Britain seems to be having a small identity crisis about how, and why, we eat. At one end of the scale, restaurants are charging £10 for a single chicken nugget topped with caviar and £7 for breadsticks, turning what used to be the free, vaguely generous part of dinner into a luxury upsell. At the other, diners are increasingly losing patience with the whole small-plates pantomime altogether. After years of sharing one bite of salmon crudo, half a cabbage and a tablespoon of risotto between four people, the mood appears to be shifting towards actual mains, old-school glamour and the radical thrill of leaving a restaurant full.
The rise of the gourmet "snack" is really about how thoroughly the modern meal has been monetised. Olives, crisps, bread and butter, charcuterie – these are not new foods, nor especially luxurious ones. What has changed is the pricing and the psychology behind it. Restaurants, under huge financial pressure, have found a neat way to increase spend before starters have even landed. It is clever, certainly. But it also feels faintly absurd when "picky bits" with a linen napkin can add £40 to the bill before dinner properly begins.
The backlash to small plates taps into something similar. For years, they signalled taste, coolness and a certain kind of urban fluency. Now they increasingly look like poor value wrapped in soft lighting and biodynamic wine. Lydia Spencer-Elliott's suggests diners have had enough, and the numbers back that up: more than half of UK diners now prefer individual dishes to sharing plates. In a cost-of-living crunch, people still want eating out to feel like a treat – but preferably one that includes a proper plate of food.
There is another kind of food loss running through the week, too, and it is a more serious one. Ainsley Harriott, the Scouts and nutrition experts all point to the same problem: too many young people are growing up without confidence in the kitchen. Part of that is about schools quietly letting food education slide. Part of it is about home life changing, with longer hours, more convenience food and fewer chances for children to watch cooking happen in real time. The result is not just a generation less able to make soup or curry, but one potentially more cut off from the social, practical and health benefits that come with knowing how to cook a simple meal.
Elsewhere, though, the internet is ensuring at least some people are very enthusiastic about getting into the kitchen – just perhaps not in the way Delia might have imagined. TikTok has turned eggs into one of the most viral ingredients on social media, from soy-marinated mayak eggs to whipped Vietnamese egg coffee and raw egg stirred into hot rice. Some of it is genuinely useful, some of it is gloriously chaotic, but all of it speaks to a generation finding its way into cooking through trend, novelty and algorithms rather than home economics.
There is comfort, at least, in the slower pleasures too. Nima Safaei's pheasant ragu makes the case for game as a richer, leaner and surprisingly accessible alternative to the usual beef or chicken, and feels like exactly the sort of thing worth cooking on a cold spring evening. And in drinks, even champagne is having to reckon with changing tastes. As France's great houses bicker over prestige and pricing, British drinkers have largely moved on – towards prosecco, crémant, English sparkling and, in one gloriously awkward twist for the luxury set, Aldi's award-winning champagne.
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Glass warfare: Why it no longer pays to be a champagne snob |
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As France's biggest champagne houses argue over pricing and prestige, British drinkers have already moved on – embracing Aldi's award-winning champagne and a world-beating English fizz, writes Hannah Twiggs |
Arow has broken out in Champagne. Not the fun kind that ends with popping corks, sabres and bad dancing, but a rather tone-deaf dispute between the rich, and the even richer, about money, class and who gets to drink what.
This week, the chief executive of Lanson Bruno Paillard (worth €100m) accused Bernaud Arnault (worth €150bn), founder of LVMH – the luxury goods group behind Moët & Chandon and Dom Pérignon – of driving up grape prices to such an extent that "ordinary families" are being priced out of champagne altogether.
Shipments from the region have already fallen sharply – by 99 million bottles in four years – and producers are increasingly anxious about who, exactly, their wine is now for.
It is a question which, in Britain – champagne's second-largest export market – comes about a decade too late. We have been drinking more prosecco than champagne since 2014. Last year, an English blanc de blancs became the first non-champagne to win best sparkling wine at a major international competition. And a £15 Aldi bottle was recently named the best champagne in the world.
In other words, the whole argument feels slightly beside the point. Champagne hasn't just become too expensive for "ordinary families". Ordinary families don't even think it's cool any more.
Read the full article here
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