From Greggs to kimchi: my six food heroes of the decade

At the end of any decade, it is customary to reflect on what changed within it and who was responsible. This can be a vexed and controversial enterprise when you’re thinking about politics and trying to argue that it was all, say, Sarah Palin’s fault, but it needn’t tear us apart if we’re talking about food.

The obvious place to start is with restaurants. The London-based foodie/entrepreneur Jonathan Downey recently listed 12 of his heroes, including Dishoom (delicious), Viajante (totally rad) and Bao (testament to the enduring, universal love of anything at all when it’s stuffed in a tiny bap).

We could each pick over the bones of that and compile our own Desert Island Starters, but I question whether or not single restaurants alter anyone’s eating habits all that much. Runaway success, for a restaurant, is either when it turns into a chain, or when people start copying, or both. The scene, however, is brutal, and the more modish the cuisine, the more likely it is to fold within a year, making scarcely a dent on the eating choices even of people who live next door to it.

So, ignoring most restaurants except for exceedingly specific reasons, these are the six people or places that have changed, not necessarily the way I eat, but my foundational food assumptions over the past 10 years.

Greggs

I was about to say it’s not just the vegan sausage roll, because I remain a firm fan of the regular sausage roll. Also, the nacho slice. But in fact, it is just the vegan sausage roll, because it gave the lie to one of those tenacious myths of food, that trends are only for the trivial, the metropolitan elite, the faddists, the orthorexics. Veganism, said Greggs, is just a thing now. Not everybody has to do it. Some people prefer a steak bake. But we will not allow our baked goods to be dragged in to a culture war. There are pastries for everyone. Eat and let eat.

Greggs had a profit boom afterwards, by the way: that’s how much we all agreed.

Booths

It’s hard to explain what is so spiritually nourishing about this posh Northern supermarket without just making it sound like Waitrose in the Lake District. Originally to reinforce its focus on food miles and sustainability, it names many of its suppliers; once it has given, say, Tina Canipa a name, and you know she sells kippers, you feel pretty confident that she gets a fair price for them. That lingering feeling in any large supermarket that the Bogof offers and weirdly cheap milk have somebody paying a price, somewhere in the supply chain, vanishes.

Wildes Cheese

This is not a mass-market suggestion. It is two guys, Keith Sides and Philip Wilton, in north London, who taught themselves artisan cheesemaking after Wilton was made redundant. It’s often in cute shapes, and you may not even have heard of if it you don’t regularly shop at Fortnum & Mason. However, they have revolutionised – for my money – the notion of what it takes to fabricate a special cheese. I used to think it was centuries of graft, local knowledge passed down, embedded in the landscape, a kind of dairy aristocracy that you had to be born into. Now I know that any thinking person with a passion for cheese and the patience to treat it right can build their own varieties from scratch. It’s a pleasing democratisation, while at the same time not at all cheap.

Brickhouse Bread and the inexorable rise of posh toast

It’s a slur on the snowflake millennials that they spend all their money on avocado and toast, and that’s why they can’t afford houses. Within it lurks utter scorn for fancy sourdoughs, the marching snack of the liberal elite, because honest people only eat Mother’s Pride, you see. But that slur has its economics arse backwards; really good bread has turned a huge array of things that would once have been sides, if not garnishes, into actual meals – avocados, poached eggs, onions and anchovies.

Tim Spector and the cult of the gut biome

Spector did not invent the biome, but he did write the definitive guide to its health, The Diet Myth. Being a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College, London, he produced something with more heft than your average myth-buster. In his explanation of and emphasis on diversity in the gut, he turned a huge range of foods, many of them fermented, from curiosities into things you should definitely eat because they’re good for you. I have never had so much kimchee in a single decade.

Leon

There is nothing unique about a food chain putting the accent on health, or sustainability, or packaging, or whatever it is that people might start a change.org petition about. I suppose the surprise is when it also tastes good. A little zoned-out while waiting for a train in Birmingham the other day, I accidentally picked up someone else’s Moroccan meatballs, when my own order was the lentil masal, except – here’s the kicker – I had already started my own box. So it wasn’t a mistake in the classic sense; I knew the meatballs weren’t mine, but on some subconscious level, they smelt so good I decided they were. This is quite unusual on a station concourse. I believe Leon has raised the standards of the entire high street.