How to open a modern British restaurant

It's the restaurant you've always wanted. Why is it for about the last hundred years, smart and expensive restaurants in the UK have always been French or maybe Italian? You only have to think of the words 'posh restaurant' and you suddenly spring into a French accent, impersonating John Cleese's wafer thin mint sketch and flopping a napkin over your forearm.
Well hold on a minute, isn't London supposed to be the world centre of gastronomy now? And the rest of the UK its lush and fertile garden, to produce all its ingredients? Surely this is the new era, where British cooking is taken seriously, where menus are free of pretentious florid adjectives and we go back to a simple celebration of honest ingredients respecting the seasons?

Of course it is, you've read it in Restaurant Magazine and seen it on Great British Menu and that is why when you open your new restaurant, you'll be throwing out all those stuffy old continental cliches. No more stuffy old French sounding dishes or food terms on the menu. No more restaurant owners called Giovanni or places called Chez-something. No more white linen on the tables, no more gondolier or red dress flamenco dancer scenes on the walls. No more sommeliers, maitre d's, waiters with large pepper grinders or black waistcoats.

'Disciples of St John'* you are now free to give the world the gastronomic restaurant, sorry, 'business establishment which prepares food and drink to customers in return for money, specialising in the art or law of regulating the stomach' it's been waiting for. So here goes: How to open a Modern British restaurant.

Concept
This is a rejection of all those stuffy foreign influences and preconceptions about 'posh restaurants'. Stripping away all the stiffness, fussiness and ridiculous pompousness of French fine-dining cliches.
In fact, you don't even call it a restaurant, it is an 'eating house'.
Focusing on our green and pleasant land, its plentiful bounty, and confident our own rich history of food and drink can stand up on its own and be taken seriously on the world stage.
Your mantra is 'locally sourced seasonal ingredients' and you must frequently remind people of this.
You might also want to bring in some more influences from a more mystical, mythical, romantic nature.
Fairies, goblins, fawns, anything C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, all good.
The general idea is that someone - a man of the soil, at one with the earth, in an intimate relationship with his environment and its magical seasons, probably called 'Flynn' or something, has gone out at dawn, wearing a Viyella shirt, treading the sparkling moss down over the old grassy knoll, startling the odd sleeping toad, and trapped a wild hare in a snare made of hand-riven willow and barley twine. He has then foraged some rare nettle leaves, fungi and grains on the way home to serve it with, where he will skin it with the help of his two home-schooled children - Colan and Steren, who will sing pagan rhymes and sacrifice beetles to sun gods.

Location
There is no ideal location, thus is the flexibility of modern British. Anywhere from a disused Nissan hut to a motorway bridge or Georgian Townhouse.

Design
Some kind of simple brand, perhaps the humble eating house's name, hand carved into a pit-sawn board of recently seasoned (in a forest spring) local cherrywood.
Your website should include misty, folky idealised views of the British countryside. Antique maps, engravings, drawings evoking a pre-industrial age. Links to Dickens or Shakespeare all good, as are whimsical quotes about sustinence etc.
Fonts: Distressed Garamond, Futura, Gill Sans.

Decor
The look is '1956 Powis Square bedsit meets 1924 home counties grammar school'
Refectory tables. Danish modern chairs. Library/science lab cupboards. Institutional lighting. Glazed rectangular tiles circa London underground 1935. The odd fleur de lys. Edwardian doilies. Damask wallpaper. Thonet hatstand. Copper wine coolers. A trio of ceramic flying ducks.

Staff
The look is greasy flick & bedraggled beard for men. Obligatory stripy blue apron. Trimming of beef under the fingernail.
Women - 1940s washerwoman meets victorian matron (not maitre d'… see what I did there?). Scarf in hair. Flowery frock. Frumpy brogues.

