The best and worst of London food (media) in 2024
2024: The Year in Charlatanry. Vittles Review of the Year, part 2.
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Today is the second part of our review of the year. To listen to part one - our end of year podcast with Adam Coghlan, Jonathan Nunn and Hester van Hensbergen - then please click here. If you wish to access all paywalled articles in full, including Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday, then please subscribe below for £7/month or £59/year – each subscription helps us pay writers fairly and gives you access to our entire back catalogue.
The best and worst of London food (media) in 2024, by Jonathan Nunn
If I had to sum up the last year in the London food world, the first word that would come to mind is ‘charlatanry’. 2024 has been the year of gold leaf dosa, tuna fight club, chocolate covered strawberries, luxe jacket potatoes, 90 minute queues for inedible sandwiches, the Ilford biryani wars, the Ilford mango soft-serve wars, the New Haven pizza wars, adana kebabs sold by the metre, the Imran Khan-themed biryani shop, and short-lived micro-trends so absurd that the era of Salt Bae has started to look like a relatively conservative and stable interregnum. Hidden gem culture has spiralled into farce: this year I witnessed the food hall inside Battersea Power Station, a £9 billion development so huge that TfL redrew the zones of the Tube map to fit round it, get called a ‘hidden gem’ on an Instagram reel. At the time of writing, the single biggest London trend on TikTok is a sandwich shop in Bromley that puts mashed potato in between bread.
This year has also seen the biggest transformational shift in British food media within my lifetime. The most influential archivists of London’s food are now Gobble PR and Jolly, a YouTube duo with 4.2 million followers whose videos depict amazed British people pretending to eat Five Guys for the first time for the benefit of Americans – an act of treason that would, in happier times, see them sent to Tyburn. Meanwhile, three of what would have historically been the most influential positions in London food media – the Observer restaurant critic, the Evening Standard restaurant critic, and the editor of Observer Food Monthly – are either vacant or abolished, with no clarity on whether these jobs will continue to exist in 2025. This radical transfer of power – from traditional to social media, from guys who went to public school to guys who went to slightly less impressive public schools – is now complete.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I might have been more even-handed about this shift; that maybe this is the price that needs to be paid for the overdue democratisation of taste-making. But I was kidding myself: this is a moment of steep decline, equivalent to the critical gutting that has happened across other cultural media. Food writers used to shape culture as much as they documented it; over the last five decades, the Standard and the Observer alone have given us Jane Grigson, Nigel Slater, Fay Maschler, Delia Smith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It’s hard to see where their replacements are going to come from – not because there isn’t talent on social media, but because there is little ambition left in print media to take the subject of food seriously in the way it once did. Maybe this is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a gurn and an undisclosed paid-partnership.
I often think about the favourite line of a certain restaurant critic: that the only job of being a critic is to sell papers. But what do you do once the papers stop being sold? What do you do once the paper itself is sold? Now we know the answer: sell McNuggets.
2024: The Year in Charlatanry
Comedown of the year
11.00am
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Meals of the year 10-6
Note: I have left off a few meals that I plan to write about next year
10. Dried shrimp rice roll, at West Rice Roll King (New York)
9. Roast suckling pig on rice, at Peach Garden (Birmingham)
8. Lapin à la moutarde, at Josephine Bouchon
7. Tablier de sapeur, pike quenelles and rhum baba, at Le Garet (Lyon)
6. End of year Christmas meal at 40 Maltby Street
Observation of the year
Most eaten dish of the year
In the first half of 2024, I got into a habit of ordering the khumb palak from Kokum in East Dulwich, an exceptional side-dish-turned-main of spinach and mushroom. But it’s too expensive to justify eating regularly, so I switched my allegiance to Z’s Dera on Rye Lane, a Pashtun take-away whose palak sabzi is the goth mirror version of Kokum’s, long-stewed, dun-green and absolutely delicious on rice. The general standard is almost as good as Afghan Grill in Bethnal Green, and when combined with their excellent chapli kebabs and kabuli pulao this combo has been a constant life-saver when I’m out of all other options.
Freudian slip of the year
Further sections in this newsletter
Comedown of the year
Meals of the year 10-6
Most eaten dish of the year
Observation of the year
Freudian slip of the year
Poster of the year
Letter to the editor of the year
Influencer of the year
“My father would womanise; he would drink; he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.”
Most creative gaming of Google Reviews
Most ‘will this do?’ moment in 2024 restaurant criticism
Restaurant of the year
Collab of the year
Biggest fall from grace this year
Least dignified Topjaw appearance of the year
Meals of the year 5-1
Favourite articles of the year
Surprise of the year
Fiasco of the year
Predictions for 2025
Most eaten dish of the year
Observation of the year
Freudian slip of the year