The first Observer Food Monthly came out in April 2001. On its cover was an effortfully moody-looking Marco Pierre White, smoking a fag and wearing a black trilby; inside were the chefs Nobuyuki Matsuhisa (“Nobu - the world’s sexiest restaurant”) and Ruth Rogers (“One of the most exciting moments of the year is the arrival of the first porcini”), and the actor Christopher Walken (“My brothers and I worked in our father’s bakery: I was the guy who put the jelly in the doughnuts”). Introducing the magazine to readers, Nigel Slater noted that the public’s interest in food-related matters had never been greater. “I am sure you will agree the timing is perfect,” he wrote, promising OFM writers would both debate the important issues of the day and sing the sensual praises of cooking.
To pick up this magazine now is to feel suddenly vertiginous, the steep slopes of time falling away all around you. O tempora o mores! as Cicero observed. Things change, and yet they change not at all. The formerly Michelin-starred White, then still clinging to his bad-boy pomp, is best known these days for his association with Knorr stock cubes, while Nobu is just another slick but uninspiring global chain, as good (or bad) in Doha and Riyadh as in Miami and Beverley Hills. Ruth Rogers, on the other hand, sails blithely on – last October, she published River Cafe 30, a collection of recipes marking three decades of cooking at her influential but wildly expensive west London restaurant – as does Tamarind of Mayfair, whose Punjabi dishes the actor Meera Syal singled out for praise in the same issue. Still other names have moved from what was then relative obscurity to relative fame (we were good pickers). Stephen Harris, whose column deconstructing such dodgy mainstays of the local menu as “seafood avocado” also appeared in the first OFM, is now a revered chef-patron, his pub, The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent, having held a Michelin star since 2008.
It’s certainly true that in 2001, interest in food was unprecedentedly high. Jamie Oliver was already famous; Nigella Lawson had already published How To Be A Domestic Goddess; in the capital, restaurants were, for better or worse, the new nightclubs, or at least the new red carpets, their doors haunted by paparazzi, their maître d’s nominally friends to the famous (I joined the Observer in November of the same year, and remember all too well the way splashy new places seemed to open almost every day on a wave of sponsored champagne; I still shudder to remember some of the hangovers). But surely no one could have predicted that our fascination with all things culinary would grow exponentially, that it would ultimately devour both the bestseller lists and the TV schedules, and young people would aspire to careers in kitchens as they never had before (on MasterChef, revived by the BBC in 2005 after a four-year hiatus, the contestants seem to grow ever more youthful – and ever more competent). Nobu and its ilk were undoubtedly fashionable back in the day, but they were not hip. The wilder shores of our major cities had then yet to be colonised by the cool (and frequently bearded) purveyors of the artisanal and the authentic.
Our timing, though: it was uncannily good. In the months after the arrival of OFM, restaurant culture shifted in a number of enduringly significant ways. In 2002, Simon Rogan opened L’Enclume in Cartmel, Cumbria; the following year, René Redzepi opened Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. With their emphasis on fresh, local food, and particularly on foraged items – L’Enclume went on to have a full-time forager – both blazed a trail; though their worlds seemed rarified from the outside, we have them to thank, at least in part, for the fact that supermarkets now stock such things as samphire, unlikely mushrooms and edible flowers. It was in 2002, also, that Jamie Oliver opened his first restaurant, Fifteen, which began as a way to bring the young unemployed into the restaurant trade; in the years since, it has trained some 500 apprentices worldwide, among them Tim Siadatan, the chef-patron of Trullo, in Islington, north London, and Padella, in Borough Market. Siadatan belongs to that inspirational new generation of younger chefs who have changed the way people think about restaurant work (and, in his case, about pasta, too). The Wapping Project, a gallery housed in a listed former hydraulic power station in London’s East End, sadly closed in 2014, and with it, its fantastic restaurant, Wapping Food. But its influence cannot, I think, be overstated. When its cavernous spaces opened to the public in 2001, people understood in a glance that a restaurant could be situated almost anywhere: the more excitingly unusual the venue, the better (also, that such enterprises could be used to cross-subsidise community and arts ventures). Cut to 2017, where a kitchen can thrive everywhere from a Victorian lavatory (Attendant, in Fitzrovia, where the original Doulton & Co porcelain urinals are still in place) to a greenhouse (the lush Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, Surrey). I discern shades of both Fifteen and Wapping Food in the brilliant Clink restaurants, run as part of a countrywide programme to rehabilitate prisoners, of which there are now four.
