Angus Colwell

Abolish the food hall

They’re no substitute for restaurants

  • From Spectator Life
The Arcade Food Hall in Battersea Power Station (Alamy)

I remember going to Westfield Shepherd’s Bush to visit my first food hall, still a relatively new concept for British diners. They’re big rooms filled with shared seating and different kitchen stalls, serving everything from Thai to burgers, wontons to bratwurst. You can have a burrito and your friend can have a pizza. Oh, how I loved it. I was instantly gratified, gloriously free from the convention of menus, courses or ‘cuisines’. I was excited.

These places were born in a boardroom to the sound of marketing ‘insights’

I was also a teenager. And that’s the problem: food halls are childish places. Surely the more choice there is, the better? Nope, it’s not true. Far better to trust the judgment and expertise of a proper restaurant, and worry about the things that really make a good sit-down meal.

Things like conversation, which food halls ruin. Never mind that these huge spaces echo like a factory floor. Never mind the annoyingly large tables, or the coccyx-torturing stools. It’s the buzzers, the little battery powered perspex squares that vibrate and flash once your food is ready. Try maintaining a conversation with four other people constantly jumping up and down to the whims of a writhing, vibrating slab of plastic. What, you want your food to arrive at the same time? Sorry, your friend’s beef rendang will be ready in three minutes and you will have to wait 20 for your chicken burger.

Gone are all the lovely little things that make restaurants worth it: a nice room, a properly thought-out menu, the gentle hum of people enjoying themselves, a basket of bread, the smiling recommendation of a waitress, starters followed by mains, a bottle of wine, flirting with the pudding menu, another bottle of wine, flirting with the waitress.

Maybe food halls aren’t supposed to take the place of restaurants. Really, you’re there to have a quick lunch with a colleague or waning friend who only has enough conversation to last 20 minutes. Food halls reveal their intended audience by where they pop up: Oxford Street, the Arndale Centre, Canary Wharf. On their website, Market Halls by Victoria Station promise to ‘make the good times easy’. But who ever had a good time in Victoria?

There’s something desperately sad about the food on offer too. Say there are nine stalls. Eight of them will be veg oil-stained pig-outs; fish and chips, ginormous pies or atherosclerotic burgers. Then there’ll be a dinky little place to get a poke bowl. Has it not occurred to food hall managers that there’s a consumer between Mr Creosote and Kate Moss?

You’re never going to get a culinary risk taker in a food hall, either, because the stall rents are so high and the customers so transient. They’re definitionally lowest common denominator places, serving something for every tourist but without needing to be any good because the punters likely won’t come back.

Despite leaching on the authenticity of ‘street food’, these places were born in a boardroom to the sound of marketing ‘insights’. As Jonathan Meades said, if you want to get the most genuine, authentic street food in India, you’ll get botulism. But there’s been an overcorrection. Instead, we get the hollow impersonality of these new private equity-backed behemoths.

At Arcade Food Hall in Tottenham Court Road, a friend and I were taken down to the basement where they had two tables right next to the gents’ loos. They shouldn’t have put a table there at all. It felt insulting to be so nakedly treated as an income source to be milked, rather than a customer to be served.

We’re better than all this. We should embrace the narrowing down of choices and have the guts to trust a particular chef. We should choose something that perseveres because locals like it, rather than because an investor backs it. Most of us still (just about) have the attention spans to sustain conversation over several hours, and we still have the courage (just about) to order a second bottle. Bulldoze the food halls.

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