Like eunuchs in a brothel
Tommy Gilhooly sits down with The Yellow Bittern's Hugh Corcoran, London's most controversial chef, to discuss the horror of small plates and where critics go wrong
A bowl filled near to the brim with spat-out red sits on a denuded table. The Yellow Bittern has just finished a wine tasting session. Post-luncheon cigarettes go up all round, lit, of course, by Cook’s Matches. Hugh Corcoran, sat at the table, is a busy maître. Our conversation is squeezed in before a book launch being hosted that evening at The Bittern. The kitchen tap drips through our conversation like an impatient clock: dud, dud, dud.
‘I like the silence, and I like the chatter. I like the sounds of plates and knives and forks and cooking.’ Hugh is explaining how The Bittern first hatched into existence in his mind. He likes white tablecloths too: ‘I think it reflects the light well. I think it represents a ceremony – of a meal.’ Knock, knock. A delivery for the bookshop below the restaurant – providing a dash of Beckett and a soupçon of Proust – disturbs our conversation.
I take the opportunity to look at our surroundings. The Bittern’s décor – pale-yellow walls, canvases everywhere, photos scattered, patron letters and cartoons pinned up; an elegance mixed with a rough-and-readiness – seems modelled on two Soho institutions: The French House and The Academy Club. What’s impressive is The Bittern has achieved this fresh out of the womb. It doesn’t feel like a place that has only been open for half a year.
Each photo, painting and scratch has a story. Hugh tells me some. A polaroid of Shane MacGowan (face shadowed, but recognisable from the profile of his ears) was taken by Hugh’s life partner and co-owner of The Bittern, Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal. They were good friends, Hugh casually mentions. Above McGowan is the writer Brendan Behan, so sloshed his naval cap is worn at a 45-degree angle. That one was taken by Frances’s father, Sir Tony Jones-Armstrong. They were also good friends. And the portrait of Lenin (which has caused quite the stir in print) was bought by Hugh’s mother in the Soviet Union. Hugh has carried Vlad with him everywhere, from his time training as a cook in the Basque Country, to Paris, and finally to where we sit now: 20 Caledonian Road, London.
James Joyce is pinned up too. And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, gourmands and imbibers, is ‘nes’ – as Joyce once put it in Ulysses. No, says Hugh, he never intended to court controversy. Yes, it has made The Bittern what it is today: packed at twelve and two (the only sittings) and recently dubbed ‘the most controversial restaurant in London’ by The New York Times. Due to the insults dished out on Hugh’s social media – at cheapskates opting for tap water rather than wine, and at ‘ignorant’ critics – the restaurant has ruffled feathers. All the main British papers have descended on The Bittern. A handful of dissenters have dared to chef kiss it in print.
‘The only answer I can give is this is a restaurant which is very human’, Hugh begins, ‘but yet has had lots of media attention.’ Other restaurants would attract controversy too, if only they were not strangled by PR, Hugh believes. He grew up in Belfast where, ‘politics and having very strong opinions on things were quite normal.’ He draws a musical analogy: ‘I think it’s quite interesting that myself and two of my best friends, who have formed a band called Kneecap, have created such controversy on different levels within the British establishment. […] We’re seen as being controversial, but the things we say are perhaps not so controversial at home. Or maybe we are just full of controversy, because we just say exactly what we think about the world.’
‘When critics are divided, the chef is in accordance with himself’, Oscar Wilde once nearly said. ‘It’s a good quote’, Hugh chuckles. He returns his own: ‘Brendan Behan’s old quip about critics is that they are like eunuchs in a brothel: that they see it done every day, that they know how it is done, but they just can’t do it themselves.’ The Bittern is, consequently, more influenced by clientele than pundits: ‘I try not to let restaurant critics have too much influence on what we do, because they’re not the people that are going to come and eat in your restaurant every day.’ Still, Hugh admits critics are not totally impotent: ‘They do have an influence ultimately on who comes, and who doesn’t come, to your restaurant.’
Personalities, relationships and Marxist-Leninism: that is what Hugh believes has been mistakenly foregrounded in reviews. The Bittern has a well-stocked bookshop adjacent to the wine cellar, and literary criticism serves as a measure for how rancid restaurant criticism has turned: ‘The book critics in the LRB [London Review of Books] don’t spend the whole time talking about the personal relationships of the authors. They talk about the work, the books, and what they’ve produced. And so, I think restaurant criticism today has done itself a disservice, because it’s turned into a sort of tabloid-style journalism, which people read just for a kick on a Sunday afternoon – but they don’t read it seriously as an intellectual contribution to journalism.’ This is down to, Hugh believes, a lack of effort among reviewers to develop their critical faculties: ‘Particularly when it comes to the wine, I find them completely ignorant of what they are eating and drinking.’