Were there pop-ups and supper clubs in 2001? I don’t believe there were; nor were chef residencies and consultancies so much of a thing. Both are trends that seem ostensibly to be great for the customer, providing the chance to try something, or someone, new. In reality, however, what they mostly reflect is the fact that during the last 15 years, rents in our larger cities, and particularly in the capital, have become prohibitive. Think – to take just one example – of Racine in Knightsbridge, which opened not long after OFM launched. When it closed in 2015, its chef-patron Henry Harris gave as his reason both its rent and the radically changed nature of the neighbourhood, locals having been pushed out by non-doms who visit only rarely. Harris is now chef-director at a small group of London pubs that includes the Truscott Arms in Maida Vale, which itself closed in 2016 thanks to a rent rise; last year, he admitted he had struggled to find a London site for a new restaurant of his own.
Celebrity customers aside, in 2001, restaurant culture in general was less performative than now; before smartphones and Instagram, there wasn’t much to be done with a pretty plate save for to eat its contents. It was also perhaps a little less macho, for all that the likes of Ramsay, White and Tom Aikens of Pied a Terre (who once reportedly branded an employee with a hot palette knife) were famed for their hot tempers and foul language. The “I’m-all-about-knife-skills-and-barbecue-pits” vibe had yet to lift off; impossible to imagine, then, that meat would become such a fetish, that Hawksmoor, founded in 2006 in Spitalfields by Will Beckett and Huw Gott, would shift so many £29 steaks it would one day open a branch in Manchester. (The smart, or smart-ish, chain is another notable development of the last decade, whether we are talking Burger & Lobster or Wahaca, the Mexican street-food joints co-founded by the MasterChef winner Thomasina Miers – which only goes to prove that those with the cash for a certain kind of casual midweek supper are frequently the most conservative diners of all.) Street food, now turned out with such ubiquitous dash by hot-browed men and women in urban markets, was in 2001 still mostly the nostalgic preserve of people who’d had a gap year.
Away from restaurants, it’s possible the landscape has changed even more dramatically. In 2001, tracking down pomegranate molasses, kimchi and ras-el-hanout (all now stocked by Sainsbury’s) was often the work of several days; in 2018, supermarkets are on a mission to outdo each other when it comes to unusual and hard-to-find stuff (in the old days, they just responded to whatever new ingredient Delia Smith had in her latest book). But the advent of austerity has brought with it an emphasis on value, too, ever more of us making our way to Lidl and Aldi. As I write, the two chains have in play 90 planning applications for new supermarkets. Meanwhile, the big four – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons – have filed a grand total of just 11 as they continue to struggle with property costs and the numbers of customers shopping online. For them, smaller convenience stores are now the order of the day (stores that have, of course, brought with them their own problems, from their detrimental effect on local businesses to the congestion caused by outsized lorries on too-small streets).
In 2001, I had never shopped for food on the internet. Not once. By 2004, that had changed forever. Ever since, my basics have been delivered, while specialist shops – real ones, as opposed to virtual – have picked up the slack, something that may go some way to explaining (I can’t be alone) the small but cheering revival, in some towns, of butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers. The internet’s impact on takeaways has been slower to take effect, but thanks to recent publicity most of us are now all too painfully aware of how increased demand has encouraged courier services such as Deliveroo to establish so-called “dark kitchens” in prefabricated structures for restaurants that want to expand their business (in London, this includes the Thai chain Busaba Eathai, and the Franco Manca pizza parlours) without opening more expensive high-street premises.
