19 November 2025

Stop perving over chefs!

This is not a Benihana

I suppose I would be more concerned if the chefs were not making such effortful noises. But the volume from the open kitchen at the Eagle in Farringdon really is quite high: in full view and earshot of the diner, pans clang and meat hisses on the grill, men in aprons grunt and grumble from the exposed galley, even the clinking of porcelain is distracting. I am here eating venison and polenta – like some kind of Etruscan king – alone at the bar, with a courtside seat to the action.

There was a time when the magic of the restaurant depended on illusion: food was prepared away from the view of the nosy patron, as though chefs had not toiled over open flames to produce it for us. We were supposed to believe that those bananas came into this world already flambéed, and that the cow actually butchered and seared its own sirloin; that soufflé rose by some act of God. We were insulated from the ergonomics of the kitchen – sweaty, crude, carnal as they are. And the chef was to be neither seen nor heard: most look more Raymond Blanc than Anthony Bourdain, in any case.

Well, the London restaurant scene cares little for these old-fashioned politeness codes. If you eat out regularly, you’ll spend half your time watching cooks prepare your dinner – as the open kitchen increasingly becomes a rule rather than an exception. At some point, when the chef became a rock star in their own right, the kitchen became a stage and punters became excessively interested in sautéing as a spectator sport. Voyeurism might be a crime in several jurisdictions but over dinner it is encouraged: at Aulis in Soho, or Bocca di Lupo around the corner, or over in Notting Hill at Canteen, enterprising restaurateurs have flung open the galley doors and let in mood lighting upon magic.

Last Sunday evening I sat counterside at Barrafina on Dean Street – one branch of the Balearics-meet-Soho tapas bars that are dotted across London. The restaurant lost its Michelin star last year and that is perceptible. The ajoblanco (cold garlic soup) had a slight vegetal rawness to it. I know the floating grapes are traditional, but tell me: what soup has ever been improved by the presence of fruit? And besides, grapes are for making wine. The cauliflower is nice, especially if you like pools of lurid oil (I do); and it is hard to say much bad about ham unless you are a pig.

But the food was only an auxiliary excuse for my visit – I was really there to absent-mindedly spectate the rough choreography of a professional kitchen. I watched a small man who looked like he was on day-leave from the navy wield a sauce bottle like he was a rhythmic gymnast. I watched another handle an oyster with more love and attention than most children receive from their parents. To my right someone plated octopus with the zeal of a battle-hardened Ukrainian orchestrating a drone strike. And I overheard a drunk American girl ask a chef if he had read the 1958 classic of African literature Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. He hadn’t.

The open kitchen is supposed to democratise the trade: forcing the patron to observe the labour behind their lunch and protecting the sous-chef and line cooks from the managers, who cannot shout at their staff in view of diners. That’s well and good – though I cannot help but feel rather decadent, demanding from a restaurant not just dinner but a show too. Venison and polenta with a leafy side spectacle.

I do not imagine Walter Bagehot, the great 19th-century constitutional theorist, would much like eating out in London in 2025. And not just because the dazzling cosmopolitanism of it all might scramble the Victorian senses (I wonder what he might make of hot honey). Rather, in fact, because the modern restaurateur has taken the great Bagehot edict about royalty – not to let daylight upon magic – torn it up and laughed in his face. Mystery and illusion, traded for a spotlight.