Goodbye to the Stockpot – the last great Soho cheap eatery

This ‘utterly, ineffably London’ restaurant, purveyors of moundfuls of broccoli cheese and bargain set meals, was like something out of a Muriel Spark novel. Now it’s gone, victim of a mix of Instagram and gentrification

So the Stockpot is gone. No more stodgy puddings and synthetic custard, bargain roast dinners and greasy plates piled high with liver and fried onions. Like so many loved restaurants in Soho, the Stockpot on Old Compton Road is no more; in this case, it has fallen foul to unbridled rents and changing food tastes. It will be sorely missed. According to Angela Lopera, whose parents own the restaurant, they decided to call it a day after running the business for so long because of increased cost and competition. “We were an iconic restaurant in Soho,” she told the Standard, after it closed at the end of last month. “It feels like a lot of the chains are taking over.” Predictably, perhaps, the Twittersphere has been experiencing a collective spasm of grief at the demise of this legendary place, where you could get a two-course meal for £8.40 and which was “more than a cafe, but not quite a restaurant”. The Stockpot “was utterly, ineffably London”, said one Petter Watts, “as if they had distilled the very essence of the city and mixed it into the gravy”. “The unstoppable greed of landlords has ripped the heart out of London,” tweeted Andy Nyman.

I first went to the Stockpot in 1992, the first week I arrived in London. My boyfriend took me – he was an art student, living in a squat in Turnpike Lane. He had been in London for two years and knew all the “glamorous places”. This scruffy joint, with its pine-cladding, cheap moundfuls of broccoli cheeseand bargain set meals, was the first port of call. It was practically an institution when I was a student in the 90s. My partner and I, now with three kids, did much of our early dating there, hacking away at the chunks of steak and overcooked vegetables and arguing about some obscure film we had seen. If you were skint, you could always eat there, filling up on whatever bargain dish they had on the laminated set menu that day.