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.
Photo by Bobby Beasley
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.
