Fifteen places open their doors this month and my bank balance has opened a complaint of its own.
LONDON, England – There is a particular silence in a flatshare when the rent email arrives, and it is the silence of four adults all pretending to look at something else on their phones.
The Email
Our landlord writes in a style that I can only describe as warm threat. This morning’s message begins “Hope you are all well!” and ends “Regards, K”, and the middle section explains that the boiler contractor has been paid, which is a way of telling us that we are about to be.
“As discussed, the household contribution for the coming quarter will be reviewed. No action needed at this stage.”
“No action needed at this stage” is the most frightening sentence in the English language, and I include “your call is important to us” and “we need to talk”.
Honor reads it aloud twice in different voices, the second one a bishop. Gideon says nothing at all and opens the fridge as if the answer might be in there. It is not. It contains a jar of capers, half a lemon wearing a small coat of mould, and the sourdough starter that Honor calls Brenda and treats better than any of us.
The Job of the Day
Marjorie, my editor at The London Prat, wants something on the food openings by the end of the day. Not a review, she says, because reviews require eating, and our budget, like the lemon, has gone soft. She wants “a reaction”.
So I read Time Out’s list of the best new London restaurants for November the way a person on a diet reads a menu, which is with every sense apart from taste.
There are fifteen openings on it. Fifteen. There is a Georgian comfort-food place arriving in Soho, a fire-focused Thai restaurant in Clerkenwell, and a rotisserie chicken joint in Nunhead serving South African wines. There is a chophouse in the crypt of a church in Mayfair, which feels like a restaurant that has anticipated my funeral arrangements. There is a burger chain opening its third and largest site in Covent Garden, with a basement speakeasy for dessert and cocktails, as if dessert were something that needed to be kept from the authorities.
And in Notting Hill there is a cafe built entirely around crumpets, with savoury, sweet and cheese-flavoured versions. I have spent my adult life wanting a place that takes the crumpet seriously and now it exists in a postcode I cannot afford to walk through.
The Grievances, in Order of Cost
- A martini, wine and oyster bar opening in Dalston, which I can only afford to stand outside of
- A rooftop restaurant by the river in Temple, where the view alone would cost me a week of rent
- A whole new chophouse with an Eastern European menu, when I cannot get Gideon to eat a cabbage at home
- The word “tasting menu” in any form
- Brenda, who is eating better than I am
I read the list out loud in the kitchen, as a public service, and Honor says it sounds like a roll call at a school I did not get into. Gideon asks which of them does a cheap lunch. I tell him the answer to that question is the pavement outside.
I look at the list again and realise I know someone who would love every single one of these places: the version of me with a salary that has had a conversation with inflation. That version of me books a table for six, says “let’s just get a few things for the middle”, and does not check the right-hand column.
The Evening Tally
Later, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2026 lands, and Time Out’s headline points out that just one London restaurant made it. One. A city of nearly nine million people and countless crumpet fans, represented by a single table.
Gideon takes this personally. “We have more places to eat than anywhere on earth,” he says, “and we’ve sent one.” I tell him that is how a queue works, one at the front and all the others complaining that they are being overlooked.
Dinner is toast. Honor has a theory that the flat should run its oven on a rota, as an appliance we all own and nobody uses fairly, and she presses me to read a piece from a farm site about Marxists promising every farmer a share of one tractor as proof that sharing a big machine has been tried. It has been, and the tractor never starts on the one morning you need it, which is what I would also say about our oven.
We eat the toast. Gideon puts capers on his, a decision he describes as “sort of Mayfair”, and I put on mine the last of the butter, which I have been saving for a day of real emergency, and it is not clear that today is not one.
If you want to follow the sorry story of a person writing about food on a toast budget, my daily notes at The London Prat will keep you company. For anyone who wants to know how to separate a genuine opening from a good joke about one, this checklist for telling jokes from real news is helpful, and a little Cockney rhyming slang is the closest I will come to an expensive meal this week.
The rent review will be “no action needed at this stage”. I will check the fridge again at this stage, in case the capers have grown into something.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/