New-wave greasy spoons are cleaning up in Britain. They tend to look like traditional high-street cafes as shot by Wes Anderson and serve what are essentially upmarket school dinners, but that feel weirdly luxurious.
Still, the best of them manage to be both cool and accessible in terms of price. Londoners talk about Norman’s Cafe in Archway, which boasts an elegant crowd ever-excited about ham, egg and chips and collaborates with the likes of Burberry and the award-winning Shoreditch cocktail bar Seed Library. Rise and Dine, a new cafe on Lambeth Road with 70s-style branding and well-plated breakfasts on white crockery, feels like a second Norman’s.
But there are plenty more across the country doing essentially the same thing, and doing it well, from Lucky Strike in Bristol to Cafeteria in Newcastle.
These modern cafes for a millennial diner are an outstanding example of a British food business that works in our age. They take simple ideas and make them sing. They do things with rigour and panache.
And they have much in common with the Devonshire, the central London pub with comfort food and the occasional celebrity punter. All are strikingly affordable and offer a warm embrace with the kind of food people want to eat; plus standout drinks, whether Guinness or martini and the best sort of service – that is to say, not too damn serious.
Just as pubs like the Devonshire go against the grain by succeeding while so many are closing in a fractured industry, the new wave of cafes operate in a similar environment – estimates from market analysts suggest “many thousands” of greasy spoons have shut in Britain in the past decade. This points to a new future for an old favourite: harking back to heritage trade, without rose-tinted spectacles but with a clever sense of where the gettable money might be.
Young people have less but there are plenty in Britain’s cities and towns with enough to fork out for a fancyish breakfast. They then give the cafes free publicity by posting about them on social media.
The Instagrammers have yet to arrive in earnest at the impressive Rise and Dine, where the man in charge is Niki Byrne, who lost his engineering job in the oil and gas trade and pooled what he had into a cooked breakfast delivery business. That was in Camberwell, 2014, before Uber Eats arrived and swallowed up all his customers.
Byrne told me he went into office catering afterwards, which was “growing really well” before Covid hit and everyone started working from home. He muddled through. Today he sells fry-ups by the dozen to suits in the City, promising a 7am delivery where others offer no such guarantee. And this has funded – in part – a community cafe, where a full English costs £7.50 and the lunches are softly Anglo-Italian – lasagne, penne arrabbiata, parm ciabattas – though stretch to curries, chilli con carne and a ham and Boursin omelette, which I suspect will do extremely well once the influencers turn up.
Despite modern savvy, it’s old school. Those regular customers who might be struggling financially will get an extra sausage or two, a jacket potato to take away for later.
The tiles on the floor are old and chequered; the service no-nonsense but warm. The scene is every bit a greasy spoon, that is to say much the same as a true pie and mash shop: financiers next to builders, single mothers next to tubby publicans.
Byrne has already collaborated with Manze’s on Tower Bridge Road, now overseen by Emma Harrington, the fourth generation of her family to run this London institution. She is starting to mix things up over there too (pea and ham soup as pie liquor if desired, for example – a brilliant evolution).
“I’m from a council estate in south-east London, so it’s ‘oi oi saveloy’ here,” said Byrne. “We kept the original flooring. The place is 80 years old. But we’re a new caff – all the tables and chairs and everything is new. It’s funny because we had the BBC and Netflix here recently for filming and they told us they couldn’t find anywhere suitable: there are greasy spoons left but not many.
“So, yeah, we’re an old school British-Italian cafe, sort of. We like Norman’s, but we want to be less wanky. We’re more aimed at the working class.”
