Contradictory Restaurant Confounds King's Cross
Gabriel Mullins, Culture Editor, BA History 09/12/2024
Just eleven-hundred metres from SOAS has opened The Yellow Bittern, yet another restaurant serving ‘uncomplicated’ food paired with incredibly complicated social signals.
The restaurant’s resident poet and chef-in-charge, Hugh Corcoran, aims to return the afternoon diner to an earlier time when one could, in his own words, ‘eat and drink with some sort of abandon.’ Corcoran, a devout communist and self-professed anti-imperialist, has published his own anthology of poetry and short stories. He has made a name for himself cooking in the Basque, in France, and at pop-ups around London. He runs the shop with his partner, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones (daughter of the Earl of Snowdon), and Oisín Davies, a curator and UCL graduate.
The Yellow Bittern attracted a flurry of media attention following its opening in October, with critics generally split into two camps; the first made up of those full of praise for its diligent ‘Modern Irish’ menu and its owners’ ‘refreshingly subversive’ attitude. In the second are all those bemused or enraged by Corcoran’s bolshiness, his highly curated austerity, and the chef’s decision to serve incredibly simple food; to the point at which it was described by the Observer’s Jay Rayner as leaving diners ‘mumbling about school dinners.’
Soon after the restaurant’s launch, Corcoran made a particularly divisive series of comments on Instagram, condemning customers who order too little as undeserving of their reservations and, without appreciation for the ‘point’ of going out to eat. He argued that ‘any member of the organised working class’ could afford to eat at The Yellow Bittern ‘once a week or once a month’. An intense media circus ensued, as did discussions about the role of the hospitality industry in a recession, and about the hypocrisy of London restaurants hunting for aesthetics of authenticity - whilst serving £200 bottles of wine.
Can SOASians be expected to shell out £80 on lunch? Do they even want to? There is a popular smoothie place on Charlotte street charging £7 a bottle (they are coloured gold). Is this a case of an establishment designed for its proprietors to congratulate themselves on a norm well subverted? Before ‘justifying’ their place at the table (and Corcoran makes a valid point about occupying space), can students justify to themselves spending upwards of three figures on food they’d rather make at home? Should they have to? An Irish cookbook costs about £25. This is the price of the Roast Pheasant at The Yellow Bittern. Placing aside issues of hypocrisy and authenticity, questionable political principles, and abstractions about food - if someone simply doesn’t want to take part in the kind of restaurant culture espoused by The Yellow Bittern, they can choose not to. Whether it is making London a better place is another story.
