Almost all of the (many) reviews, think pieces, and posts about the Yellow Bittern, London’s most controversial restaurant, start with these facts. The restaurant has 18 seats. It is only open for lunch, seatings at noon and 2 p.m., and is closed on the weekends. It has no website, no social media presence (save that of its chef, Hugh Corcoran—more on that later), and reservations can be made only by telephone or, famously, postcard. There’s a lefty bookstore in the basement. Cash only, please.
That this all sounds a bit out of time and space is obviously a good hook, and clearly by design. Corcoran, along with his partners, Oisín Davies and Frances Armstrong-Jones, imagined the restaurant as a sort of prelapsarian oasis, a portal to a time before reservation apps and point-of-sale tablets sucked the romance out of dining, and a long, boozy midday meal was the order of the day. The menu changes daily and reflects Corcoran’s proud Irish heritage, as well as time spent in France and the Basque Country: potato leek soup, guinea fowl pie, Dublin coddle, rice pudding. Simple food, well-seasoned and honest, pretentious only in its aggressive unpretentiousness.
But the reason that the Yellow Bittern became the talk of the town could not be more 2025: an Instagram post. Less than a month after opening, Corcoran took to his personal account (defacto the establishment’s) to call out what he deemed bad behavior on the part of diners—chiefly, ordering stingily, sharing too little food and abstaining from drink, violating the unspoken agreement between patron and proprietor that allows restaurants to stay in business. “When you come to a restaurant, it is expected that you are there to eat and drink with some sort of abandon.” The comment section went bananas. Endless ink was spilled. Corcoran doubled down. Responses ranged from outrage (Who can afford to have a weekday wine lunch these days?!) to approval (The customer is not always right!) and everything in between. And just like that, a little lunch spot around the corner from King’s Cross Station became the nexus of a conversation about culture, taste, economics, and class (did we mention Corcoran is a communist?) that could not feel more of the moment.
I’d been following Corcoran on Instagram for around a year before he began hinting seriously about opening the Yellow Bittern. (As of this writing he has deactivated @hugh_corcoran, but something tells me he’ll be back.) I was charmed by his online persona: a grumpy, lefty, 30-something cook with a penchant for unfussy food and fussy wine. A bit of a romantic. What struck me about his posts leading up to this little lunch spot’s opening was that they were much more about world-building than food. He wasn’t so much teasing a menu as he was teasing a dream. The Yellow Bittern was to be a restaurant, sure, but more than that it was to be a vessel for the owners’ fantasies of what a restaurant could be, perhaps should be—real world be damned.
And pretty much as soon as it opened, that real world came for the fantasy. Or maybe it was the other way around. One could argue that Corcoran fired the first shot, reaching across the veil to howl about the table for four who ordered three plates to share and glasses of tap water—not the way he wanted (for spiritual reasons) or needed (for financial reasons) customers to experience the restaurant, but a tendency nonetheless. The discourse that followed ostensibly surrounded the question of who restaurants are for, but underlying that was a different question altogether: What are restaurants for? Are they discrete little worlds unto themselves, dreams with their own logic and rules, an opportunity to live a fantasy so long as everyone plays their part? Or are they meant to reflect the structures and preferences of the world as it is, living monuments to life as it is? And who gets to decide if it is one or the other?
And so, on a recent trip to London to report a restaurant guide for this magazine, I went to see for myself. Well, sort of. I already knew in my heart that I was going to love my lunch at the Yellow Bittern, that the fantasy was for me—I did and it was. And I also asked Corcoran if he would let me interview him over dinner at Café Deco. What follows is a highlights reel of our two-hour bottle-of-white, bottle-of-red conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
Amiel Stanek: In all of the reviews, all the writing, everybody brings up the Lenin portrait. Everybody talks about you being a communist. There's an idea that those political leanings preclude you from being a restaurant owner. It's like this gotcha moment: "You're a communist? You have a restaurant that serves nice wine!"
Hugh Corcoran: First of all, being communist doesn't mean you exist outside of capitalist society. There's a big difference between communism and Christian-type teachings. Christian teachings believe that you should be a kind of white knight. You should live what you preach and all these kind of things. Communism is pretty much, at its most basic, I believe that organizing society in a socialist way would be better. I don't have to live this out; I just believe that it's a better way to do things. There's no moral onus on me to do anything more about that.
However, in my own life, I have actually spent a great deal of my life organizing the working class up until I was 25 years old, and moved to the Basque Country to work with somebody who happened to be also a political activist who was on the run for years, who happened to open a bar and a restaurant. He needed a chef, and I worked for him.