Menus
Expensively produced on handmade paper.
Ingredients listed in bald English. Provenance. The more unknown and remote the farm the better.
Try to avoid slipping in to the comfort zone of lazy Frenchisms…. no 'sauce', always 'gravy'.
No 'pork' but 'pig'. You get the picture. If you can find a ridiculously long-forgotten name for something very ordinary to hopefully baffle and wow your guests, all the better.

Tableware
Pewter. Earthenware pots, hand fired pottery (preferably with your own kiln,). Scandinavian stainless steel. Hand turned wooden salt cellars made by a family living in a wigwam near Glastonbury.

Food
Your heroes are Jocasta Innes, Fergus Henderson, and you secretly envy Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.
The food is a kind of Mrs Beeton meets the Modern Parents via Billy Bunter. Artisan. Foraged. You produce as much as possible yourselves, via your own farm, from which you pick the same day. You smoke your own meats, over oak chopped down from a local copse. You curd your own cheese. You churn your own butter. Lots of your ingredients, you should have last read about in a Beatrix Potter book - radishes, sloes etc
Craft beers. Dripping. Whey. spelt. Oats. Rare herbs. Offal. Skin.
Dishes come in three main designs: 'Lyme Regis rock pool', 'Faries' Compost heap' and 'Pixies' rockery'.
Desserts - perfect for a last minute bit of nostalgia, so lots of nursery favourites like suet pudding or rhubarb crumble, but with a witty twist, and how about a fun little throwback to our Enid Blyton /Just William past, with a recreated Tunnocks snowball, or vanilla ice cream wafer (rectangular cone) etc?

And don't forget to present the bill in an Odgen's Nut Gone Flake tin.

Melissa 2013


*  - thanks, @HRWright

Just been informed it's 'Nissen hut'. That'll teach me to do some research. Thanks @matt_hero

What your favourite restaurant says about you

From Tripadvisor

Brinkley's
'Where men with no future go to meet women with a past'.
You actually live in Putney or Wandsworth but would love to live in Fulham or Chelsea.
Sloaney hungover, hoping to bump into Hugh Grant or a cast member form Made in Chelsea. You eat eggs royale wearing sunglasses & uggs, your pals Henry and Annabel are late, but such a scream.
Your idea of edgy decor is a hot pink chesterfield sofa from The Conran Shop South Ken.
You still think Notting Hill is cutting Edge. You own (and use) a sailing jacket.
Cool is James Dean, or what people in East London do. Relaxed is rolling up the sleeves of your Emmett shirt and wearing commando soled deck shoes. Your idea of a trendy restaurant is a square plate, and edgy means a burger served on a wooden board. You're an events manager or have a sort-of-job in PR, or are just about to launch a new whisky company using your chum's estate in Scotland and blow your family inheritance.
Your parents live in Beaulieu, and are a little bit tired of supporting you (seeing as you're nearly 30). Could also be: Big Easy Crab Shack

From Travel with Wingz

Barrafina
Your TV production company has just landed a new ad for an online comparison company . You might also work in fashion, or digital strategy.
You dress in Joseph or A.P.C . You have lunch because dinner is spent at your gravel drive and labrador home in the Home Counties, where you've just renovated a barn and turned it into a recording studio.
Your hair is expensive blonde. You own a chair designed by Robert Eames. You have a Liberty Storecard.
You holiday in a house in Burgundy or Florence.
Could also be: Bob Bob Ricard, Bocca Di Lupo

From Londontastin

Story Deli
You look like you're off to an Ernest Hemmingway convention. You live in a concrete floored ex dressing-gown factory near Arnold Circus and still wear one of the dressing gowns you found when you moved in.
Your bicycle is a restored Whitcomb or period Bianchi with pre-cable derallieurs. You wear Redwing boots.
Your lipstick is blood red. Your sunglasses are bought at auction and come from from a Jean-Paul Goude Grace Jones shoot in 1981.
Your favourite film is 'Man Bites Dog'. You and your partner are about to get married with a non-religious service held ironically in the disused synagogue in Brick Lane, your friend at Weiden + Kennedy is creating bespoke invitations. You like sourcing 60s furniture and lighting.

