Lunchtime drinking isn’t a treat – it’s an economic necessity

Man with a glass of wine
The owner of a new restaurant near Kings Cross has told customers to ‘drink some wine’ - GETTY

It’s an unusual strategy for a first week of trading. The chef patron of The Yellow Bittern, a new restaurant near Kings Cross in London, has lashed out at his customers for their derisory attitude to lunch, the only meal he serves at his 18-seater restaurant. Taking to Instagram, Hugh Corcoran wrote: “Restaurants are not public benches. You are here to spend money.”

Studying the paucity of his first week’s trading figures, he’s noticed habits such as four people booking a table, sharing a single starter, two mains and then drinking tap water. “At the very least,” he says, “Order correctly, drink some wine and justify your presence in the room.”

Many of London’s lunchers, and a very large number of PRs, who are thanking their lucky stars that they have not been engaged by Mr Corcoran, are aghast.

It is the normal practice of restaurateurs to flatter their customers, to send out messages of joy and goodwill, to embrace the notion of hospitality and dispatch cosy notions of delicious menus and hearty welcomes. Especially now as the sector is under attack as never before. The Government’s hike in employer National Insurance Contributions is a hammer-blow to an already beleaguered industry that is grappling with rising food and energy costs, low margins and staffing issues.

The PR missives I receive as the Telegraph’s food critic, which announce new restaurants or reboots of existing ones, court the critics and beg for custom. Not Corcoran. He’s only been going a week and is sacking his customers, or at least putting them on notice.

“In the case that a plate of radishes is enough for you and your three friends for lunch,” Corcoran admonishes, “then perhaps an allotment would be a better investment than a table in a restaurant.”

On the running of The Yellow Bittern, Corcoran, who hails from Belfast, is in league with a bookseller called Oisin Davies and the editor of a biannual magazine called Luncheon. Clearly they believe in the concept of lunch, but they also spurn dinner and accept only cash. Reservations can only be made via the use of a telephone. They are, in other words, arbiters and custodians of my heart.

I’m yet to visit The Yellow Bittern, but as one who loathes the rigmarole of online bookings, who carries a bit of cash and who loves, adores, worships even, the idea of lunch, I like their style.

Refreshing marketing strategy

And I also love the new and refreshing marketing strategy. But more than that, I support and endorse his demands that people drink wine at lunchtime. For God forbid we descend into the tedious quagmire that is New York, where the only people who order wine at lunch are the Britons. And pretty appalled are New Yorkers too when they spot it.

For me, the very word lunch includes the word wine, invisible perhaps but resounding with the concept. The suggestion of “let’s meet for lunch” is a declaration that we will eat, drink wine, have several courses and make it last for as long as possible.

It’s more fun to eat during daylight hours, it’s more fun to drink during the day and it’s healthier. Indeed, my body literally convulses, the acid in my stomach doing its finest Mount Etna impression, if I eat and drink (like it were lunch) in the evening.

Now, of course, I am lucky that I can do this as a profession, indeed in your very service, ensuring in my weekly descriptions that you don’t waste money in poor places and that you invest wisely in the good ones. But I also come from a long line of lunchers. My grandfather lunched, my father was a legendary luncher of Fleet Street, my brother is an aficionado, I, too, lunch for Britain.

Indeed, I was at it this week. I reviewed a new place called Barbary in Notting Hill and, sensitive to my employer’s duty to its shareholders, while I got the food, my friend Ewan took care of the wine. After a martini (him) and a negroni (me), he invested wisely in a white Burgundy and a red Bordeaux and then they rewarded us with two glasses of Sauternes. The restaurant made a decent margin, we made merry and Corcoran would have been proud. But he would also have noticed, as we did, that the – mainly – yummy mummies who crowded the place were sipping water.

Tut tut. The world is a terrible place of misery and pain. Business is tough, life is hard. So the least we can do is heed the call of Hugh Corcoran. Have lunch, drink wine and know that when you do it, you do it not for just your own pleasure, but for the economic benefit of your country.