I know about fucking communism. I know about revolutionary movements. I’ve been following the Republican movements since I was a teenager in Ireland, been in back rooms teaching people Marxist theory. I've been through all that. I've been arrested several times. Friends of mine have gone to prison. I've grown up with this.
Thinking about the Yellow Bittern, a thing I keep coming back to is entitlement on the part of diners—this idea that everything is for everybody. I guess to me, when you go to a restaurant or buy wine or anything like that, you're a part of an ecosystem.
It's a two-way thing. You go to places that you like. I mean, this is how capitalism supposedly works: Everybody has their own businesses and then you can take it or leave it. You don't have to spend your money there. And they don't even have to take you in. You enter into a bit of a dance. I just went to a pub I like. And I like it because it's an old, traditional pub, run by a man from Galway. They don't play music. It's got carpeted floors. The pints are really good and if it's not too busy, you can get a little seat at the bar and sit and have a pint on your own. That's what I did. I sat and had a pint on my own, read a book, drank a few pints. Once I finished my pint, I got off my stool, I left, came here. I was thinking while I was drinking my pint, I get to the bottom of the pint and I'm already ordering another. Not because I'm some mad alcoholic who cannot dream of not having a drink in front me, but I can't contemplate being in the bar and taking up a stool and not having a pint in front of me, or having an empty pint because then I'm just taking up space. And the contract that I enter into, the unwritten contract is that you can come here and sit, but you have to be drinking. I saw somebody near me, sitting and reading their book with an empty glass and I was going, "This isn't a library. This is a really busy bar in the center of London." I'm like, "If you want continue reading your book, you got to order another drink." Sorry, just finish up. Because there are libraries. Libraries exist.
And libraries are a great place to go and sit and be alone.
Libraries are wonderful places, as are public parks, as are all these public things that are not being used. Libraries are being closed down every week in England because nobody wants to fucking use the library. I believe in this sort of civic republicanism where we all participate in society. I don't like rowdiness in the street, I don't like people playing music on their phones on the bus. I'm not the only person in the world, so I need to be aware of the people around me. Maybe there's people sleeping at night, people putting their kids to bed, maybe somebody's on the bus, trying to read a book, newspaper. That stretches to the bars and shops that you frequent. If everybody behaves like you, if everybody was playing music on their phones, it'd be fucking chaos. If everybody came in to fucking cafés or restaurants and just ordered a cup of coffee and sat there for three hours and worked on their laptops, they would have closed. So everybody else around you is paying for your table. I mean, okay, we understand that within capitalist society not everybody has the same amount of money. So you go into a bar, somebody maybe who doesn't have money, whose roommates are buying their pints, or they’re drinking their pints a bit slower, or they're ordering cheaper whiskey, whatever. But then there's this absolute piss taken of, “I'm just going to sit here on my laptop and use this space as my personal office.”
You could pay for office space or you can just work at home—you would just prefer not to be there.
Yeah. And the problem I had in our restaurant is that I feel like people want to be in the ambience of a restaurant but not necessarily contribute in terms of playing the game of getting a bit of wine or an appropriate amount of food. An entitlement of…I was laughing today, I was saying the next thing is we have one sitting at 12 and one sitting at two. Next thing is we go, "This is an infringement on my human rights. My grandad didn't die in the Somme for me to be told that I can't eat at 1:00."
Listen, this is how the fucking restaurant works. You have a 12:00 sitting and a 2:00 sitting. And if it's a really quiet day and there's nobody coming for the 2:00 sitting, you can sit. And also you could come at 1:00, but it's not really enough time to eat because I need the table back at 2:00. All I'm saying is there's two slots, which one do you want? It's like going into the green grocers and saying, "What type of oranges do you have?" And he says, "I have mandarins and fucking clementines." And well, I want Valencia oranges. He's like, “I don't have them.”
It’s interesting to think about the things that seem to have gotten people so riled up. There are plenty of restaurants that have rules, whether they're stated or implicit. You could have a set price; you could say the meal is going to be this much money. There are plenty of places that do reservations online and only have availability at certain times. It's interesting because you've been very outspoken about what your, not rules exactly, but what your expectations are.
I've set out my stall at the market and said, “This is what I do. You don't like it, go somewhere else.”
And there's this sense that is a violation of something. Frankly, from where I'm sitting, you're actually making yourself pretty vulnerable. You're like, "Look, these are the margins of my business. It's a precarious business that I've elected to do. And this is what I need, this is what the expectations are to sit down at this restaurant. This is what I need in order for this business to be able to continue and be profitable, and for me to keep a shirt on my back and continue to offer this service." And that seemed to get people really riled up. Whereas five years ago, when everything shut down for COVID, everybody was so sympathetic towards restaurants. How they have these razor thin margins, and one month of lost service is going to bankrupt the owners and all the employees are going to be on the street. But you talking about what you actually need in order to keep the restaurant running upset people in some way. I'm trying to figure out why exactly that is.
