a profit as making people feel good. Not everyone can afford a £40 pie, just as not everyone can afford a £363,000 Ferrari. The difference is that most people accept that Ferraris cost £363,000 and that they’ll probably never own one. Except if you’re a communist I suppose.