Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Today’s article is taken from Issue 3 of our print magazine – a whistle-stop tour of the most influential restaurants in the U.K. over the last 75 years. You’ll find entries from Jonathan Nunn, Fay Maschler, Chitra Ramaswamy, Drew Smith, Polly Russell, Andy Hayler, Adam Coghlan and more.
To read the full piece, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, or you can buy the magazine – which contains everything from an investigation into the economics of restaurant influencing, the piece on fruit and vegetable supplier Natoora, a deep dive into the halal influencing scene, and a long read on the history of MFK Fisher’s hidden role in introducing Japanese food to mainstream US culture. Order your copy now!
15 restaurants that changed everything, by those who know
Over the last decade of reviewing restaurants, I have often found myself wondering exactly how everything – by which I mean a unique cocktail of culture, geopolitics, agriculture, immigration, technology, advertising, taste and sometimes even some individual human ingenuity – has conspired to produce the food on my plate. The answer can be hard to come by; you can find plenty of lists about the best restaurants in the country, but none about the most influential. So much of it, sadly, is lost to the record: the Chinese takeaway that first put sesame prawn toast on the menu, the first native fried chicken chain, the people who came up with the korma/madras/jalfrezi/bhuna/vindaloo hierarchy that curry houses abide by to this day.
Still, there are many lineages and hidden influences that the archive can attest to. Some go via the old-fashioned route: one chef teaching another, who teaches another, until there is a whole school of thought. Some influencers are originators who invented something, by design or circumstance, that others wanted to copy. Some are the copycats themselves, who realised how to market something more effectively and reach more people. Between them, they have helped British food culture progress, inventing or altering the formats of restaurants – from the gastropub to small plates – the types of cuisines they put on their menus, and how those dishes are marketed and sold back to us.
We asked some of our favourite critics and industry heads to write about 30 restaurants from the last seventy-five years – a period during which British restaurants have changed unimaginably – that have influenced the way we eat. Of course no list can be exhaustive; we are already self-flagellating for missing out on Berni Inn (democratising eating out), Cranks (vegetarian restaurants), Terroirs (natural wine bars) and The Sugar Club (fusion food). But we hope each entry speaks to how influence works, and the mechanics through which the philosophy of one restaurant, for better or for worse, can reach a whole country. Jonathan Nunn
Below, you can read about 15 of the restaurants. You can find the full list of 30 in the magazine itself.
1952, Bath, George Perry-Smith
The Hole in the Wall set the benchmark for the modern British restaurant. Opened by George Perry-Smith in a basement in Bath in 1952, it went on to influence a whole generation of chefs, including Simon Hopkinson and Joyce Molyneux. Without formal chef training, and influenced by the writing of Elizabeth David, Perry-Smith cooked against the grain of post-war restaurant culture, privileging flavour and ingredients over the then dominant formal French repertoire. Staff worked across kitchen and dining room, the open kitchen – possibly the first in Britain – discouraging bravado and bad manners. Menus were free to roam depending on mood, from jugged hare and kedgeree to curries and salade niçoise, alongside a daily cold table of homemade charcuterie. That eclecticism, paired with an almost radical informality – generous, relaxed, yet deeply serious about ingredients and taste (‘anal rustic’ as some have labelled it) – became its most enduring legacy. Polly Russell
1964, Glasgow, Ali Ahmed Aslam
As origin stories go, it’s up there with Dickens inventing the Christmas turkey. The year was 1972. The chef was Ali Ahmed Aslam, whose father, Noor Mohammed, arrived in Scotland in the 1940s from the Punjab and opened what’s thought to be Glasgow’s first Indian restaurant in the late 1950s: Green Gates Cafe. In 1964, he and his son opened Shish Mahal. One night (allegedly), a complaint came from a bus driver: the chicken tikka was too dry. Aslam, compelled by a potent stew of racism, necessity and ingenuity, upended a can of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup over the meat. Chicken tikka masala, and a whole new British heritage cuisine, was born. The country would never be the same again. Soon, La Cr.me De La Cr.me, housed in an outr. red and white cake of a building in nearby Finnieston, became the biggest Indian restaurant in Europe. Glasgow’s curry kings continue to mythologise and remake the cuisine, and themselves, turning this into a spicy saga of booms, busts, bhunas, bling, and flashy GlaswegAsian characters destined to write tell-all memoirs called Tikka Look At Me Now. *Chitra Ramaswamy
1965, Preston, Harry Latham and Raymond Allen
In the summer of 1968, a notice in the Lancashire Telegraph advertised an expansion programme for the American fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken. At this point, KFC had opened only three test branches, in Preston, Samlesbury and Liverpool, but now Britain was ready for more. The advert read: ‘A unique opportunity to join an international organisation at the beginning of the “TAKE AWAY” boom.’ KFC could be on here just for introducing the country to one of the giants of franchised American fast food, a decade before the first UK McDonald’s. But really its influence lies in its copycats, and the copycats of its copycats. Southern Fried Chicken opened in Reading in the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by the British-Tamil Morley’s in London and the halal British-Pakistani Dixy in Solihull, then Sam’s, Chicken Cottage, XFCs, Morley’s dupes and their gentrified doppelgangers. American fried chicken has become the most British of foods, with mutations like east London’s Bengali-influenced PFC culture and Manchester’s spicy dip burger wars even becoming fully regional. Jonathan Nunn
1967, London, Albert and Michel Roux
In a real sense, Le Gavroche invented London gastronomy. Albert and Michel Roux opened the restaurant on Lower Sloane Street in 1967, but moved it to Upper Brook Street in Mayfair in 1981, where the plush basement showed off their classical inclinations, a mix of the farmhouse and high-end luxury. There was baked potato with caviar, boudin Joceline, the much-copied soufflé Suissesse, a lot of cream and eggs and always colour. Albert, in particular, was muse, mentor and magician. He fostered the supply lines from Rungis Market outside Paris, which gave his chefs the tools to work with. He cajoled Michelin to support them. All of it paid off: Le Gavroche became the first UK restaurant to earn one, two and three Michelin stars. More significantly, he turned the basement into a training kitchen that gave young cooks vision, discipline, technique and the confidence to express themselves. Many went on to become well known and influential in their own right: Pierre Koffmann, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Rowley Leigh, Jason Atherton, Monica Galetti, Clare Smyth, Christian Delteil and his own son, Michel Jr. Drew Smith
1971, Glasgow, Ronnie Clydesdale
Only a handful of restaurants are so legendary that, like Madonna, they can be distilled into a single word. And so it is with the Chip, Glasgow’s proto-restaurant, which looks like the inside of a Victorian glasshouse and defines the city so categorically that almost all its famous folk have either dined at its foliage-enveloped courtyard tables, or waited on them. Opened by Ronnie Clydesdale in 1971, the Chip revolutionised Scottish cuisine at a time when the majority of the nation’s premium catch was exported to Europe and fresh local produce was for the home kitchen. The Chip served up cod landed in Oban, house-stuffed haggis, beef hough, Orkney clapshot and Shetland salted ling. In a depressingly apt update, its fifty-year rule ended abruptly in 2022 when the Clydesdale family sold it to the woefully generic pub chain Greene King. Chitra Ramaswamy
1979, everywhere, Tim Martin
No matter how hard you try to fight it, there are times when you cannot argue with the numbers. Across its branches, Wetherspoons has sold 10 million portions of fish and chips in the last decade and is the biggest seller of curry in the country, uniting the UK’s two undisputed national dishes.
