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Banquets inspired by the photographer's grim images of British cuisine are being served up at a London eatery. I'd rather drink a cup of tea in a greasy caff
This week a pop-up restaurant in London is serving up cuisine inspired by the photography of Martin Parr.
That's right, Martin Parr – the terrifyingly honest photographer of Britain shorn of all pretensions of 21st-century cool. His 1995 book British Food might offer a glimpse of the kind of food that awaits diners at Say Cheese – and over five courses too.
Seaside donuts, strings of sausages, fish fingers, baked beans and mini sugar packets are all shown in lurid bright colours in Parr's food photographs of unreconstructed British grub.
I can't face a five-course banquet like that – and anyway, I come from seaside Wales. If I want a Martin Parr meal I don't need a postmodern metro version, I can just go to Rhyl and get the original for a lot less money. I have never forgotten a cup of tea in a Rhyl caff that arrived before me with a solid layer of grey, greasy scum floating on top. How Martin Parr is that?
So what other artists might inspire unlikely cultural cuisine? A pop-up beer hall inspired by the Weimar artist George Grosz might be fun, with German beer and sausages straight out of his grotesque images of Berlin in the 1920s. Or what about a chance to enjoy the drunken feast in William Hogarth's 18th-century painting An Election Entertainment? Diners to this pop-up could booze and scoff oysters until they pass out.
Another idea is an Edward Hopper diner. It would be just like a real New York diner, except that everyone would sit in existential solitude like the people in Hopper's painting Nighthawks.
All this reminds me of Andy Warhol's vision for a chain of restaurants called Andymats. He saw the Andymat as a place where you could dine alone and get served from a machine. In fact, it seems he was prophesying Yo! Sushi.
Yet none of these alternatives is quite as disgusting as the food photography of Martin Parr. Today it's fashionable to defend British food but the truth is that because we had the industrial revolution before anyone else, we lost touch with fresh natural ingredients some time in the 19th century and a lot of British food is as grim as Parr pictures it. I like fish and chips but I recently went to Bilbao and tasted cod cooked the Basque way – what a massive indictment of British "cuisine", based as it is on the same Atlantic fish we have access to. So why don't we have inky squid and cod in pepper sauce?
Martin Parr's vision of British food is a real challenge to national pride and the Parr pop-up restaurant should be quite an experience, if you can stomach it.
