I ate a concept last Thursday. Not just any old abstraction, but a “heavily concepted restaurant trend”, in publicist-speak. No kidding: at the new Lobster Kitchen, the name is the menu is the business model. Here you can have whatever you want, as long as it’s pink: lobster tails, lobster rolls, lobster with macaroni cheese. Dangling from the ceiling are lobster traps and buoys. The seafood, the decor, the condiment trays, even the seasoning, it all comes from New England – a gigantic concept crammed into a small room just off the tat-selling fag end of London’s Oxford Street.
As the last paragraph proves, I am no restaurant critic, no Marina O’Loughlin. Given the choice, I’d rather go for a walk than a meal. But if you want a glimpse of the near future for London and Britain, start here. Because part of how this country responds to the loss of its manufacturing base and a banking meltdown appears to be that it gets into eating. London is going through a restaurant boom. According to the website Hot Dinners, the number of restaurants born in central London has surged every year since 2011. In 2013, 196 new places opened; this year it’s 240.
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