london restaurants

that was a lot of "really"s, some kind of Lacanian slip obv

the bonnington cafe in vauxhall is a good post-capitalist model for a restaurant. people sign up to cook. there’s a calendar with an indication of what type of menu to expect each night. you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent. byob. musicians come sometimes. i once saw brecht/weill songs performed there. some of the diners knew the words and they passed the mic around.

oh that sounds frightfully darling, shall we give it a whirl?

NV - I loved the surrounding discussions and threads. It was good that the original poster actually answered a lot of quote tweets and didn't back down as it got him to expand. It's one thing to say 'abolish prisons', but a restaurant and the whole business of eating out is another matter.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

also

you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent.

paradigm shift y'all

when I first read that I was like 'the CUSTOMERS sign up to cook?' and thought okay, there might be something in that, but no, it's the standard model except with more ~solidarity~

anybody can sign up to cook. at least that’s how it was when i was going there (a few years ago now). but it’s not for the faint hearted! the standards are high and there are a lot of plates to serve up. sorry you seem to find this so irritating imago.

An unfinished concept.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

yes i've been thinking about the limited amount of stuff i know about food vendors in precapitalist cultures and it'd be interesting to read more about that. some of the conversations have been good and enlightening, i just mean that i think the "this too shall pass" side of the discussion is clearly correct

apologies, ignoring the singing stuff collective restaurant ownership emanating from a squat/commune model does actually sound like a nice idea regardless of how wellmeaningbourgie the clientele actually end up being, albeit nothing too far removed from the traditional small-restaurant model of the chef also being the owner and any employees often being their family members or friends

anyway as we all love Twitter here's a good thread by a communist about all this

It seems (like *every single form of 'discourse' on twitter*) based on a semantic ambiguity. He denotes a 'restaurant' as the specific institution unique to capitalism where you make food based on exploitation. Others denote it as any specified place people make food for others.

— 🅄🄱🄾🄰 (@Uboatheflesh) May 29, 2022

From the last thread you can tell that's a pretty clueless thread. Arbeit isn't looking to organise or anything lol, it's his take on restaurants, as someone who works and sees the exploitation in the industry.

This is better

Adorno, a Marxist, once wrote that restaurants “are putrescence in amber, only ever performing the ideology of their own nothingness.” I don’t know what that means, so therefor I’m going to McDonalds.

— john (@johnsemley3000) May 29, 2022

adorno wasnt really a marxist

All joeks.

lol this is the perfect thread to be derailed by some good old fashioned class war tbf. I'm more inclined to listen to people who work in an industry that mostly treats its workers so shit there is currently a labour shortage, than posh patrons feeling attacked because they lead idle leisure lifestyles and want to be seen as progressive and maybe even fashionably radical, while enjoying the benefits of luxury minimum wage servitude. I think it's good that someone brought this up tbh and some of the reactionary responses are quite amusing.

Reactionary responses from 'communists' too.

they must have gone to the same school as imago!

came across this while hunting for info on cooking competitions in the ussr: https://geohistory.today/soviet-kitchen/

i dont know how reliable it is -- not a topic i know nuch about -- but the swerves and changes it depicts are interesting and i was entertained by the robustness of the title of the 1923 pamphlet "down with the private kitchen"!

(also intriguing why and how restaurants re-emerged in the 30s)

There was something similarly collectivist but just as unrealistically workable during the not very great leap forward when Mao banned private agricultural plots, and I think then reversed the ban when even wild propaganda from local cadres couldn't cover up the mountains of starvation victims.

When Vladimir Lenin came to power, collective nutrition became the new ideal. Lenin’s administration believed that people were not capable of receiving proper nutrition when they cooked for themselves

lol, the cunt was a bigger tory melt than Jamie Oliver!

Vittles have, to their credit, written about this.

since @Arbeit_Fish has pissed off all the right people today, gonna reshare the piece we wrote about the labour crisis in the restaurant industry for @vittleslondon https://t.co/ybCYhyn7CL

— stolen valeur (@nightoffices) May 29, 2022

dan barrow's review of bastani's fully automated luxury communism: a manifesto maybe rambles a bit and if i wanted to tweak the new socialist guys in general id tease them abt the joys of high-theory-as-jargon as its own kind of pleasure in exclusivity, but it hits a lot of marks -- including towards the end the point that the contradictory aspects of luxury are themselves a value (as a kind of knotty problem to think a thing through)

http://newsocialist.org.uk/falc-and-its-discontents/

(the abolitionist position walks too easily away from this knottiness i think, which is a submerged reason it generated pushback, even if the pushback was then too often formulated just as "b-but my treats!) (anarchists often aren't good dialecticians, is my undialectical snark here)

(same snark applies to bastani lol)

The problem of dreariness.

I think publicly run hotels under democratic workers’ control under socialism would be nice. I think the problem with the sort of society you’re sketching out is it seems pretty dreary and unattractive which is a hard sell

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) May 29, 2022

are not big hotel chains like Novotel etc usually quite uniformly dreary places.. lol wtf is he on about.

