From the Excellent to the Inexplicable, This Strip Has More Restaurants Per Metre Than It Has Any Reasonable Right To
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
One Week, Shoreditch High Street Only: A Caloric and Critical Dispatch
I set myself the rule on Monday morning: one week, eating only on or immediately adjacent to Shoreditch High Street, from the railway bridge down to the junction with Commercial Street. I wanted to know what the strip actually is as a food environment — not the headline restaurants that get written about in the nationals, but the full range, including the places I walk past every day and have never entered.
Monday lunch: a poke bowl from a place that has been there for two years and that I have never entered despite passing it approximately forty times a week. The poke bowl was genuinely good — fresh, well-seasoned, the rice cooked correctly, the salmon handled with care. £14. For a bowl of food that took four minutes to prepare, this is a price point I have views about, but the views are complicated by the fact that the bowl was good and the rent on Shoreditch High Street is such that £14 is probably the minimum at which a business of this type can operate without losing money, which means my views about the price point are actually views about the rental market, which is a different article.
The Highlights and the Puzzlements
Wednesday dinner revealed the neighbourhood’s range most clearly. At one end of the street: an Ethiopian restaurant that has been there since before Shoreditch was Shoreditch, that serves the best injera I have eaten in London, that is always busy with a mix of the neighbourhood’s remaining East African community and people who have discovered it through word of mouth, and whose prices have remained genuinely reasonable. At the other end: a restaurant whose menu describes dishes in language that requires a glossary and whose small plates cost £18 each and whose tables require a booking made three weeks in advance, and which is very good in the way that very expensive restaurants with very serious chefs are very good, meaning: I was impressed and also slightly relieved when we left.
The Ethiopian restaurant is the better story. Capitalism’s food distribution system produces both, and both have their place, but the restaurant that has survived twenty years of neighbourhood transformation without raising its prices into unaffordability is the one that understands something the concept restaurants do not. London pays for experiences it could replicate at home for less; the Ethiopian restaurant is the experience you cannot replicate and could not price correctly even if you tried. Go there. Order the combination. The injera is made fresh. I went twice that week. Both times were correct decisions.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/capitalists-solve-grocery-crisis/