You could write a PhD thesis about trends in food over the last 15 years, and what each one signified at the time: the moment when everyone went mad for the cronut; the year when Korean food (or Nigerian, or Moroccan) was supposed to be the next big thing. Yotam Ottolenghi’s influence over recipe culture – a handful of pomegranate seeds here, a sprinkling of za’atar there – seems to me to be disproportionally vast; and one wonders what Japanese people make of the ersatz supermarket sushi British office workers buy in their hundreds of thousands every lunchtime (amazing to think that I had never eaten sushi until 1993, when I went to Richard Hills’s restaurant, Tokyo Diner, in Soho, soon after it first opened). Nevertheless, two trends do stand out.
The first is baking, our obsession with. For this, we may blame (or praise) The Great British Bake Off, born in 2010 and still adored in spite of its move from the BBC to Channel 4. But in truth, its roots go back further: Tarek Malouf opened the first Hummingbird Bakery in west London in 2004, selling the sickly American-style cupcakes and pies that have since become ubiquitous in our high streets; and before him, of course, there was Nigella Lawson in domestic goddess mode (her luscious baking book was first published in 2000). Is our new fanaticism in the matter of butter icing and choux pastry a good thing? Mostly, I think it is (yeah, yeah: I know sugar is bad). If the success of, say, Justin Gellatly’s Bread Ahead bakery is one of its by-products, then I’m all for it (Gellatly, formerly the pastry chef at St John, is as famed for his sourdough as for his doughnuts). If bad bread is on the run, even better. It’s a trend, too, that can genuinely be said to be national. The Forge Bakehouse in Sheffield, Loaf in Birmingham, the Exploding Bakery in Exeter: all are brilliant examples of the new generation.
The second, paradoxically and much less happily, is so-called clean eating – words I tremble even to type. When did this dumb fad begin? I’m tempted to say “who cares?”, but if you must know, its roots lie in the US, where the movement to cut out processed foods from diets – and then, by turns, sugar, lactose and gluten – first took hold in the early 2000s. In the UK, its leading proponents have been the likes of Ella Mills (née Woodward, aka Deliciously Ella) and the Hemsley sisters, and though Mills, for one, has begun to tone down her message just lately, clean eating’s popularity shows little sign of waning, for all that most of the claims made for it are bunkum. Joyless though it is, its benefit has been the increased availability, for people who really do have coeliac disease, of a wider range of gluten-free products. How we explain its popularity, of course, is a trickier question. I regard it as a strict weight-loss programme in a distractingly pretty frock and, perhaps, as another byproduct of the neuroticism in the matter of certain foods that has come as a result of our growing distance from both farming and our kitchens. It’s a profound irony that our growing passion for cookery books and TV shows has had relatively little effect on the ability and inclination of the majority to cook at home.
What lies ahead? Brexit changes everything. It may be that we will be too worried about costs and supply to waste time worrying about whether quinoa is a good alternative to potatoes; it may be that suddenly, potatoes will do after all. Britain produces only 54% of what it eats – a statistic that leaves us vulnerable to fluctuating markets after we leave the EU; supplies and prices are likely to be at their most volatile since the war. More than a quarter of those working in food manufacturing are, moreover, from other EU countries. Who will pick our crops? Who will work in our factories? This remains to be seen. Either way, food is set to become more expensive (it already is more expensive). We will have to grow more, and we will certainly care more about waste (which won’t be a bad thing). Beyond this, who can say? Doubtless scientists’ experiments with meat substitutes will improve to the degree that we will eventually become willing to eat them. My guess, though, is that for the next few years at least British menus will be increasingly nostalgia-tinted, and that irrespective of the melancholic underlying reasons for this, they will be (she dreams of arctic rolls) really quite tasty.
