25 September 2025

How eating organs became cool

Meet the hipsters who want tripe for dinner

Reticulum tripe is the lining of the cow’s second stomach. It is scrubbed vigorously with salt and vinegar to remove years of piled-up digestive impurities, then plunged in cold water multiple times. The tripe – with its honeycomb appearance – is then soaked in citric acid to neutralise its odour. Boiled, rinsed, boiled, rinsed, boiled, rinsed – all to achieve a satisfactory and safe level of cleanliness. It is then deep fried in hot oil, tossed in salt, and handed to me by a man wearing a single hoop earring.

It’s Monday night and I am in Finsbury Park, north London, for the launch of a magazine called Off Cuts at Tollington’s, a de-converted chippy that is now a Spanish-inspired pinxtos bar. So many trendy things to say in one sentence. Crowded around outside are about 20 answers to whatever the 2025 hipster is: men in Carhartt worker jackets, women with bad trousers and jobs in fintech. They are here, eating fried stomach lining, celebrating the tripe-themed special edition of this magazine. I think I’m hallucinating. Everyone is 32. And no one here has any memory of bovine spongiform encephalopathy!

The middle classes have always appropriated the aesthetics of the working class: the darts, football, Umbro, flat shares, rolled cigarettes, hating Margaret Thatcher, carpeted pubs. But no longer content with all that raiding and pilfering, these bourgeois bohemians are coming for offal too. And it’s not just my fellow travellers at Tollington’s. Were you at Camille in London’s Borough Market on Friday, you could have spent £14 on cow udder schnitzel; £16 on calves’ brains. One friend was presented with an entire duck’s head. The previous week? Snout.

The carnal fag-end is in fashion. And the economics of the entire ecosystem has changed: no longer are ox organs the cheap bits best avoided, a means to keep costs down and iron counts up. Liver and onions used to be reserved for the truly poor, while the rest of Britain sliced up pork loin and ballotine. But now all those chicken thighs and fillet steaks are passé – symbols of juvenile palates and midwit tastes; Côte Brasserie, Uniqlo, Richard Osman and Have I Got News for You on a plate. The truly recherché want lung for dinner. Keep up.

It’s a familiar story: in the 1990s the enterprising minds behind London’s St John – Trevor Gulliver and Fergus Henderson – raised a middle finger to balsamic glazes, basil oils, ravioli and the River Cafe class. On the menu? Bone marrow, lamb heart, urine-y kidneys and pea and ear soup. Head chef Henderson soon learned he was on to a winning formula: poach a tongue and the YBAs will come, trading in their slavish devotion to the haute for the exotic charms of pig collagen.

But the total mainstreaming of innards would not come for another 30 years – with offal-heavy menus becoming something of a rule rather than an exception in the Anglosphere restaurants of London. Earlier in the summer, I ate a sweetbread taco at Notting Hill’s Fat Badger: it was slippery, fatty, sweet and unnerving. In solidarity, the New Statesman’s deputy editor, Will, ate some brains on toast at the beloved Bloomsbury location of Noble Rot just a few weeks ago. Like me, offal did not come naturally to him: in a response lacking something in composure, after three bites he had to stand outside alone for a few minutes.

I suspect the source of the organ renaissance is tripartite: it is the latest frontier in the hipster’s perennial instinct for performative austerity; a way for food bros to justify an otherwise effete hobby (“It’s not girly, I’m literally eating feet!”); an environmentally anxious generation of diners learning that discarding over half the cow is a bit of a fuck you to Mother Nature.

And so here I am at Tollington’s, where bloodthirsty culinary machismo meets hipsters worried about sustainability in a crucible of fried organs and things that shouldn’t constitute dinner. I think intestine is a dish that succeeds or fails in its preparation and in the mental state of the consumer. The day after the launch, I flick through my copy of Off Cuts and read a triggering collection of words pretending to be a harmless sentence: “tripe soup for a hangover”. That particular psychological barrier is insurmountable, I fear.

[Further reading: Did you hear there’s a Rapture tonight?]