From Timeout

Balthazar
You just love a big brassy room, ooh look is that Stephen Fry?
You eat out 6.5 days a week. You live in Zone 1. You mention food critics by their first names, although you've never met any. You tweet a lot. You're a member of at least 3 Soho clubs, and 2 Mayfair ones. You have summer and winter brogues. You may or may not be gay. You wear cashmere from N. Peal and your favourite designer is Tom Ford. You don't drive. You get black cabs everywhere, but also love the bus. You rarely dine in a party of less than four. You read Vogue, Monocle and the FT weekend while watching Britain's Got Talent. You're second row at fashion week. You want an Hermès Birkin bag.
Could also be: The Delaunay, obviously.

From Yum Bun

Yum Bun
You're an Indie militant. You hate the idea of chains, corporates, or anything big, slick and established. Food is rock n roll, restaurants are bands, chefs are DJs and you're not into Simon Cowell. You drink craft beer but hate the term 'craft beer', constantly bemoaning its popularity and how the big breweries are passing off any old crap as 'artisan'. You stick it to the man at the latest food festivals, drooling over one-off specials, tweeting and blogging your finds.
You wear Birkenstocks. You bring your kids along in French fisherman striped blue T-shirts, skinny kid chinos, Vans and a designer buggy. You ride a single speed bike to work.
Either live in Peckham or Stoke Newington. You work as an account exec in a media agency. You know a lot about valve amplifiers.
Girls: You dress in vintage frocks and lean towards 50s throwback.
Guys: You have a beard and a creeping beer belly. You listen to blues records on vinyl.
Could also be: Anywhere at a food festival.

From Standard

Bubbledogs KT
You often dine alone, or with other equally serious foodies. For you, menus are journeys where you will discover your inner self. Food is not sustinence, but a gateway to enlightenment.
Foodie scenester tourist of the most serious kind. Damn right you have a food blog, and you'd use the SLR with the tripod and flashguns without a hint of shame. You could trump any dining story with your tales of undiscovered sashimi bars hidden in lavatories in Tokyo brothels run by child monks who slice scallops rizla thin before they can walk. You write about 'mouthfeel' without a hint of sarcasm.
Your favourite computer game is Tetris.
You're not hip. Food is not fashion.
Could also be in: A Ben Spalding pop-up. Something by Simon Rogan. The Clove Club (for letting your hair down).

From Coq d'Argent

 Any D&D restaurant
Deal chasing day trippers from Guildford
You're a couple with shopping bags from Westfield, Her: Mulberry bag, Michael Kors watch, beauty treatments. him: possibly struggling to hang on to mod casual roots with something from Barracuta with the collar button done up. You own a Barbour paddock jacket.
You go on holiday to Thailand or shopping in Dubai. You buy anniversary gifts in Tiffany.
You've got an Audi on finance and are getting an extension done to your smart 3 bed semi with faux leaded windows. You like a ramekin, and drink Moët & Chandon (pronounced 'moay').
Could also be: Jamie's Italian

Sweet & Spicy, Brick Lane

Now that restaurants don't have to tout their empty tables by standing in the street waving flyers and enticing you in with bottles of fizzy red wine anymore (they have twitter for that), Brick Lane can become a great place to go for a curry again. Nobody who's anybody goes to Tayyabs any more, unless it's Monday morning, because queuing is nearly as boring as reading an Andy Lynes review, and Lahore & Mirch Masala are just a bit too far over Commercial Road to walk in heels. Plus before all the places get taken over by sexy French girls or street-art shops, you want to get back down to London's crap curry capital and enjoy the garishness.

Only Brick Lane curry doesn't have to mean crap. 

Look between the glitzy signage and you'll notice numerous little cafes, sparsely decorated (some quite shabby, really) all serving 'home-style' curries, breads, samosas and bhajis from a countertop environment. 