Instead, he's interested in writing by cooks for cooks. Those that can craft a sentence and a roux. Richard Olney, Elizabeth David and Patience Gray are a few venerable names Hugh reels off. As for living critics today, curiosity is essential. Nicholas Lander – formally L'Escargot, now at the FT – is one contemporary critic lucky enough to have this characteristic, according to Hugh, because: ‘He knows how to run a restaurant, he knows how to choose wine, how to drink wine, how to eat food.’ Lander can also talk wine: he expertly listed the vintages of the bottles in The Bittern’s cellar during a visit. ‘Extremely impressive work. That’s what I would expect. And I hold him up as a shining example of what a restaurant critic could – and should – be.’
The surprising digestif to this narrative has been Hugh’s flight from social media. He’s exited the brothel with its eunuch-critics, to follow Behan. Critical of digital technology (the restaurant being strictly cash-only), Hugh’s more at peace lounging in the garden than scrolling Instagram, but admits: ‘Maybe I’ve proven that you need to be online to make the restaurant successful, because the reason the restaurant is so well-known in the media is because of social media.’ And something more significant has been proven too by The Great Yellow Bittern Controversy: ‘That the mainstream media follows, very closely, social media, and not the other way around. I think that’s very worrying for mainstream professional journalism.’ Cynics might believe the Lenin portrait, and Instagram ranting, to be a dexterous marketing ploy; to borrow the Soviet term, a kind of culinary agitprop. But Hugh says his only ambition going forward is that The Bittern can close more, allowing them to concentrate on one well-executed service.
One trend Hugh took aim at online was at multiple people sharing the same plate. Is this the result of London’s wider ‘small plates’ trend? It’s not just London, Hugh informs me, Paris has been plagued too: ‘I find it very irritating, I don’t think it works as a dining experience to be perfectly honest.’ Having trained in the Basque Country, Hugh explains how small plates are better termed – and consumed – as raciones and pintxos there: ‘When you have plates to share, they’re often a whole turbot, or a whole cote de boeuf, which is obviously to share because you’d never eat it for one person.’ This differs from what has emerged in London: ‘I’m probably going to offend people here, other restaurateurs, but I feel like some of these places, you go into them, and you don’t even have a table. You’re just told to stand at a counter. But it costs the same as a restaurant where you would have a table.’
Setting and atmosphere are therefore central to The Bittern’s culinary philosophy: ‘Where I go is where I feel comfortable, even if the food or wine isn’t to my taste.’ In fact, restaurants are, for Hugh, connected to the wider arts: ‘When you have that idea of “everything for everyone”, it means that art is for everyone, food is for everyone, wine is for everyone, literature is for everyone. Everything we have here – nature, beauty – OK, it cannot be for everyone in capitalist society, because it’s obviously for the people who can afford to come and eat here – but all the beauty of life, all the joy of living, exists here: art, literature, music, wine, food, conversation, social interaction. That’s the kind of world we want to build in a more general sense. I suppose we have created a little island of it here.’
While utopian, the Bittern is also knowingly nostalgic. Hugh admits that: ‘We’re nostalgically looking to a time that was more gentle and more human.’ Writers have accused the restaurant of a certain small-c-conservatism at odds with its purported Marxist leanings. But what is it exactly that The Bittern is trying to conserve, or revive?
Dining in the Bittern, with co-owners Hugh, Frances and Oisín Daviesholding court from the open kitchen, one is indeed reminded of a bygone world. It seems close to the one cooked up in A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. In this gourmand’s memoir, interwar French restaurants are revealed as gladiatorial arenas, where patrons often patronise, and chefs hold their own. Technical knowledge of wine and cookery is lavishly celebrated. Philistinism is boiled alive. And rather than commercial premises, the restaurants Liebling frequented (and sketched and adored) felt like being in someone’s actual, domestic kitchen – and were, therefore, much closer to the charming chaos of a pub. Liebling said the primary requirement for writing well about food was a ‘good appetite’. The richness of Liebling’s writing was therefore dependent on the richness of the food he gorged on – and that of the environments he gorged within. Liebling was one critic, then, that seemed aware that, while cooks can get on without critics, critics will starve (or at least their prose will) without cooks.
Tommy Gilhooly has written for The Telegraph, The Fence, and Vittles.