Travelodge is, Marriotts aren't. The issue is it's all maintained by exploited Labour. OJ just wants it to be publicly run and seems to think if maids are paid so they can buy a luxury car the issue of the work they do to maintain it somehow goes away.

In the US there were reports that as soon as people got a few months worth of pay (2k in their bank accounts to stay home during the pandemic) they got the fuck out of whatever 'horror' it was they were doing (under 'horror' management they worked under) to keep afloat.

Any breathing space.

Good to see some good spots in the discourse, like this exchange.

Oh man, I really appreciate this - yeah it's been a bit of a pile-on I wasn't really expecting - especially as I *thought* the subtext of my tweet (that I didn't expect to go viral) was, like, we can do more fun and less exploitative ways of eating together without capital!

— Arbeitology (@Arbeit_Fish) May 30, 2022

Being called an 'ultra-left shitposter' by Owen Hatherley must make the whole thing feel worthwhile.

Don't think he cares what Hatherley thinks, he's going for the stars (abolishing time).

i mean he is an ultra-eft shitposter lol?

everyone cares what everyone thinks, it's the internet

He is not a shit poster, he wouldn't have bothered to engage fairly seriously with people.

thst doesnt make him not a shi t poster !

a Roman shitposter who ends their baiting tweets with "Discus."

— Cara (@carasadhbh) May 30, 2022

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/60768103/are-you-not-entertained.jpg

Weird 'postscript' is Lib com riding on the back of the restaurant tweet and they often do a thing of trying to design a post-capitalist utopia. They argued with one poster for what seemed like 12 hours.

Anyway, this seemed to be, buried within, someone sketching out a bit more of a high-level vision, of how work will transform into tasks.

You’re drifting a bit close to falc here. We can’t expect technology to save us from having to actually do tasks that aren’t always pleasant ourselves. We can continue to iterate and develop new things, but 1) there are limitations and 2) the meantime

— Neville (@catherinebuca) May 31, 2022

copenhagen restaurants

https://www.ft.com/content/a62a96b8-2db2-44ec-ac80-67fcf83d86ef

*me, as a waiter at the communist restaurant, coming to clear the plates*: "Are you finished with Dis Course?"

— caitlin 🇮🇪 🌾🍞🤝 (@catsfeettowel) June 3, 2022

Is Moro still any good? I ate at Morito years back but never made it to Moro.

Sone friends coming to town and it's one of the only places i can get a table at a reasonable time, but spider sense says maybe it's a little tired.

I have a booking at Bubala Soho otherwise but later in the evening than I'd prefer.

I think it's still solid food, but isn't innovative anymore? (I think when it started it was one of the few places doing small plates?)

went to a local, Maremma (Water Lane, Brixton) yesterday, and it was v good, the best time I've been in fact. the menu was suitably autumnal, with walnut butter, ricotta and lemon tortellini, pork tenderloin in fennel, and various pecorino cheeses with a honeycomb, and a decent house white.

Two developments I've noticed:

1- Dunno if this is just a changing demographics of Stokey thing but post-pandemic the kebab shops are closing earlier. Used to be I could come back from the cinema on a Tuesday evening at 23:00 and get a bab within walking distance. No more!

2- Korean Fried Chicken fever has trickled down enough that now some chicken shops have changed their names from US states to Korean cities, Seoul Fried Chicken as opposed to Tennessee Fried Chicken and such.

Previously existing chicken shops re-branding with Korean names or new places?

The local Chinese here is closing at 10 to save on energy bills

I don't entirely know Tim, but I can say these places are v much identical to existing chicken shops, it's not like they add gochujang or something.

Dammit

since I'm unlikely to go out till the end of the year, here's my list of 2022 highlights (mostly lazily in the North-East LDN area)

Set meal at the Clove Club - worth the exorbitant price, loved the shrimp bisque and the pork jowl.
Yangeyon bun and creme brulee cookies at Bake Street
Mixed grill from Numara Bors Cirrik 2
Twice cooked pork belly and Peking shredded pork with sweet bean paste at Old Street Chinese
Hor borek pastry from Yasar Halim
Indo Chinese paneer lettuce cups at Brigadier's
Takoyaki and breaded horse mackerel at Asakusa
The fish set menu at Aun's
Kurdish kebab at Babaan's Nan (this might be bog standard for all I know, never had Kurdish kebab before - love the naan bread, minced meat paste and sauces tho)
Pakistani cheese naan at Ararat Bread
Sweet glazed pork with cabbage and a side of mashed potatoes at Daffodil Mulligan's

Guilty pleasure, trashy section: the cheddar corndog at Myungrang in Angel
Guilty pleasure, bourgie section: the pastrami bun at Gail's

Vittles response to the New Statesman piece criticising the enterprise from a couple of weeks ago, inserted in this review.

https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/crispy-bhajia-and-the-golden-thread