"If you're not hungry, don't go"

November 17, 2024 6:33 AM

London's most talked-about (and most eccentric) new restaurant The Yellow Bittern ("lunch only, cash only") has been causing a stir after chef-proprietor Hugh Corcoran took to Instagram to insult his customers as cheapskates. "It is now apparently completely normal to book a table for 4 people and then order one starter and two mains to share and a glass of tap water." This went down about as well as Corcoran's rice pudding, which Guardian critic Jay Rayner described as looking "like something your elderly cat might have coughed up".
posted by verstegan (30 comments total)

I'll order whatever I want? I love a good perturbed chef story.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:44 AM on November 17 [2 favorites]

The food looks glorious. My other half has a Trip to London coming up and this restaurant makes me want to Go to London with them, although Going to London is usually an overstimulated pain in the neurodivergence for me.
posted by The Last Sockpuppet at 6:46 AM on November 17

“If you do not drink because you have done so to such excess that it cannot be permitted any longer….”

My last drink was over 30 years ago and it’s disconcerting (to say the least) for him to trivialize the rationale in this manner. Yikes.
posted by whatevernot at 6:46 AM on November 17 [4 favorites]

£7 for some radishes and butter? £8 for soup? £40 for a pie? In a room that has all the atmosphere of a school canteen?

Yeah, I'd probably split a dish and leave early, too.
posted by fight or flight at 6:49 AM on November 17

"If you're not hungry, don't go."

....I don't think people are splitting dishes because they're not hungry, my dude, I think they're taking this route because they are broke.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:55 AM on November 17 [2 favorites]

The commenter ThereisnoOwl is always value for money on a jay rayner review

Exhibit 1

posted by lalochezia at 6:57 AM on November 17 [2 favorites]

It seemed like a lovely little restaurant and it's too bad the proprietor decided to detonate a nuclear bomb in the kitchen.
posted by goatdog at 6:58 AM on November 17

“If you do not drink because you have done so to such excess that it cannot be permitted any longer….”

What if you don't like wine?
posted by signal at 7:02 AM on November 17 [1 favorite]

I fucking love Jay Rayner restaurant reviews and this one is gold.
posted by Kitteh at 7:03 AM on November 17

The food looks absolutely horrible - the sort of watery carrots and sausage soup that my grandparents grudgingly chucked together on a weeknight. And soda bread? Soda bread, now, when we’re having a sourdough revival? I don’t know, seems like these people are just being ornery for the sake of it.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:17 AM on November 17

You know, if I were a communist who toted around a literal picture of Lenin, I might not make such a big deal about how people need to spend more at my restaurant.

Even communists have to put food on the table, so to speak, and restaurants are extremely expensive now so I'm not even saying that you've got to open an affordable place just because you're a commie - or perhaps a champagne socialist? - but if it were me I wouldn't beat that particular drum so loud.
posted by Frowner at 7:27 AM on November 17 [3 favorites]

The food looks pretty good to me, honestly - lots of things that are very tasty aren't especially photogenic, and if those drear sausages are decent quality even the drear sausages in broth are probably pretty all right.
posted by Frowner at 7:28 AM on November 17 [4 favorites]

metafilter: drear sausages
posted by lalochezia at 7:33 AM on November 17

Wow, that food looks...British. I'd probably go anyway though, for the abuse.
posted by Toddles at 7:38 AM on November 17 [4 favorites]

What if you don't like wine?

Or don't like alcohol at all? 60% of American adults have less than one drink a week. No idea what the ratio is in Britain. I get that we're all just dogpiling this dude here, but seriously buddy, make a fancy non-alcoholic punch or whatever and sell it to the non-drinkers if you want to cash in. As a non-drinker who also doesn't like sugary drinks, my options at most places are water or unsweetened tea.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:40 AM on November 17 [3 favorites]

The Standard's headline for this story is:
The Yellow Bittern's Hugh Corcoran would do well to remember the world doesn't owe him a living

Ummm...of course they do, of course they do, of course they fucking do!
posted by NoMich at 7:44 AM on November 17 [2 favorites]

What this really reminds me of is something out of Robert Graves's The Long Weekend, which is very entertaining if you like that sort of thing - it's a very chatty, anecdotal "social history" of the UK between WWI and WWII, and an expensive but "proletarian" restaurant run by a very public communist and an arty member of the aristocracy where they scold the clientele just sounds incredibly, incredibly thirties to me. Extremely retro!

