The Emergence of London’s New Underground

Underground restaurants are the dining equivalent of a speak-easy or a rave. Whether they are entirely legal or not is a bit of a grey area. But this is part of their allure. There’s something very intoxicating about the combination of being “in the know” and illicitness that creates an experience that people can’t help but talk about. It’s word of mouth marketing at its most powerful.

Underground restaurants are new to the UK in the guise of MsMarmitelover’s Underground Restaurant in Kilburn and Horton Jupiter’s Secret Ingredient in Hackney, but are much more familiar in other parts of the world. In America the underground dining scene is well established with covert organisations such as Ghetto Gourmet leading the charge. (You can read our interview with the founder of this movement, Jeremy Townsend here.) Ghetto Gourmet events tend to be relatively large scale and involve much creative collaboration between chefs, musicians and artists (you can see photographs from a recent event here.) The scene is well established with a dynamic community network and very slick sites for other underground restaurants such as Undergrounds Unite.

Whilst the underground dining movement is clearly well developed in America, it is also alive and well in Cuba, but for different reasons. Paladares are restaurants in people’s homes where they invite people to dine with them in exchange for their tourist dollars. It used to be illegal as it stands against Cuba’s communist ethos, but the rules have been slackened enough, but not too much, to maintain the heady balance of secrecy mixed with the assurance of safety. The best example of a Cuban paladar is La Guarida which serves the best food on the island and was the focus of Fresa y Chocolate. You can find similar underground restaurants in Bologna, China, Paris, Sydney – and now London.

London’s much vaunted restaurant scene has been slow to pick up on this trend. The pop up restaurants from the brains behind Bistroteque, such as Reindeer and Flash are the closest thing London has had. So why has the underground restaurant scene suddenly sprung up in early 2009?

The reasons are twofold. The easy answer is the recession – as money has got tighter diners are looking for something more exciting but for less money. The second part of the answer is the internet. The online foodie community is very dynamic in London (recent Time Out and Times Online articles support this), which makes the marketing of an underground restaurant a doddle. As soon as MsMarmitelover mentioned her idea to open an underground restaurant the response from the people who subscribe to her RSS feed and follow her on Twitter was overwhelming. Within a week a plethora of food bloggers had either helped out or written very positive reviews which in turn were lapped up by their broader readerships. This bottom up approach to marketing a restaurant has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream media or other restaurateurs. The Guardian reviewed the opening night and AA Gill wrote a piece about how bored he was with normal restaurants and how all he wanted to do was actually find an underground restaurant so he could review it!

MsMarmitelover has been writing a blog called the English Can Cook for years. It’s an open diary of her passion for food and desire to open a restaurant which she has now achieved, albeit not as close to the sea as she has hoped! For her, the motivation isn’t money, it’s about sharing. Sharing her passion for food and her wealth of creative talents and to a lesser extent her view on life. It’s the sort of story you might find in “The Gift”; a fascinating book that discusses the obligation for creatively gifted people to share their talents with others. MsMarmitelover’s labour of love could easily form the basis for an additional chapter.
Her anarchist background has trained her in the dark arts of grass roots movements. It all comes very naturally, having cooked for communal gatherings at Anti G8 summits as well as chefing once a week at a vegan restaurant called Pogos café in Clapton. She’s also interested by the dominance of men in restaurants around the world, despite the fact that women do the vast majority of the world’s cooking. Her article about “Ceserina’s” in Bologna is well worth a read.

We were stunned by the MsMarmitelover event we attended. It was more like going to a brilliant dinner party where you don’t actually know anyone, but know you’ll have a great time because your all interested in food. For a full write up of the evening you can read it here.

Her restaurant is only open on Saturdays and to keep things fresh she has a constantly changing theme. One week is was Mexican, next week it will be Indian. There’s also an astrology theme in the pipeline. She’s keen for the Summer months to arrive so she can entertain al fresco on her garden terrace.
We’re also keeping our ears perked for news from two other London underground restaurant making waves: The Moveable Restaurant and  The Secret Ingredient, which is run by musician Horton Jupiter. You can explore more on his facebook group here.

It’s early days for the London Underground restaurant movement. We predict it will grow – rather like the way mycelium spread underground without anyone noticing and then bloom as mushrooms when the conditions are right. We’ll start to hear about more secret restaurants popping up. And hopefully we’ll see MsMarmitelover share her gift for inspiring others with her food in ever more interesting ways. As the going gets tough, creativity becomes more important.

- Contributed by Jonathan Brown