The Yellow Bittern, an 18-seat restaurant and bookstore near King’s Cross station, hardly looks like the most divisive lunch spot in London.
It feels more like the farmhouse of a retired professor: Customers ring a bell to enter, then hang their coats on pegs by the door, while pots of Irish stew simmer in the tiny open kitchen. The food is hearty and hot, served with open jars of mustard. The décor includes books on Bertolt Brecht and an accordion.
But the cooking and ambience are not the only reasons that London’s top restaurant critics, chefs and gourmands have come to dine and opine. Many are curious for a taste of the controversy swirling around its head cook, Hugh Corcoran, a deeply read communist and vocal Instagrammer who managed to enrage half the city soon after the Yellow Bittern opened in October.
“I’ve arrived at dinner parties or meals with people and then we all say, ‘Shall we discuss the Yellow Bittern?’” said Margot Henderson, the chef of Rochelle Canteen in East London and a pioneer of modern British cooking. “It’s the talk of the town.”
Much of that talk boils down to issues of class, as it so often does in Britain. The Bittern is cash-only and open for two seatings, at noon and 2 p.m., only during the workweek. Detractors have noted that few Londoners can partake in a leisurely, multicourse midday meal with a bottle of wine, and fewer still can justify one that easily costs $300 for a group of four. And the suggestion that they could — coming from a man with a larger-than-life drawing of Vladimir Lenin in his restaurant — has set off a yowl of irritation.
“The food was good,” Jonathan Nunn, the founder of Vittles, a London food publication, wrote in an email after he reviewed the Bittern, “but this is like asking people on the Titanic whether they ate well. It was too colored by everything else going on around it.”
It’s not that the Bittern is unusually expensive: Mr. Corcoran, 35, stands in a long line of London chefs serving cheffy riffs on country food. Modern British cuisine took off in the 1990s and still reigns over London. This nose-to-tail approach to cooking is most prominent at St. John, a group of restaurants co-founded by Ms. Henderson’s husband, the chef Fergus Henderson.
Mr. Corcoran — who is from Belfast, doesn’t see Northern Ireland as a legitimate state and holds a passport from the Republic of Ireland — draws more culinary inspiration from his home than from Britain. He’s also been influenced by France and the Basque Country, where he has lived and cooked.
But the hubbub has less to do with his cooking than with his carping. It all started within two weeks after the opening, when Mr. Corcoran, who also buys wine for the Bittern’s extensive wine cellar, took to Instagram to admonish his customers.
“Restaurants are not public benches,” he wrote on Instagram, chastising people for splitting entrees and singling out those who do not drink alcohol. “You are there to spend some money.”
Mr. Corcoran’s post sent shock waves through London, which has built its reputation on a “sorry, pardon me, after you” reflex.
Reviewer after reviewer wrote odes and screeds, hot takes and takedowns. But the storm has only seemed to feed the hype: Tastemakers like Alice Waters have visited. Ms. Henderson, Nigella Lawson, the chef David McMillan and the writer Hilton Als have come by for lunch.
To start, there might be soda bread with thick pats of butter and a silky leek soup. There are main courses like a rabbit and guinea fowl pie with steaming golden pastry. Globules of fat float on top of a flavorful coddle, once a poor man’s stew of boiled sausage and potatoes. For dessert, cream might sluice over an apple tart. Pants unbutton as digestives flow. Guests linger long after the owners start wiping the tables.
Some enthusiasts see Mr. Corcoran and his co-owners — Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones and Oisín Davies, who runs a bookshop in the basement — as mavericks leading a charge against the exploitative idea that the customer is always right. Others celebrate the Bittern as a welcome reaction against fussy “tweezer” food.
But a much louder chorus of critics has gleefully mocked the Bittern, calling it a web of performative paradoxes.
“The idea that it’s a stew and it’s £20 and, ‘by the way, we’d like you to have a £90 bottle of organic red Burgundy with it?’” said David Ellis, the restaurant critic at The Standard. “That’s kind of a fetishization of a working-class life that never existed.”
The owners see it differently. For one thing, they said, they never claimed the Bittern was for the working class. “We have to run a business,” Mr. Corcoran said. “The people who come here are the people who can afford to come here.”
And communism, he said, is about the rights of the workers. It’s about the hours they want to keep, not what hours their customers want to dine.
“What’s the alternative?” he said. “That we start a restaurant that’s open seven days a week, and we employ loads of people and exploit their labor?”
Mr. Corcoran also believes that Londoners should not have to wolf down their soggy midday wraps. They should have time to actually eat and talk — to have a meal, not a meal deal.
“Is this the kind of society that we were trying to create?” he said. “We have to fight for lunch.”
He thinks the criticism may be displaced frustration. The restaurant, he said, “reminds people that they don’t have two hours in the middle of the day to have lunch.”
Lady Frances, 45, who also edits and publishes Luncheon magazine, is the keeper of the Bittern’s conviviality. A gracious and well-connected host and server, she makes sure that guests feel welcome as they sip and sup.
“To make a space that feels warm, for me, that’s the height of this,” she said.
But she has also become an unwilling node of the controversy: Her father, Antony Armstrong-Jones, was the Earl of Snowdon, a renowned photographer and the husband of Princess Margaret. Critics have used her pedigree to attack her and Mr. Corcoran, who is also her romantic partner.
He thinks that’s reductive at best. “People pointing out, like ‘Oh, the communist and the aristocrat?’” he said. “That’s a classic story.”
Lady Frances feels similarly. She has dreamed of helping to build a place where people feel welcome, warm and satisfied. She acknowledges her wealth, but said the focus on her family makes it seem “as if I have no agency.”
Mr. Corcoran feels his background is being wielded against him, too. “It’s also an attitude of like, ‘Entertain us with your Irishness, but don’t get above your station and start telling us what to do,’ ” he said. He prides himself on a brash and unflinching commitment to the unification of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
“You don’t have any choice in Belfast other than to be political,” he said. “To have controversial opinions and to voice those opinions is part of everyday life.”
That’s how he approaches his customers, who he believes are neither always right nor always wrong. (“In such a small place, it’s important to set out your style on Day 1,” he said.) Instead, he sees them as partners: The diners keep the Bittern in business, in exchange for food and wine.
“I hope that the food’s good,” Mr. Corcoran said. “I take pride in making it good. But we don’t expect people to come here because this is the best cooking in London or whatever. We expect people to come here because it’s a convivial space.”
And so far, the Yellow Bittern is working and profitable. The owners have a 10-year lease. So if they can find 36 diners, five times a week? They’ll be fine.
“We’re pretty much full every day since we opened,” he said, shrugging. “So somebody has the time to have lunch.”
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