I'm not sure exactly why either, but I would guess that first of all, it's cultural. It's a very different reaction in England than in France for example, or America. You might know different but as far as I could see, Americans were like, "What's the big deal?" Americans were quite supportive. French people and Italians were like, this is all completely bizarre. And it was mostly a very English thing. I feel like the English have a very difficult relationship with restaurants. Not really part of the culture historically, and it's a new thing that they're trying to get to grips with, and it's mostly happening in London, and it's mostly happening within a certain class of London. The upper class have always had restaurants. The working class still don't have restaurants, except for cafs and stuff. And this kind of aspiring middle class that is trying to climb the ladder, restaurants are the place to do that.
Sure.
However, this aspiring middle class—a non-unionized, kind of creative, professional class—in real terms, their lives have gotten worse economically in the last 10 years. Train drivers, nurses, not so much, because they're unionized and their wages have been protected. But people who work on computers on their own, they're much poorer than they were 10 years ago. But they also feel very strongly that they have the right to hang out in restaurants, and do that thing, and entertain people. And for them to be told, "You're not spending enough money," they're raging. They're going, “How dare you say I don't have enough money?”
Interesting.
Like, "I should be able to have a bowl of soup and a glass of water if I want. How dare you?" Because 15, 20 years ago, this was all on the expense account. People were ordering bottles of Premier Cru Chablis, and having oysters for lunch. Now they're like, "Oh, I'll just have a bowl of soup and a glass of water." And I, as a restaurateur, am going, "Bullshit. You just booked a table in a restaurant to have a glass of water and a bowl of soup? This is ridiculous. If you want that, go to the café around the corner. The café is great. They do soup, and you don't have to book. And they'll always accept you. It costs a fiver." But they don't want that. They want tablecloths, they want flowers, they want art on the walls, they want to be looked after, they want the illusion of a restaurant.
They want to feel rich, even if they aren't?
Yeah. And however, then you get the train drivers, the people working working-class jobs who are unionized, who've got good wages, who are coming in going, “I don't know what fuss is about. I've just took the day off. It's my birthday, and I'm out for a good day out. Get me a nice bottle of wine and gallons of food, and Chartreuse afterwards.”
That post where you said that any member of the organized working class can have a meal here really seemed to piss people off.
The reason I said that was because people were saying, "So it's only for rich people, this restaurant?" I just wanted to make that point. But the people that were riled up were exactly who I was talking about before, the downwardly mobile middle class. Like, “How dare you? So a train driver has more money than me?”
They were pissed off ostensibly on behalf of a certain kind of working class person, but what was actually pissing them off is that they thought you were calling them poor?
Yeah. But also I was, in their words, judging them for having not joined the trade union, saying, "If you're poor it's your fault because you haven't joined the trade union. You should have joined a union, and then you would have some money." A bit of me is saying, "That's fucking true. It is your fault. Join a fucking union."
The lads who've joined unions and who've organized on behalf of workers, and who can afford to come for lunch, I'm extremely, extremely happy to have them. They get treated well because they fucking put in the graft on behalf of the working class. People who just looked out for themselves and still can't afford to have lunch, fuck them.
That was one live wire. Then the other was saying, essentially, "If you're not going to come in here and order properly, order drinks, then it's not worth it to have you in." I just wonder, after all of the controversy, if you still feel good saying that, or if you feel like you would've said it in a different way, or…
No. I still stand by it because it's just the truth. Generally speaking, if you don't order a proper meal and you don't drink, it's not really worth opening for you. Okay. In a month like January, we might have a table free. If that person comes in and says, "I see you've got a table free. Can I have a bowl of soup and a glass of water?" Obviously I'll give them a bowl of soup and a glass of water.
But to book a table in advance, like a week or two in advance, and because it's such a small room, it's mostly booked up, and there's friends of mine phoning in, there's restaurateurs, and they're going, "Can I get a table?" and I'm going, "I'm really sorry, but I don't have any tables," and somebody just comes in and has a bowl of soup and a glass of water, I'm like, “Are you fucking having a laugh?”
I will say, the way that you have set up is not uncommon in France, or Spain, where the idea of the walk-in is not really a thing in the same way—you book your table the day of or the day before. In America and the UK, competitive booking culture is more of a thing. I just can't imagine booking weeks in advance to have a bowl of soup and a glass of water.
