Between the wars, and after the Second World War, London’s restaurants were considered very much below the standard of other European capitals. Some were restaurants of the middling English sort, serving beef and mutton and greens, sausage and mash, apricots and custard. But in Soho the restaurant trade flourished because of the influence of French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese cooking. In the purlieus of Soho, too, an informality of eating was introduced or, rather, reintroduced. The first sandwich bar, Sandy’s of Oxendon Street, was opened in 1933; very soon sandwich bars and the new snack bars were springing up all over the capital. This revolution in taste was complemented, twenty years later, by the opening of the first coffee bar, also in Soho, the Mika, in Frith Street.
The world of quick eating and quick drinking, a phenomenon previously noted in the pie-shops of the fourteenth century no less than in the baked-potato vans of the nineteenth, thus re-established itself. Sandwiches are now the staple ingredient of the London lunch, from the Pret A Manger chain to the corner shop on a busy junction. There has been a concomitant increase in fast food, from burgers of beef to wings of chicken. The staple of the city diet remains the same, therefore, while the statistics of its voracious appetite also remain constant. The budget of London households, for “restaurants and cafés … take-aways and snacks” is, according to a survey of national statistics, approximately “a third higher than for the United Kingdom as a whole.”
London’s reputation as a culinary inferno was gradually dispelled during the 1980s, when large restaurants catering to every taste in food or ambience became fashionable. Now the London customer can choose between monkfish tempura and chilli breast of chicken with coconut rice, grilled rabbit with polenta and braised octopus with chickpeas and coriander. Many of these restaurants soon became flourishing commercial enterprises; their chefs were recognised and controversial London figures, their owners part of a chic world of art and society. In the 1990s the connection between food and commerce was rendered all the more distinctive by the “floating” of certain restaurants on the Stock Exchange; others have been bought by large companies as a profitable form of speculation. Some of the more recently established restaurants are very large indeed, and the fact that few tables remain unbooked is testimony to the permanent and characteristic voracity of Londoners. That is why it has always been known as a city of markets.
CHAPTER 35
As the citizens of thirteenth-century London walked down West Cheap-now Cheapside-away from the smell of the Shambles and the fish stalls, they passed shops where harnesses and saddles were sold, where cord-wainers plied their trade, and where mercers and the drapers laid out their fabrics upon their stalls. Beyond these lay Poultry, of which the meaning is self-explanatory, and Coneyhope Lane where rabbits were sold. Gracechurch Street was originally “Grass Church” street, named after the herbs which were sold within it.