My favourite forever was the now deceased Shalimar, situated next to Heneage Street, which made a perfect curry night duo with The Pride Of Spitalfields, a pub so 'East End' I once heard the manageress shriek "Churchills? This ain't the Queen Vic you know" to a poor wet-behind-the-ears and red-faced student, to the snorting giggles of his mates.

Second best (maybe now first) is Sweet and Spicy, a little corner place a few doors down. 

Reassuringly shabby, with grease and dust clogged fans and Pakistani bodybuilder posters, the room is 1/4 full (7pm on a Saturday Night!) the sole member of staff shouts orders to a kitchen downstairs into a microphone, which appears not to work as replies are heard shouted back up the stairs perfectly clearly.

The crockery is brilliant. Currently en vogue and featuring in interiors shoots in Wallpaper Mag, this stuff looks like it's actually been here since 1969, when the place opened (One of the first three restaurants to open in Brick Lane, according to its website).

We order the classics: Lamb karahi, vegetable samosa, rice & dhal for two. I'm quite sure the karahi here is as good as Tayyabs, dense and rich gravy, soft meat, fragrant coriander. The total bill:

£13. That's THIRTEEN POUNDS, for dinner for two in a very fashionable part of town.

40 Brick Lane 

Tower Hamlets, UK E1 6RF

www.sweetandspicylondon.co.uk

How to Date in a Restaurant

Dating in London is weird. There are lots of potential weirdos and therefore, a lot of potential weird situations in which to find yourself. The first choice for a date is often a drink, or just as commonly, a restaurant. But there are so many ways for this to go wrong. I've been on plenty of dates in restaurants and there have been some disastrous ones. You may have totally different eating habits, your date may be allergic to everything, they may try and order a burger at a fancy French restaurant or horror of horrors, he might not want to share. It's not the same as a casual drink, where you can make a quick getaway – it can be a long, drawn out process which can be great, or can be awkward. If anything, it's a very useful way in which to discover any annoying or disgusting habits that your potential beau may have. There are so many ways to fuck it up - the littlest thing can put me off a man on a date. For example, I once went out with a guy whose idea of a tip was to leave 20p in 1 and 2p coins. He didn't understand why I, especially as a waitress, found that thoughtless. So I decided to put together some tips (and some horror stories) of dating in restaurants - potentially disastrous.

LOCATION

Choose the location wisely. You could book the most amazing sushi place only for your date to announce that they don't like sushi. Nightmare!
Go somewhere with interesting staff. @tableforONE_PV: ' Le Beaujolais is a delightful choice for a 1st date. If the guys's boring then the old bartender is full of fun stories.'
Go somewhere with a focal point or a nice view - it'll give you something to talk about and it's a nice shared experience.

ARRIVING

Don't dither when you're asked who the reservation is for, if you made it. It makes potential first interactions potentially awkward. Also, your date may have forgotten your name.

ORDERING 

Establish the ordering situation. Once I went on a date to Pitt Cue. I thought he wanted to share, but he didn't want to share, so when the food arrived, I had to re-order to get my food. Hilarity ensued (it did not).
Don't assume people like being ordered for. @belhunt100: "1st date wouldn't let me order, or see the menu, or wine list. Did it all for me, and made a rubbish choice!"
Don't pretend to know a lot about wine if you don't. You will, inevitably, look like a pretentious dick. 
Don't worry about asking for tap water, no-one thinks you're cheap. 
Be observant. There's nothing more awkward (and unattractive) than a man ignoring who the waiter looks at and steaming in to order first. 
Read the situation and the location. A Nando's experience will be different to a Michelin starred restaurant experience (you would think this was obvious. It is not to some people). 
Make sure you can pronounce what's on the menu. @laurenbravo: "First boyfriend thought he was impressing by ordering "Sea Red beef". Had to point out it was actually "seared"."
Order things where there is no question of eating method. Some people like to follow the rules very strictly. If you order a burger, do you cut it in half first? Would you really cut a banana up with a nife and fork, as the Debrett's guide instructs?

