A light in the darkness: Home Kitchen reviewed

Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen?

To do so – and forgive this fiction, but Primrose Hill lends itself to fiction – they would first have to navigate the duality of Primrose Hill: that is, the things that make it awful, and the things that allow it to believe it is not as awful as it really is. Denial in bricks, I call it: postcode-washing. So, for every estate agent and seller of over-priced Uggs – they are a kind of fleeced boot – there is a rustic vegetable seller florist and now a restaurant with morals.

Primrose Hill did not invent the restaurant with morals. Notting Hill did that, to allow itself brunch near Grenfell Tower. If I had to choose between a restaurant with morals and a restaurant without morals, I would have said – until now – I don’t know. Neither. Both.

Home Kitchen is not for profit, an oddity for Primrose Hill. It calls itself ‘the world’s first fine dining restaurant staffed entirely by homeless people’, existing to ‘help socially vulnerable people get out of poverty and into work’. Staff are full-time, adequately paid, and take professional qualifications at the restaurant’s expense. If it sounds like the kitchen at Occupy, St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011 – political movements need cuisine as much as anyone, perhaps more – it is nothing like it.