One Vision: The rise of the 'single-issue' venue
We look at the growth of foodie venues which focus their efforts on a handful of dishes, debate the pros and cons, then get distracted by animals and other people's bad ideas
A couple of months ago, we spent several hundred words and a not-inconsiderable amount of ire mouthing off about the fact that we’re nearing the foodie interior design singularity. You know, the point at which all the streetlights get replaced with ten-foot-high filament bulbs, and the amount of exposed brickwork and industrial venting on display leads to hipsters wandering for days looking for the bar, unaware that they’ve actually been wandering around a disused warehouse the whole time.
We said that every venue seemed the same nowadays, and decried the fact that it can sometimes be difficult to tell one place from another. Well, when one door closes, another flies open – say goodbye to the problem of everywhere seeming too similar, and wave hello to the age of the single-issue venue.
Yes, the days of accommodating that one friend who wants something vastly different from everyone else are over, folks – in the brave new world, you can eat Chinese buns at the Chinese bun joint, or chicken wings at the chicken wing place, or you can have yourself a big ol’ bowl of nothing. Finally, the power in the food world is in the hands of the right people – culinary obsessives with the planning skills to outflank their friends, and the gall to force said friends to a restaurant that only has two things on the menu.
It’s a phenomenon which we reckon can be traced to a couple of different places. You can see its roots in the street food movement, which does add up when you think about it – if your kitchen store cupboard consists of the pockets of your 1930s-inspired tweed apron and, if you’re lucky, a shelf, you’re going to stick to a slender menu.
The other side of the equation was best summed up by hirsute food writer and sometime Masterchef-interrogator Jay Rayner in one word – “Tokyo-isation.” In the Japanese capital, there are somewhere in the region of 150,000 restaurants, so it’s important to stand out. You stand out by producing tasty dishes whose reputation then spreads far and wide, and it’s easier to put together one classic than it is to come up with a whole set of them – just ask [INSERT SNIDE POP MUSIC REFERENCE HERE].
Making the best use of limited resources to stand out in an ever-expanding market by focusing on doing one thing really, really well; it’s hard to see how anyone could disagree, unless they’re the kind of person who demands that each part of their meal be more exotic and ridiculous than the last, like some deranged Medieval king. Yep, single-issue venues, all good in our book. All the best, The Skinny.
"A cat cafe is not a cafe, it's a room with a cat in it."
But then there’s the cereal thing. You see, it is a good idea to focus your energy on crafting one dish to perfection before moving on to another, or to say “I make donuts, and only donuts, but they’re very good donuts so whatcha gonna do about it?” It is not a good idea to look at a bowl of chocolate-coated bits of rice, stare longingly into the eyes of the cartoon monkey on the side of the box, throw down your spoon and say, “Yep, this. We’ll do… let’s make… let’s have lots of these.”
The Cereal Killer Cafe in “London’s trendy Brick Lane” not only manages to be a crap concept with an even crapper pun for a title, but it also compromises the whole idea of a venue focussing its attention in one area. Like cutting-edge robots that malfunction mid-press conference and start running around in circles, venues like Cereal Killer and The Porridge Cafe make the notion of the single-issue venue seem like a joke. Your macaroon shop is not at the forefront of The New Dining; instead it’s “like that cereal place off of the telly, but with macaroons, yeah?”
Some of these high-profile one-note venues are clearly ridiculous PR stunts, or the frenzied fever dreams of those with more money than sense. Then there are the play-for-laughs knockabouts like #SimplyCrispy, the Belfast-based crisp sandwich shop which described itself as “world leaders in putting crisps in between bread.” Even still, it’s coming to something when a press release promoting the launch of an ‘Owl Cafe’ is met with a shrug rather than a gasp. Well, a shrug followed by disapproving grunts and/or howls of contemptuous laughter.
The aforementioned owl cafe, Annie the Owl in London’s Soho, received over 80,000 applications from people keen to head down and risk a talon to the face during its limited run last month. For the £20 cover charge, punters got two hours with the owls, and some smoothies. The smoothies are the important part of the story, because initially Annie the Owl was branded as 'A Pop Up Bar' promising 'Creatures and Cocktails', until an online brouhaha forced the organisers to put the bottles down and refocus the event as an educational opportunity.
Which from a food standpoint somewhat negates the whole point. After all, there are already buildings with animals inside, designed to educate folk about said animals. They’re called 'zoos', are run by professional animal handlers, and tend not to operate on a pop-up basis. Ditto the growing trend of the ‘cat cafe’, where people pay to sit in a room, with a cup of tea, near a cat. That is not a cafe, it’s a room with a cat in it. Every food spot needs a selling point, but it also need to be, y’know, about the food. Not about a cat.
So when you dodge through the morass of blackboard paint and parquet flooring the next time you’re out and about, embrace the fact you’ll be making your choices early. If you like ramen, go to the ramen place and enjoy deliberating over whether you really want that extra tea-stained egg. If you want a glass of wine, inspect every bottle in the place in a faux-snooty manner, then order a glass of the second cheapest. And if you like cats, just make friends with someone who has one; they might even throw in your tea for free.