The Covent Garden of the early 1970s was an area in flux. Deranged, on-off schemes by the GLC to demolish half the streets when the fruit and veg market moved out meant that buildings were abandoned, as everybody prepared for the shift south to Nine Elms. It also provided an opportunity, however, for interesting enterprises to flourish in the newly unwanted spaces.
A strong-willed Australian called Margot Boyce-White saw potential amid the decline. In 1971, she took over an old banana-ripening warehouse on Neal Street and opened a vegetarian restaurant. She was soon getting rave reviews in the alternative press. Time Out’s Book of London in 1973 warned of the new establishment that “Thursday night is Folk Night and now and again there’s a Poetry Night”, but it was worth the risk: salads were 15p and hot dishes 40p.
Food for Thought swiftly became London’s leading vegetarian restaurant, imbued with the buccaneering spirit of alternative London and bringing a taste of a new world to the old ways of Covent Garden. After 44 years, it will close in June, a victim of rising rents.
“We found out two or three weeks ago,” says Magda, 37, who has worked there for 10 years. “In the last few years, the landlords have put the rent up so much we couldn’t cope. It’s one of the few places in the area that is still independent, low-profile but very busy. Now the whole area is changing. All the older shops are closing.”
“We’ve been investigating options for the last two years,” says Vanessa Garrett, the owner. “After we looked at what we needed to do to survive, we didn’t want to do it. The area we are in is changing, and changing in a way that is not particularly to our tastes. I thought I’d rather go out singing and celebrating than weeping and wailing.”
From the moment it opened, Food for Thought was “a very groovy place”, says food writer Lindsey Bareham, who remembers Covent Garden in 1971 as an area filled with shops occupied by specialist craftsmen for the opera house, and where you could pick enough fruit and veg off the pavement to cook lunch and dinner. “It was one of the first places that had big, bold food on the counter. This was like Ottolenghi coming and breathing fresh ideas into a staid concept. It really was that dramatic.”
Gradually, Covent Garden became a centre for alternative eating. On Marshall Street was Cranks, a little older and duller in its treatment of vegetarian food. Round the corner appeared Neal’s Yard, a wholefood shop started by Nicholas Carr-Saunders, author of Alternative London. Neal’s Yard expanded into a dairy, cafe and apothecary, and eventually a chain.
That was not the route Food for Thought took. At its white-fronted premises on Neal Street, nothing changed: that was part of the charm. All the food might have been orange and tasted faintly of butternut squash, but the place was special: unpretentious, cheap, filling and fun, without any of the finger-wagging you sometimes get in veggie restaurants. It seemed to represent a window into a different version of the city: an older and more interesting Covent Garden.“It predates the gentrification of Neal Street, and arose at the time when this edge of Covent Garden was still considered radical,” says Guy Dimond, Time Out’s long-standing food editor. “It survived the onslaught of shoe shops and boutiques. And of course the food has changed little since I first ate there in the 1980s. I last ate there just last week – still rammed, but still good.”
The layout was simple. On the tiny, ground floor space, staff ladled generous dollops of veggie stews to office workers, shoppers and students clutching takeaway boxes. You could top up with gigantic scones, colourful salads or chunky quiches. Downstairs was a thin restaurant with whitewashed walls, invariably with a queue snaking up the battered wooden stairs and along Neal Street.
Charles Damant, 46, grew up on Neal Street. “You had amazing shops and they’ve all gone,” he says. “It’s just endless shoe shops. They have economies of scale that Food for Thought cannot compete with. It wasn’t like Neal’s Yard: it never had those ambitions to replicate itself. It just wasn’t that sort of place.”
His father and stepmother, John and Jane Damant, bought Food for Thought in 1977 (Vanessa Garrett, the current owner, is Jane’s daughter). And Charles himself worked at the restaurant in the early 1990s: “It’s the sort of place that engenders an incredible loyalty. I went back recently for a party and there was a customer who had been going for 35 years. Steve the chef had been there for 40 years. They are all completely bonkers – we had a potwasher who married a Littlewoods heiress he met at yoga. That typified the people that worked there.”
Regular Sarah Irving, 39, remembers it in the late 1980s as “one of the few fun veggie places I came across. They all tended to be so bloody earnest and very heavy on the wholegrains. Food for Thought was just a bit more light-hearted and served food that I actually wanted to eat, rather than that made me feel morally superior because of the effort involved.”
Mundanely, it has become yet another victim of London’s raging property market. The tale is well told. Rents are ballooning for residents and businesses, as landlords ignore stagnant interest rates and instead seek to squeeze the market, regardless of the social consequences. Across the West End, long-established venues have been forced to close, from the 12 Bar Club on Denmark Street to Madame JoJos in Soho. The process makes it almost impossible for independent, unambitious ventures like Food for Thought to survive, no matter how popular they might be.
To stay in Neal Street, Garrett would have had to raise the price of a meal from £5.50 to £9.50. “That completely changes how we operate,” she says. “It’s not just about our landlord. It’s the cycle of the city. I need to pay my staff a decent wage so they can live in London. It’s a pattern. You can ride the wave or get off the beach.”
Was change or expansion ever an option? “There have been opportunities to franchise out, but then you are working from somebody’s pocket,” says Garrett. “We’ve always absorbed the cost of what we do, but now there is no more room for absorption. Maybe we are dinosaurs, maybe we are over-idealistic, I don’t really care. All we wanted to do is produce really good homely food that anybody can afford. You need to run it as a business, but if you start to worry too much about counting beans, you forget how to cook them.”
For further information about Food for Thought’s closing party, watch this space
