Tightening our belts

Where have all the sub-prime steaks gone? Gone to pork belly, every one. Even before the crash-bang-crunch was a 90-point headline, this was a year of gastronomic belt-tightening. The restaurants of conspicuous oli-gastronomy, with five glacier-faced, missile-breasted, Alaïa-clad Valkyries at the lectern who would never recognise any name that didn’t end in -ski and said you could wait in the corridor while they decided whether to feed you, are over.
Having the paparazzi outside is a sign that this is a place not to be seen in. The quality and calibre of celebrities caught outside unbookable restaurants have gone way down. Now it’s more likely to be a bloke who used to be in EastEnders, a drunk runner-up from Big Brother, and Piers Morgan. Gone are the days when Brad Pitt would engagingly take a swing at a pap, or some trashed techno-babe would wink pink getting out of a cab for the edification of 15-year-olds and downloaders everywhere. Big-money dining in multimillion rooms is so utterly over. Binge dinners are just not chic or smart, and the restaurants that specialise in them suddenly look embarrassing, passé and tacky. Sake No Hana had an overindulgent opening. Backed by Evgeny Lebedev, it is a perfect example of how to completely and utterly miss the zeitgeist, like turning up at a No Third Runway protest dressed like a 1970s Braniff hostess.
They always say that catering is the first into a recession and the last out, and I think the food knows, I think the ingredients can tell. Knives and pans have a sibyl’s sense of what's coming. There has been a move away from tables with five layers of linen, glasses big enough to breed goldfish in, and a special spoon just for supping your jus. The writing was on the wall for amuse-bouches and unordered shot glasses of tricksy gunk with caviar on top. No more gold leaf on your risotto, or truffle oil on everything. The slow-cooked rediscovery of British Industrial Revolution food overcame everything this year. For the first time in two decades, there must have been more English-restaurant openings than Italian. The fear of poverty has coincided with a digestive nationalism, a confidence in the home-grown — and thank God.
The writing on the wall also told us what field our cow came from, and the name of the wendy house in which the chicken brought up her happy, multicultural brood. Menus stopped being written by Barbara Cartland and all read like they’d been penned by WH Auden, Ted Hughes and Bill Oddie. Food went back to the sideboard, to scrubbed oak tables and bentwood chairs, served by people who wore home-baked shoes and had degrees in sustainable English. Pubs merged into restaurants, and restaurants served five types of beer. There was a sense of generous austerity about, and a cool pride.
Cooks’ menu envy made them compete to see who could serve the most gangleous of remote cuts and the weirdest hedgerow weeds. Fillet steak became braised shin; shoulders replaced cutlets; every time you opened your mouth, it was filled with a mustardy snout, ear or fry (bollock). The totemic dish of the year was the ubiquitous pork belly: a slow-roasted slab of crackling and fat, held together by slivers of exhausted muscle. It’s in every TV chef’s Christmas cookbook, and personally I’d happily not eat it again for a year. Brit food has been forcibly and good-humouredly taken back from the xenophobes and Little Englanders, from football yobs and the false teeth of pensioners. It’s not granny food or school food or hospital food, or the clubbable, stuffy, sticky, paunchy Sunday food any more. It is smart and sexy: who’d ever have thought that pies and mushy peas would be lubricious? But, it turns out, they really are. And there were dripping-fried chips with everything. We all went out to eat home-cooked without irony.
The Times