EATING

Order something different to your date – if conversation runs a bit dry, you can always offer them a bit of your starter that they 'have to try'. It's a cunning excuse to get a bit closer to them.
Don't order anything messy. You may think that eating spaghetti is sexy, but you could end up slurping more than seducing. Not to mention the food that might go down your front / attractive joker-style tomato sauce stains around your mouth.
Think about the effect your food will have on you. @Blonde_M: "Don't order the squid ink pasta. You'd think it'd be obvious, wouldn't you? *Sigh*" - same goes for too much red wine!
Manners are very important. @TheSCGuy: “My date orders a salad, I order pasta. She gets up & goes to toilet as food arrives at table. Comes back 15mins later with no apology, eats salad whilst I force down cold pasta.”

CONVERSATION

Make sure your date isn't married! @intotheFworld: 'Shortest 1st date ever. Fancy fish restaurant, we sit down, he says "Don't take this the wrong way but I'm married". I leave.'
Remember where you are. You're in a place where people eat. I've had a few bad experiences where my date has told charming tales involving bodily functions. I'd rather not hear about your bad digestion whilst I'm eating, thanks.
Don't forget to thank your date if your dinner was paid for by them. That's happened to a friend of mine and it really pissed him off to receive a text saying that his date was home safely. No word of thanks for dinner in sight.
At least pretend to be interested in what your date is saying. @jameslewisland: "My most memorable restaurant date was one Valentines day when I proceeded to fall asleep when she was talking."

Try and keep the same eating pace. A friend went on a date to a turkish restaurant, ordered kebabs, finished way before and spent the rest of the meal picking meat out of his teeth with the forks that the kebabs were on. 

PAYING

At least pretend to protest even if you think your date will probably pay.
Tip. Unless the service was really bad. Otherwise, definitely do. That is an instance where you WILL look cheap and that doesn't bode well on a first date.
If you are offering to pay the bill, make sure you can pay. There is nothing more embarrassing than your credit card not working and not having any back-up cash. That's happened to a friend of mine - his date had to pay and he was mortified.
Don't be tight. @Blonde_M: "I wish this weren't an actual experience of mine - do NOT whip out a voucher at the start of the meal and tell your date what she can order based on the T&Cs therein.  Unsurprisingly, that date was our first and our last."

Princess Victoria, Shepherd's Bush

Shepherd's Bush is a bit of a culinary wasteland. Full of mainly chain restaurants, it's not somewhere I would go for a meal. It seems to be more concentrated on shopping and live music - food doesn't really get a look in, for those serious about it. So in a forest of EAT, Yo! Sushi and GBKs, I was surprised to discover that somewhere worth going to actually exists.

I was actually in Shepherd's Bush by accident. I'd been to a house party the night before and I'd stayed there out of sheer laziness. I woke up with a hangover and a few of us decided to go to for brunch/lunch. What fresh hell, I wondered, would this visit bring me? I didn't know anywhere in Shepherd's Bush worth eating in. The previous time I'd been to Shepherd's Bush for a gig, I ended up going to Wagamama in Westfield for some oh-so-hip but mediocre ramen on the insistence of a visiting friend (ever find that when friends visit the [eating] capital, they get most excited about going to Nando's or Frankie & Benny's over somewhere new? Not that I have anything against chains but going all the way to London and only eating in that kind of place is limited and a little boring). So I was not particularly excited about this visit, surrounded by Chicken Cottage and the like.

