A cluster fuck of trends?

I’ve read many a snarky post on the way that food trends seem to come and go in London at the moment, be it the sudden proliferation of burger places, or the fairy ring like growth up of ramen joints in Soho. So I decided to look at it from a different point of view.

After all in other industries it’s very common to find similar merchants or manufacturers in a common geographical locale. It's usually referred to as clustering or aggregation economics. 

As I understand it one of the key features of aggregation economics is that there is an increased amount of competition within the group. This certainly seems to hold true with a couple of the recent trends. The swift growth in numbers of new burger restaurants following the success of Meat Liquor has certainly demonstrated that is both a market hungry for a better product and people willing to provide it. Whether one views this as a passing trend that will burn out, or as I’m inclined to do, as a welcome readjustment of way the burger is viewed within London’s restaurant scene. One only has to take a short hop on the Eurostar to experience what it was like in London about 4 years ago.

Parisians demonstrating how much they'd love a cluster fuck of decent burger joints..

With respect to the other hyped trends, I would again argue that they are merely taking a much loved food style and elevating it to a higher quality level. For fried chicken we can see that there was evidently a market for it. See the enormous numbers of chicken cottages, KFCs and their ilk. However the shocking welfare standards that the chickens endure and the low quality of the product was obviously putting a segment of the market off, thus it makes perfect sense to follow a revival of one type of fast food with that of another.

Other obvious examples of clustering within the London restaurant scene would be the revival of Soho as a food destination and the more recent explosion of activity within Brixton Market Row and Brixton Village. It is not for nothing that Soho has been the epicentre of the no bookings places, it is surely one of the few places in the UK where one can safely go to eat without a booking safe in the knowledge that should one’s first choice be unavailable there are plenty more excellent places within very short walking distance.

The quick growth of the restaurant scene in Brixton can similarly be explained by the benefits of clustering in that potential customers are drawn to the area and see the diversity on offer, thus prompting repeat custom. It being home to a shit load of affluent mainly white folk who are newish to the area is a completely different blog post, it is still a beautiful example of businesses clustering in a new locale.

Shonben Yokocho : Piss alley, god how I wish we had this in London.
http://bloodandwasabi.com/archives/piss-alley-the-spiritual-home-of-yakitori

Finally, I’d like to dwell briefly on the Ramen renaissance in Soho, we have an area with a high concentration of restaurants, lots of potential customers who are prepared to pay slightly more for high quality produce, a dish that has previously been popularized by the Wagamama group. So what better place for there to be flowering of new openings? 

Bad Ramen

I don’t really understand noodles. They’re rather like rice, not anything I grew up with. Yep I know how to make them, I’ve cooked them, I’ve followed detailed recipes from Harold McGee to make proper alkaline noodles to go in Tonkotsu broth lovingly distilled from a shit load of bones. This doesn’t mean I get them; it doesn’t confer upon me an appreciation of their finer subtleties.

Many moons ago I when I worked at Oddbins people would come in and ask for Champagne for special celebrations and the like, they’d ask about Dom Perignon or Krug, and I’d question them as to whether they thought it’d be money well spent? Did they drink Champagne enough to really justify all that extra cost, wouldn’t they prefer to buy a couple of bottles of Bollinger Grande Annee for the same price? I wasn’t trying to make people feel foolish, I was just worried that as we get to the higher price points the law of diminishing returns starts to gnaw away at the obvious differences, leaving subtleties. And the one thing I do know about subtleties, is how easy they are to miss. Just talk to me about interpersonal relations for a pretty swift demonstration of that.

So anyway, I’ve read loads about Ramen noodles, pretty much the whole of the first issue of Lucky Peach was one long soggy love letter to them. They sounded awesome. David Chang outlined their sheer wondrous brilliance in many a third person piece, and I wanted in on all this good stuff. But where was I to cut my teeth?

A full day’s worth of boiling, kneading, chopping and, well actually more boiling again, supplied me with a bowl of steaming porky, fatty broth. Rustically cut noodles curled around my fork (I didn’t have any chop sticks), the still ever so viscous yolk of my soft boiled egg leaked dangerously into the soup whiule scattered herbs and spring onions gleamed emerald round the puddles of fat languorously coalescing on the surface. Yet still I didn’t really feel that I’d got it. It was nice, I had a glorious sense of satisfaction over a dish well made, but it didn’t feel like it was mine to love. There was no tugging at heartstrings, no moments of wistful reminiscence; I just didn’t have any context. Not having grown up eating noodles, I didn’t really have a backlog of flavour memories with which to compare what I’d made. It was frustrating; deep down I knew that if it had been roast potatoes, I’d have had an opinion. Fuck yes I would have done, and I’d not have been backward about coming forward with it. You’d have known, because I’d have told you, how much better, or indeed worse, I could have done the potatoes. But with these noodles I was silent.

When you’re mighty geeky like I am, there’s a certain helplessness about being confronted by things that you can’t judge flavour wise. It’s sad, but I’ll admit to liking to know about what I’m eating, I feel a little lost at sea when I don’t, that little boy lost in China town not knowing what in the world to order.

Btw, read into this whatever you will….