Harper-Thames Investigates the Hoarding, the Instagram Account, and the Coming Soon Sign That Has Outlasted Three Seasonal Menus
There is a restaurant on Redchurch Street that has been about to open for eighteen months as of this writing. I know this because I pass it three times a week and because the ‘coming soon’ sign in the window has been present through two repaints of the exterior, one change to the restaurant’s name as displayed on the signage, and at least three updates to the Instagram account that document the fitting out process with the careful framing of someone who understands that the anticipation of a restaurant is a distinct product from the restaurant itself and that both require cultivation.
The Instagram account has four thousand eight hundred followers for a restaurant that has not yet served a single customer. The posts show tiles being laid, equipment being installed, staff training in an incomplete kitchen, and — in a post from three months ago that generated the account’s highest engagement — a photograph of a lemon with the caption ‘almost ready’ that received two hundred and forty-seven likes from people who have invested emotionally in the opening of an establishment that has not yet opened and may or may not open in a form that matches their investment.
What Is Actually Happening
I asked around about the restaurant. The nature of restaurant delay in London is consistent enough to constitute a genre: planning permissions, fit-out overruns, supply chain issues for specific equipment, the licence application that takes longer than expected, and the specific paralysis of perfectionism that affects operators who want their first service to match the version of themselves they have been performing on Instagram. The restaurant will open. Restaurants in Shoreditch almost always open eventually. The question of whether the reality can match the eighteen months of ‘almost ready’ is one that the lemon photograph does not address. I will go when it opens. I have been going when things open for years. This is the job. More from me at Harper-Thames.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
