Once Yellow Bittern, Twice Shy
The restaurant that rattled everyone. A review by Jonathan Nunn. Photographed by Michaël Protin.
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Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
Once Yellow Bittern, Twice Shy
The restaurant that rattled everyone, by Jonathan Nunn
Here are some facts about The Yellow Bittern, a new eighteen-seater restaurant that opened on the fag end of Caledonian Road last month, which has successfully rattled the entire London restaurant industry:
The Yellow Bittern is co-owned by Hugh Corcoran – a Belfast-born chef who was last seen working at the wine bar Delicatessen Place in Paris, where his cooking ignored the trend for small, composed plates in favour of a counter laden with hard-boiled eggs and fresh radishes.
The restaurant has no website, no online booking system or Instagram, just Corcoran’s personal account, where, in the three months leading up to opening, he has referenced as influences the eighteenth-century Gaelic poem An Bonnán Buí (after which the restaurant is named), the trade unionist and Labour leader Keir Hardie, Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin (whose portrait can be found in two separate locations in the restaurant), and the sans-culottes, the revolutionary French working-class group who opposed the aristocracy.
On October 29th, a week into debuting a menu of pies, stews, braises, and soups, in the dining room were, apparently, the Observer’s Jay Rayner, Katy McGuinness (the critic from the Irish Independent), and two young women who McGuinness spotted “eat[ing] and drink[ing] very little”.
The next day, Corcoran took to Instagram to decry that some customers weren’t ordering enough food, and that they needed to ‘order correctly, drink some wine, and justify [their] presence’, or ‘our types of tiny family run restaurants’ would not exist anymore.
A pie at The Yellow Bittern when it opened cost £45.
The next day, Corcoran clarified that ‘any member of the organised working class’ could afford a long, boozy meal at The Yellow Bittern ‘once a week or once a month’.
The Yellow Bittern is only open for four hours at lunch and doesn’t accept credit-card payments.
Outside of lunch hours, the space operates as a bookshop run by co-owners Oisin Davies and Corcoran’s partner Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones – the daughter of Princess Margaret’s first husband, the Earl of Snowdon, who was most recently portrayed in Season 3 of The Crown.
If Corcoran’s one-two jab was a carefully staged bit of old-fashioned marketing, then it worked a treat. The reaction has veered between gushing and outraged with almost nothing in between: chef Jackson Boxer wrote that the restaurant has ‘a commitment, a belief, in the supreme human quality of cooking simply and generously’; meanwhile, Joe Bishop, writing in The Fence, called it ‘an outrageous bit of bullshit’. The London Standard, not having the courage of a single conviction, published two opposing takes. The posts precipitated such a discourse event horizon – “restaurants have become too expensive and hostile!”, “the customer isn’t always right!”, “my culture (operating cash only restaurants) is not your costume!” – that Corcoran had to climb down, using a phrase I used to often hear from restaurateurs upset by cultural dissections of their places of escape: ‘It’s only lunch!’
But we all know it’s more than lunch. Whether we are conscious of it or not, the places we choose to eat – their aesthetics, where they are, who they serve – communicate something about ourselves. The Yellow Bittern serves as a useful Rorschach test: to its acolytes, Corcoran is striking a blow against the increasing homogenisation of London dining, returning to a time before the Fall when it was possible to open idiosyncratic restaurants that refused to pander to customers. But to its detractors, The Yellow Bittern is cosplay, a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals and real aristos whose idea of a ‘working-class customer’ looks less like the nurses at the nearby UCLH and more like Jimmy Hoffa. It’s Norman’s Cafe for people who go to Rochelle Canteen: all the unresolved contradictions of modern London dining physically manifested in £6 soda bread. It’s a rich text, even before you get into the important matter of whether the food is any good.
Sometimes the punishment – in this case, invasive articles by The Sun and The Mail and a flood of fake negative reviews – does not fit the offence. Corcoran’s real crime is ‘being annoying’, but he has annoyed a food media that customarily celebrates this kind of food and aesthetic. The Yellow Bittern’s austere style places it within a lineage that includes Café Deco and St. John (where a pie is £50 and no one complains), but pushes this sensibility to its limit, almost provoking us to examine the motivations of restaurants that are designed to look as simple and unmediated as possible. It’s an uncanny valley: almost ‘on trend’ but one step removed – enough to make people feel uncomfortable. It fits in with the current Irish resurgence at restaurants like Café Cecilia, The Devonshire and Shankey’s, but its menu and carefully curated decor has a more ambiguous relationship with modern Ireland, romantically referencing a bygone age, pre-EU and pre-Celtic Tiger. Its lack of online reservations and cash-only system sets up comparisons with London’s present-day diaspora restaurants – most notably Singburi – although The Yellow Bittern has particular reasons for doing so. (Corcoran prefers cash because he views the move to card as ‘part of an alienating process which removes … humanity, replacing it with technology,’ a motivation that strikes me as one rung less noble than ‘tax evasion’).