It was our neighbour, Richard B, who first mentioned it. “Sourdough wars,” he said ominously to my husband, down at the pub. “The new place versus the old place. There will be blood.” Later that night, T passed the news on to me. “Sourdough wars,” he said, rolling the words round his mouth experimentally. “Or so Richard says.” A few days passed, and then T went to buy Saturday morning croissants. When he returned, there was – to pinch from the divine Kay Burley – sadness in his eyes. “The old place was empty,” he said, handing over the booty. “But the new place was heaving.” In the silence that followed, my heart began to beat a little faster, and not only at the thought of the buttery carbohydrates to come.
When we first moved into our house a decade ago, the area was not gentrified, by which I mean that it hadn’t yet been socially cleansed. There was still a greasy spoon, a chip shop, and a Greek place so gloomy, patrons needed Clarice Starling-style night-vision goggles if they were to read the menu. But there was a very good patisserie, a beacon of hope for those (not me) who fixate on such things as house prices and the availability of the babycino (don’t ask), and a treat for the rest of us – or at least those of us lucky enough to be able to afford to patronise it. Let us call it, for the sake of argument, Le Grand Cafe de la Moyenne Bourgeoisie. Its owner is French, and it sells really excellent loaves and pastries, including the best coffee eclairs it has ever been my good fortune to taste.
A few weeks ago, however, another place opened a few doors down. Let us call it The Bushy Beard Diner. Yes, it’s a hipster joint, with a faintly industrial vibe and (probably) pig cheeks on its evening menu. I’m sure it’s very nice, and I plan to go there soon, the better to eat some roast celeriac and to gawp at all those young men in trousers that are just a little bit too short. Unfortunately, though, this place also does (it’s almost obligatory in the 21st-century city) breakfast, and for all that its croissants are more expensive than those at Le Grand Cafe de la Moyenne Bourgeoisie, it seems to be cleaning up. The Bushy Beard makes Le Grand Cafe look faintly twee, I guess, plus there is, I can’t help noticing, a feeling abroad here now that at last we are – whoosh! – firmly on the way UP. The major symptom of this particular brand of collective madness is an overwhelming desire to spend more on breakfast – yeah, I’ll have avocado with that, and a Seize The Day Body Sculpting Smoothie with extra unbridled optimism and a few added half-truths – than is wholly wise.
When did food become the single most visible signifier of what we call, if we’re being polite, gentrification? I suppose it started in the 70s, when parents like mine bought dilapidated Victorian houses in urban streets and then spent seven years doggedly replacing all their original features (plus as many Japanese paper lampshades as Habitat could possibly supply). Local greengrocers, sensing an opportunity, began stocking bags of macaroni and lentils the better that willowy local mothers with serious Clothkits habits might stuff them in the hoods of their baby buggies along with their potatoes and carrots. Meanwhile, family butchers believed for the first time in ages – and as things turned out, they weren’t wholly right – that they might just be able to survive the arrival of Fine Fare or Kwik Save. In their windows, still sprigged with lurid plastic grass, lamb chops suddenly started wearing jaunty white paper hats.
And yet, how benign, how wonderfully inexpensive and wholesome, mere pasta and pulses and lamb chops seem beside the orgasmic smorgasbord of over-priced foodstuffs the middle classes seem now to require to be on hand in their neighbourhood if they’re to feel even moderately content (start at jamon Iberico, and “curate” your shopping up from there, price-wise). I do wonder about this edible escalation, a frenzy that shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. Is it that, houses being an almost hopeless dream for a new generation, people think “oh, sod it”, soothing themselves thereafter by throwing their money at artisanal brownies and hand-roasted coffee rather than, as they might once have done, at wooden bookshelves and salvaged door handles? Or is it just that some people are stupid and vulgar and – though they’d rather die than admit it – too well off to care? Answers on a Tate Modern postcard please.
