1 week Ago By Slutty Cheff
I spend a lot of time lamenting viral TikTok restaurants, the ones that are spreading round the city like an STD, infecting our restaurant culture so rapidly that not even the sex clinic on Dean Street can save us. There is something deeply uncomfortable and desperate about it all. The menus are designed to satisfy algorithms over appetite.
There is no nuance, just straight up excess: volcanic portions of chips topped with all kinds of deep fried shit, comically large chunks of barbecued meat, and all the godforsaken stretchy cheese. Influencers rush to these places with their ticket for a free meal in the form of a little blue tick. Then comes their weird telesales-style performance, where they try so desperately to convince us – the bill-paying eater – that their meal is “the BEST in London”.
They speak with AI-generated authenticity, and look into the camera with deranged delight when they achieve the all-important cheese pull. (I wonder if choking cases in A&E have gone up since all the cheese pulling malarkey?) The bottom of their video is marked with a little sign saying “Ad”. So how are we to believe them and their opinions? There are, of course, genuinely great spots that also happen to have gone viral.
Beigel Bake on Brick Lane, for example. TikTok loves that joint. But it earned its stripes well before social media smothered it with its sticky hands; people queued for those bagels before any sort of virality, because they’re damn good.
But nowadays the queues come first, and the acclaim comes later, or maybe never. Is quality actually important anymore? I know I can be too harsh, too judgemental, and take matters of the stomach slightly too seriously. Who knows, maybe TikTok is right – maybe the shiny, flamboyant, novelty-item restaurants are actually nice? I decided to undergo some serious research.
I took to Instagram to find some viral food spots and landed on the “restaurant” whose notoriety, buzz and fame baffled me the most: a place serving jacket potatoes. I won’t name the specific venue, but I will tell you that it is a garish red, it rhymes with “thud prose”, and it promises to deliver “the greatest spuds on earth”. I went with an open mind but the minute I saw a queue of easily over a hundred people waiting for a fucking jacket potato, I reverted back to being my deeply cynical, snobby self.
I hate queueing. I am impatient. I don’t think there are many things worth queuing for, apart from maybe A&E.
But I’d come all this way and Vogue had already signed off on the column, so I had to do it. I was undercover, I was Louis Theroux in a brothel. So I joined the back of the damn queue and stood in a puddle of my boiling blood.
Twenty minutes in, as I eavesdropped on the conversation between two blokes behind me, I realised that they too were here on some sort of morbid curiosity quest. I got talking to them and learned they worked for a fast-food, to-go chain most people were familiar with five years ago. They were here because their brand was struggling, and so they were trying to understand what it is that makes people queue up for food these days.
“Because it’s viral innit,” one of the guys said, as if the word “viral” was synonymous with excellence. An hour passed – an hour! – and I still wasn’t at the front. I was getting more and more pissed off – I felt humiliated, fast losing all respect for myself and everyone else in the queue: is this how we were choosing to spend our precious hours on earth? I don’t even like fucking jacket potatoes.
Every now and again some peppy bastard came outside and gave us all – the victims of the queue – an overly-animated thumbs up accompanied by the patronising bellow, “Nearly there guys!” I felt angry at this employee. He knows we are mugs, but like a cult leader, he doesn’t sympathise, he is high on his power. Why wouldn’t he be? He has achieved some weird dystopian miracle – making people queue for hours for a potato.
At one point I nearly gave up, my knickers were more than twisted, they’d actually formed themselves into a little noose. After what felt like an eternity I arrived at the front. Inside, the same peppy bastard with the thumbs was occupied solely with filming content for social media.
He was knocking about the place with far too much personality and a tripod. There were five staff. I had been baffled by why I had had to wait a 90 minutes for someone to arrange a bowl of pre-cooked items, but now I understood: because the employees are not cooking, they are frolicking about in a state of viral euphoria.
Is this all some kind of sick joke? By the time I got served, I was a broken woman. The sense of humour had left my body a long time ago, but I had just enough strength left to mutter the words, “Can I get The Spudfather please.” I took my cardboard box of carbs and meat outside and sat on the grass.
The Spudfather consisted of a jacket potato, melted garlic butter, a special three cheese mix, chilli con carne and a chilli mayonnaise sauce. It weighed a tonne. It cost 11 quid.
I took a mouthful. Holy God. It was so incredibly mediocre, if anything, actually bad .
Despite all the sauces and excess cheese and butter, it was, would you believe, under seasoned! At the risk of coming across as patronising, there is no real cooking involved with this dish, all you need to do is sprinkle the right amount of salt on it. At this point I was done. I surround myself with chefs and good food.
This day felt like committing a hate crime. I put the remainder of my jacket potato in my Lime Bike basket and decided that that very evening, I would do my bit to stop this absurdity, and join a queue for an actually good restaurant. And so, that evening, I sat outside Brutto in Farringdon, £5 negroni and fag in hand, “queueing” for my table in the last of the sunshine.
Secure in the knowledge that once my wait was over, I would enter an excellent, timeless restaurant and have a brilliant dinner..