That's what I can't understand. I'm more in the European booking category of, if I book a restaurant, it's usually the day of. If something special is happening, maybe a couple of days before or a week before. The only place I would book in any advance is if we're going on holiday and I really want to go to that place. I'm going to Paris in two weeks, I've already booked Le Baratin.
Pinouche [co-owner of Le Baratin], I've heard him say, Americans phone up and say, "Can I book a table?" He says, "For when?" And they say, "For a month from now." He says, "No." They say, "Why not?" He says, “Because I don't know if I'm going to be dead by then or not.”
I have also heard that from Americans trying to call.
It doesn't seem like anybody has any etiquette anymore. If you go to a cheap restaurant that always takes walk-ins, of course you can just go and have a plate of food and leave. But if you go to a restaurant where you expect that you have to book, then you go, "I'm here to do some damage. I'm here to eat something and drink something." If you're not hungry enough to eat a main course, you probably shouldn't go to a restaurant.
Some of these things do feel cultural. In France, it is practically constitutionally enshrined that you will go out to lunch regularly, and have a menu offered to you with three courses, and that you're going to eat all those courses. And maybe you don't really eat breakfast in the same way that Americans or British people do, and you might not have a big supper, but lunch is a meal. And so I think the lunch of it all is what people get hung up on. That they're like, “Lunch is a thing that you do standing up or at your desk or walking around.” There's something bizarre to them about sitting down to lunch.
Yes. This is another thing. I mean, I saw an advertisement on the tube the other day and it said, “Now you can make every moment of your journey profitable by eating taco wraps on the tube.” And it was like an advertisement for Mexican protein wraps that you could eat while you were traveling on the tube. Rather than having lunch, you would just sit on the tube and loft down four protein wraps that were so-called Mexican food. I mean, not only is this highly offensive to people from Mexico, but it's highly degenerative for a culture to think that that's an appropriate way to spend your lunchtime.
The British and Americans have had lunch basically taken away from us. The idea of having a lunch that's longer than a half an hour is completely unheard of.
You have to take the day off work.
Yeah.
So to have the two-hour lunch has become a luxury. For me, two hours is a bit long, but an hour and a half is a basic lunchtime. An hour and a half is what you need to, if you're cooking your own food, to prepare it, to eat it, to wash up the dishes, whatever. You need an hour and a half to two hours. If you go to a restaurant, you want an hour to an hour and a half's break in that restaurant to step back from work.
So I suppose it's interesting you brought that up because when I first moved to the Basque Country, I proposed to my boss that I wanted to do a lunch menu, and that's what I wanted to cook. And he said, "Listen, I just don't think this is going to work. It's a seaside town. I think people want burgers and sandwiches. They want to take a sandwich and go to beach and eat something on the move." And I wrote him this big email and said, "No, I don't want to do that. I want to defend lunch culture. And this is one of the last places in Europe to have a lunch culture. And I feel that neoliberalism is destroying lunch." So I feel that it's a resistance against capitalism to have a restaurant which serves a long lunch and which says you should take the time off in the middle of the day to eat something.
Well, but also I guess to that point, the conditions are the conditions, the world's the world. This is obviously a leading question, but to what extent is the Yellow Bittern representative of the world that you want to have versus the world that is?
It's completely representative of an imaginary world that doesn't exist. I've just written an article about this for Tribune magazine, which is the magazine of the Labour Party, the left of the Labour Party in England and connected to Jacobin in America. Part of my point was that what we were doing is completely fantastical. It's a fantasy. But it's important to provide fantasies about how the world can be in order to motivate people to change the world. Because if we accept this world as it is, it's a fucking grim future and it just gets worse and worse from here on out. But if we say, actually, I've dreamt of a world that's better than this. I've dreamt of a world which is more human, where human beings have a time to interact with each other, to have lunch, drink wine in the middle of the afternoon, to do all these things, you keep the consciousness alive that this is a possibility.
And if that's not a possibility for you because of your work conditions, then you better organize and change your work conditions. And even better take control of the fucking state and reorganize society so that we can drink wine in the middle of the afternoon. Because we're all living such miserable fucking lives where nobody's getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody's eating anything nice, maybe once a week. Many people are so lonely, starved of company and friendship and community. Why would we continue living life like this? Why? There's no point to civilization, society, life itself. We need to reorganize things so that the average human being has a wonderful experience of life.
And that is possible because the needs of the average human being are very basic. The needs are that you feel loved, that you have a house, you have food, that you're surrounded by people who you enjoy, that you're intellectually stimulated, that you have culture. That you have basic things like good food. How can we not organize that in a place like London, which has all this money. Well, the reason we can't organize this is because of extractive, exploitive capitalism. And the fact that some people need to live miserable lives in order for other people to live these absolutely luxurious lives.