I grant you that if I were running a restaurant and trying to keep the doors open and people showed up and ordered very little food and plain water, I'd get anxious, and getting anxious might cause me to make fool comments - as a chronic reader of Guardian restaurant reviews, it certainly sounds to me like unless you're doing fish and chips or cheap and cheerful take-out, you basically can't run a restaurant in London unless everything costs approximately one billion dollars, not even a restaurant based around, eg, nice sandwiches.

No doubt this is the American future as well - things are expensive now, but since we've voted for our own conman version of Brexit, it will only get worse.
posted by Frowner at 7:50 AM on November 17 [3 favorites]

Lunch only and two two-hour seatings at lunch? I see why he needs people to order a lot of food and wine to make that work. With restaurants that have seatings and reservations, there are probably parties who order so little that you could argue they are violating a social contract, but if you think a ton of people are doing that it is worth looking at your business model to see why.

This reminds me of a Chicago chef who started complaining about reviews this summer, got into a hole and kept digging.
posted by BibiRose at 8:00 AM on November 17 [1 favorite]

I think what some commenters are missing is that there's a type of London restaurant that's as much a piece of performance art as somewhere to eat an expensive meal. You go to these places to eat overpriced food and to have an experience to talk about for the rest of the week. The proprietor who puts up pictures of Lenin, derides non-drinkers and posts rants about how cheap the customers are is very much part of the schtick. Enough people will find that appealing for the business to thrive.
posted by pipeski at 8:11 AM on November 17 [7 favorites]

Exactly, the fact we're all here talking about his overpriced restaurant means it's a great success.
posted by automatronic at 8:27 AM on November 17

maybe my grace for this restaurant lands wrong, but I’ve worked small restaurants and that might be informing my perspective! Inflation has made costs super high, and I get his anxiety; I’m timid in my long illness and that means I groom my words to avoid the hissfinger, but not everybody does that. I would have said “we can’t stay open without these minimum spends, so this is our policy.” Vulnerability isn’t safe for everyone and our atomised society has made admitting want literally dangerous—so the chef may have thought that this is the only way to communicate the need.
posted by The Last Sockpuppet at 8:48 AM on November 17 [1 favorite]

I tracked down lalochezia comment -

ThereisnoOwl:

The tiny dining room with its paper-clothed tables…

Disappointing. You’d think Corcoran would at least have provided authentic lenin tablecloths.
posted by zenon at 8:49 AM on November 17 [1 favorite]

Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal
posted by fullerine at 8:53 AM on November 17

i'd like to see Chef Paik and Chef Anh destroy this guy in a Culinary Class Wars taste evaluation.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:53 AM on November 17

Being self-employed I absolutely get the anxiety. But I thought Rayner's remark was to the point: '“Restaurants are not public benches,” [the chef] moaned. “You are there to spend some money.” Perhaps open for dinner then, when people are happier to drink.'

Also, agreed with Frowner that deliberately creating a restaurant where people are expected to spend hundreds of pounds on lunch is an odd fit with the chef's communism. If the intent is just to redistribute wealth, then go all out, charge more, aim for the .01 percenters. If the intent is to feed people good food, then find a way to do it without requiring them to fill themselves with wine, or making them feel bad about how little they can afford.
posted by trig at 9:11 AM on November 17

Eh. This is just a publicity stunt. Most restaurants solve this problem by having a set menu with a few options that everyone must choose.

This is a nice slice of the continuous class war that is the London dining scene. Throw in a nice snobby quote from the British aristocrat Jay Rayner about a place run by an Irish Communist and you have a perfect picture of modern Britain.
posted by vacapinta at 9:11 AM on November 17

You know, if I were a communist who toted around a literal picture of Lenin, I might not make such a big deal about how people need to spend more at my restaurant.

It has been surprising to me, but over the last decade or so I have just had to accept that cognitive dissonance is not a thing that everyone experiences.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:12 AM on November 17

And soda bread? Soda bread, now, when we’re having a sourdough revival?

I would say it's pretty normal for an Irish restaurant to have soda bread.
posted by ambrosen at 9:15 AM on November 17

MetaFilter: probably pretty all right
posted by chavenet at 9:17 AM on November 17

So the place seats 18, and there are two lunch seatings five days a week, so he's serving 180 lunches a week if the place is at full capacity all the time. Even if everybody who came in spent 100 pounds each I just don't see how that pencils out as a profitable proposition, with rent and labor costs and food costs and taxes and all the other overhead that comes with running a restaurant. If people are trying to "cheap out" and spend a paltry 50 pounds each (for lunch!) then for sure it's not going to work.
posted by Daily Alice at 9:19 AM on November 17