I wonder if they’re deliberately targeting a female audience?
A magazine editor gets in touch, laughing, to tell me about a new “clean-eating”-type mini-chain. They had initially let customers choose from the various salads and quinoa-based assemblies on offer, but – disaster! – they were doing so in a way that was not visually appealing enough. People were Instagramming brown things! So they promptly took the choice out of the public’s hands: putting lentils and sweet potato on the same plate was evidently brand-denting horror beyond imagining.
I’m remembering this as food starts arriving at Henrietta, the restaurant of a new Covent Garden boutique hotel as light and airy and, well, feminine as its name. We’re immersed in “a flora and fauna atmosphere”, apparently, an aesthetic that extends to the food. Dishes are pastel-hued, scattered with petals, artfully composed: edible Hello Kitty kawaii. Eater’s Bill Addison has christened this “the New Romanticism”, as practised by the likes of New York’s Wildair and Estela (and Pidgin, Lorne and The Wilderness over here). The style is rampaging through forward-looking kitchens like decorative bindweed.
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