Last month, the founder of the Browns restaurant chain was charged with killing his mother. Shocking news, but it feels somehow appropriate. Browns is the traditional lunch spot for families looking to feed their student child, the place where 2.2s are revealed and doomed university girlfriends introduced. Many parents have found themselves spending hundreds on lunch only to be told their far greater investment has been wasted on dreams of becoming a club promoter. Steak frites, please, with a side order of murderous intent.
Browns began in Brighton, but only really got going when it spread to Oxford and Cambridge in the 1980s. Bristol got one in the early 1990s, decking out a neo-Byzantine library next to the Wills Memorial Building. It’s where I drank Bloody Marys before being graduated by Brexit saboteur Baroness Hale (a respectable 2.1; she told me to smile). Tony Blair was an inadvertent supporter of the restaurant. As more and more undergrads packed off to cities such as Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham, Browns wasn’t far behind. It’s a good rule of thumb – the older your Browns, the better your university – and perhaps a topic for sociologists: ‘Modelling educational epidemiology and its tertiary expression in the gastronomic environment.’
Browns is supposed to be a brasserie, which I’m sure once meant something. Today, it means vaguely European food plus burgers in a slightly fancier setting than Pizza Express. My dad would take me to the one in Oxford before dropping me back at school (he had gone there as a teenager to flirt with the waitresses). I remember it being très chic.
There were dark green banquettes, indoor palms, brass fittings and a baby grand, played at weekends by a jobbing concert pianist. After I was confirmed by the Bishop of Oxford, we piled into the Volvo and drove to Browns for lunch with the godparents. A few hours later, I was put in a taxi while my dad and godfather sank flaming sambucas. I don’t remember the food, but food wasn’t really the point.
There’s something about proper noun establishments that suggests a certain robust quality: Rules, Wiltons, Scott’s, Sweetings, Simpson’s. Mr Owner will provide serviceable food at sensible prices. The waiter will be wearing a tie. You will feel relaxed. This is no longer the case with Browns. It lost the great brasserie arms race of the 2010s.
In London there’s Colbert, Chucs, Harry’s, Café Rouge and plenty of Côtes – some are vaguely Italian but all are now brasseries; Zedel still squats under Piccadilly Circus, a vast pink bunker ready to keep serving soupe à l’oignon if it ever comes to nuclear war. The Ivy decided to march on the university towns about a decade ago, bringing black miso cod and metropolitan gaucheness to the regions. Good old Mr Browns found himself trapped in a pincer movement.
Today, there’s a Browns in the glass and steel shopping centre next to Victoria Station. The building could just as easily be a gym and most of it has been ceded to office workers getting tanked up on £15 mojitos. There are no brass fittings, nor a piano, just nu jazz playing on the ceiling speakers. The chairs are chav velvet. And the food is bad. Noticeably bad. Think ‘frozen prawn platter for £30 and tepid chips’ bad. I will remember the food. What’s happened to that once pleasant space for observing the rites of life and suppressing familial discontent?
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