After walking past a number of Aussie-themed pubs and unremarkable chicken places, we ended up at The Princess Victoria. It is one of those pubs where you can have a very nice time. It consists of a large room at the front and a dining room at the back. The waiter attempted to dissuade us from sitting in the busy pub bit (after a little pushing, we discovered he was trying to fill up the empty dining room and clear the pub for football supporters. Nice try). We waited for our friends to arrive and although they offered us their own brand of still or sparkling water (free of charge, tick) and a basket of bread (also free of charge for the initial one), they didn't seem to want to take a proper drinks order until said friends arrived twenty minutes later, how ever much flagging down we tried. Were they not trying to sell us things here!?

I ordered a couple of starters because they looked more interesting than the main courses (more often than not, that's the case). To start, a beef tea (which is basically a beef broth), with chanterelles, bone marrow dumplings and truffle oil, which kind of looked like something resembling the mock turtle soup from The Fat Duck. It was refreshing and meaty but I couldn't taste the gratuitous truffle oil. It didn't detract from the dish particularly. Also, it wasn't another 'carrot and coriander' soup - something a little more adventurous. So much of what makes up a pub menu is often a crowd-pleaser. Then, some dressed crab with paper-thin slices of toast - a fairly generous amount, though erring on over-subtle taste.

Also on the table were a half-pint of unpeeled prawns with lemon mayo, crispy deep-fried whitebait and not-particularly-smoky taramasalata on toast which were all perfectly pleasant and and exactly what you would expect, but the true star was a magnificent Scotch egg which was , which I'm still berating myself for not ordering.

It was about £20 each for a main course and one (non-alcoholic) drink - pretty average for the area, although as with all gastropubs, prices would rise swiftly adding on extras and drinks.

It's about a 10-minute walk from Shepherd's Bush Market station and about 15 minutes longer than that from Shepherd's Bush main station but it's a 'gastropub' I would probably travel to Shepherd's Bush for - it's interesting, a great room and there's not a pieminister pie in sight.

How to Open an Artisan Coffee Shop

Originally published in Fire & Knives March 2013.

Once upon a time a coffee shop was either the place owned by Daphne where everyone met in Neighbours, or a snack bar announcing the fresh, new vision of Tesco circa 1985. 

Coffee shops: places we now can't live without, an essential part of our day. I think it was when my own suburban mother referred to 'needing' her coffee 'hit'  that my stomach turned over and I felt the first twinges of cynicism. Now we talk about coffee in terms like 'flat white' and 'stumpy'. It's like we've all eaten an Australian phrasebook.

I'm not going to re-write the story. We all know that the coffee shop industry has us by the balls. What do you spend every day on coffee? £5, £10? Possibly more? Scary. 

Coffee has been in the news a lot lately, of course, with Caitlin Moran's favourite - Starbucks - grudgingly forced (after PR pressure, not the rules) into chucking the government a bone occasionally, after being caught paying less tax than a single-mother working part-time as a trainee nurse. Or the opening of the latest chain, Harris & Hoole, where people have been hoodwinked into cheerfully believing their neighbourhood has a friendly new independent latte lounge, complete with cool interior, groovy staff and homemade flapjacks, only to be horrified (after loving it) when they read in the paper that the secret silent investor is none other than the evil corporate bully (and UK's biggest employer) Tesco. Boo, hiss.

I was walking through town the other day and coffee was suggested. Where should we go? We considered the options. There are generally three choices now. The ancient Italian coffee shops we all know and supposedly love (although when charged £3 by a shouty Inter Milan fan for a bitter espresso, not always); the corporate super-chains where you're lining the pockets of a fat bloke on holiday in Mustique; or the new cuddly, liberal, eco-friendly, brown-cord-wearing nice guy reading the Guardian Weekend - the artisan coffee shop.

Artisan coffee shop. I could have easily said 'independent' - those places of vibes, design and good intention. Started by 'folk who love good coffee' (there seems to be quite a few of these), they have mutated into achingly worthy hangouts for more than just coffee: they are now full all day at the weekend with creatives resembling Catalan beatnik intellectuals, hipster families and everyone in between. It's even started filtering through to the normals. Liking 'artisan' coffee is not just for the foodies and coffee geeks now. Instead of going to the pub, they go to The Nordic Bakery (open late) and linger over a cortardo with their MacBooks and woolly hats and unfinished semi-autobiographical manuscripts, discussing righteous causes.

