In Soho, Life Imitates the Algorithm
Tamila, Forza Wine and the calculated appeal of the modern restaurant brand. Words by Simran Hans. Artwork by Alia Wilhelm.
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Today’s essay by Simran Hans is about new goings on in one of the most important restaurant neighbourhoods in central London: Soho. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.
On the corner of Great Marlborough Street and Poland Street, a queue was already forming. Admittedly, in sanitised, social media-friendly Soho, you’re never more than a few paces from one, whether that’s a line of people eager to get their hands on a smashburger or the latest drop from Supreme. That afternoon, it was about forty-five minutes before dinner service and the sky was turning golden. I surveyed the line, which featured a cross-section of outfits and ages united in their excitement for 50 per cent off the bill. I found the scene romantic, and so, with no plans later that evening, I joined it. As I edged closer to the front door of Tamila Soho, a girl in a blazer slid in behind me, tugging her friend’s elbow and thanking her for saving them a spot. “It’s from the same people as The Tamil Prince – it’s an Instagram place,” she explained to her friend.
If a ‘TikTok spot’ can be defined by a single viral dish, one that’s usually decadent, oozing and excessive, an ‘Instagram place’ sells a lifestyle. Take It’s Bagels or Yard Sale or Jolene or Top Cuvée: with their sans-serif logos and instantly recognisable branding, they inspire loyalty, tribalism and tote bags. They are neighbourhood spots in the sense that they conjure images of a certain kind of local: affluent, and wearing a baseball cap. Islington’s The Tamil Prince is, apparently, an Instagram spot, at least according to a friend of mine from Birmingham who requested we have lunch there on a recent London visit. An elevated desi pub with impeccable branding that opened in 2022, it has spawned a second outpost (The Tamil Crown) and three spin-off restaurants under the Tamila brand in Clapham, King’s Cross and now Soho. And it’s not the only Instagram-forward small plates restaurant that’s planted a flag in one of the city’s most densely packed dining ecosystems. This spring also sees the arrival of the ‘Italian-ish’ Forza Wine Soho, which serves fritti, not bhajia, with its cocktails, and no-reservations fast-pasta pioneer Padella. This is the third outpost of each restaurant: the owners of Forza run a successful rooftop restaurant in Peckham (and another at the National Theatre), while Padella originated in Borough Market and has a second location in Shoreditch.
You could call this process ‘deSohofication’. Back in 2020, Jonathan Nunn described the phenomenon of ‘Sohofication’ as ‘a kind of homogenisation’ where a certain type of restaurant would open in Soho, courting a certain type of customer, varying its cuisine but sticking to the same set of rules. The pandemic saw this model falter, with shuttered offices, reduced footfall and rising rents making this particular pocket of W1 an increasingly unsafe bet for restaurateurs. Yet the last couple of years have seen the gradual return of both culture and capital to the area. The Elizabeth Line, which opened its doors close by on Tottenham Court Road in 2022, provided a fast new route from the city’s outer boroughs right into the heart of Soho. The same year saw the arrival of Outernet, an enormous entertainment complex on the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Legendary watering holes have been revived, including Trisha’s bar and The Colony Room Club (which closed in 2008 and was rebooted in 2023 as the Colony Room Green, a bar inside restaurant Daisy Green). The Devonshire, a refurbished Irish pub a few steps from Piccadilly, has become a bona fide destination. Within a ten-minute walk from The Devonshire, you can now find inspired, offbeat restaurants including Rita’s, Osteria Vibrato, Impala and Moi. Soho is once again becoming a neighbourhood of multitudes. So the question now is: is it the algorithm funnelling people back into the city centre, or is it something else?