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I just discovered that I was born in the last year of the boomers. This means, as far as I can tell, that I’m supposed to have worn flares at Woodstock. I didn’t. I was at the St Matthias College infant school and if I’d seen mud, I’d have probably eaten it. Generalising into broad, stereotypical age groups rarely withstands any closer observation. Even admen and politicians know that.
And yet, the past couple of years of solid restaurant-going in the heart of our great metropolis have forced me to acknowledge what can only really be described as an age-based phenomenon. I wouldn’t want to claim to have been the youngest person in the dining room but too often, looking carefully about, there’s nobody noticeably younger.
Of course, this should cause no surprise. Restaurant prices are rising inexorably. If young people can barely afford to rent, let alone buy flats in the capital, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to be as keen to stump up for a posh night out with quite the enthusiasm that their parents are spaffing the inheritance. Dining in good restaurants has always been a luxury, and the old have always dominated that arena. But I don’t enjoy sitting in a place where everyone is my age or older.
Partly this is vanity, but I’m beginning to believe that it has more important ramifications. It doesn’t really matter if you’re older or younger than the couple at the next table. If you’re eating in central London right now, it’s a racing certainty that you’re older than almost everyone on the floor or in the kitchen.
For a frighteningly long time now, certainly back to before the pandemic, we’ve seen a change in the young people coming into the industry. For a while, all they needed was talent and drive and they could find a place to hang their shingle. But high rents and private equity screwed that. As I’ve discussed in previous columns, hospitality in our urban centres is now effectively a subdivision of the commercial property sector. In effect, a talented young person needs old people’s money to start a restaurant.
And now, post-pandemic, with pressure on the workforce, we’re seeing further change. The person serving you or cooking your food can almost certainly not afford the experience you are expecting them to provide. For a while there, our hospitality industry was run by engaged enthusiasts. You could hope that your server knew what it was supposed to feel like to be served, that your cook was eating widely and experiencing the work of fellow chefs. Not any more. You have to go back to Orwell in Paris to find a time when the income and attitude chasm between server and served yawned so wide and grew so fast.
Perhaps it’s something that only a miserable critic would notice, but I’ve heard chefs complaining about it too; subtly changing menus to cater for older, more conservative tastes. More places opening in a traditional idiom.
Two decades ago, I came of age writing about a new face of British food. One that wasn’t happening in posh places inhabited by old gits like my dad. Back then, the status quo was restaurants designed for older people: uniformed wine waiters, flaming food on carts. Then we saw a revolution. Suddenly it felt like everybody was going to restaurants, many on most days of the week. Cool young people were opening places because they could afford to. In sociological terms, it was an indicator of generational change. Sure, it wasn’t quite on the scale of the Civil Rights movement or the Depression of the 1930s but, for a culture like the British, forged by class division and austerity, an easy-going restaurant scene was earth shattering. It changed the economy and the attitudes of, yes, a generation.
I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about cool, young, democratic eating places. How “Modern British” was a reappropriation of our own traditions and a celebration of our multiculturalism. I cheerfully attacked pretentious, expensive places. The joyless elitism of Michelin and international luxury restaurants. I even had a go at Elizabeth David and her patrician writing for an earlier generation of aspirational “gourmets”. Food and restaurants had been for the elite and the old, and I didn’t like it. I was happy and proud that things had changed — I hoped, for ever.
A generation in itself doesn’t necessarily cause change. Instead, its collective experience forms its attitudes. The behaviour of the young presages what’s going to be relevant to the future. Will there be some attitudinal shift caused by the absence of young consumers in hospitality environments? We are certainly seeing a great draining of youth from restaurants in urban centres, but perhaps there’s more. Perhaps we’re resetting to a reality in which, just maybe, we shouldn’t be eating out five days in seven. Maybe cooking food was never something that ordinary wage earners, in a functioning modern society, could subcontract permanently to others. What if we’re supposed to take proper grown-up responsibility for buying ingredients, cooking for and feeding ourselves and our families?
I can see no way in which restaurant prices are going to come down. No curve on which eating out becomes more affordable and democratic. Quite the opposite. The age thing will not wipe out the restaurant industry, but it threatens the metropolitan scene. And what if it spreads across the country? What if it signals something bigger — that the idea restaurants were “for every day and for everybody” was a shared delusion we could only support for a couple of decades . . . for a generation?
Follow Tim @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com
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