The Yellow Bittern

The Chef at London's Most Controversial Restaurant Goes on the Record | Bon Appétit

"An 18-seat, cash-only lunch-only restaurant with noon and 2 p.m. seatings (closed weekends) that was deliberately designed as a prelapsarian, long midday-meal escape from reservation apps and point-of-sale modernity. Reservations are made by telephone or postcard and there’s a left-leaning bookstore in the basement; the daily-changing menu reflects the chef’s Irish roots plus time in France and the Basque Country, with straightforward, well-seasoned dishes such as potato-leek soup, guinea fowl pie, Dublin coddle and rice pudding—food that is simple and honest, pretentious only in its aggressive unpretentiousness. The chef’s outspoken social-media post criticizing patrons who order sparingly, share little and abstain from drink ignited a wider debate about who restaurants are for, class and cultural expectations; the proprietors, including the politically outspoken chef, argue these expectations are necessary to sustain the precarious margins of a tiny lunch service and to defend a convivial lunch culture that values long, boozy mid-day meals." - ByAmiel Stanek