We need more of these little shops, sticking it to the corporate man in a stylish, good intentional granary bread kind of way, standing proud like a little beacon of brown in a sea of bright green & burgundy branding. So to encourage quitting that job in the City and running the independent hang-out you've always dreamed of, here's my guide to opening an artisan coffee shop.

1. Location

Your 'Monopoly Mayfair' gold spot would have to be a corner plot in London's Broadway Market in Hackney, a street so pleased with itself it recently decided to attempt to ban tourists as they were the 'wrong kind of people'. But any recently gentrified, middle-class enclave will do. Ultimate neighbours would be a specialist vinyl record shop, bookshop and vintage boutique.

2. Design

Rough & ready. Stripped pine, distressed and exposed brick are all good. As funky as possible. Helvetica font, or worn typewriter for more scrappy feel. Concrete/kitchen tiles/filament bulbs obviously - they're a given. There has to be a peg board menu with amusing notes for the customers. Any colours should be muted greys/greens from the late 90s gastropub era.

3. Product

Single supplier, hand roasted, ethically sourced, locally roasted beans of course. Square Mile, Climpson, Monmouth all favourites. Latte art essential. Serve coffee in glasses, Barcelona style.

Homemade cake, thick and crusty artisan bread, specialist Spanish hams, salads, and don't forget, lots of quinoa. Tea: great one as can be charged at the same as coffee (or it would make the coffee look expensive), enabling the extremely sneaky £2.50 cup of tea that has found its way unchallenged onto menus across London. Ker-ching!

No-no: branded cups, anything packaged. Walkers crisps. Syrup shots.

4. Staff

Baristas are the original mixologists. Get the most aloof ones you can find, and instruct them to wow your customers with their milk stretching knowledge. Tell them time spent is no object, and queues forming while they expertly tamp grounds and tap the milk jug up and down should be encouraged.

Girls: Wacky funky tomboy lesbians with exotic accents, lots of shaved haircuts and piercings. 

Men: beards are essential, as are band t-shirts or cable-knit jumpers and beanie hats.  Southern hemisphere where possible. 

5. Atmosphere

Background music should resemble a Match.com ad. The Staves, Laura Marling, the knowingly retro Joni Mitchell are all good.

6. Backing

Of course you'll need some cash to fund all this. Don't risk your own, and banks are extortionate. What you need is a backer. Be careful who you get - large evil corporations equal bad publicity and don't mesh with the independent vibe you're aiming at, so keep it quiet.

Good Backers (feel free to shout about these)

Local community whip-round

Fair trade coffee company 

Crowd funded multiple investors

Bad backers (shhhh)

Tesco

McDonald's

Your parents

If you do well, you can open more shops, and hopefully become a chain. By that time you'll be loaded and have forgotten about the reasons you started your shop anyway, so it doesn't matter. 

Last but not least, your coffee shop will quickly fill up with buttoned-up lumberjack shirt wearing freeloading wifi suckers buying a coffee at 11am and sitting there for the rest of the day using your tables, loo, heating etc as their office. How to diplomatically discourage these folk will make the perfect topic of conversation as you clean the Marzocco.

Restaurants Doing Twitter Right

These are restaurants twitter accounts who do what I think twitter can be brilliant for: making customers remember you. 

Here is a list of accounts that I actually enjoy following and who have got the message from people who know how to do marketing: don't do the hard sell. They're witty, informative and there's a real person with opinions behind it. And not too much dull retweeting of praise or making their every tweet visible to all of their followers (not every reply is interesting!).

Mangal2. All of those 'witty' twitter accounts pale in comparison to this one. This one takes the piss out of itself regularly, and in a timeline of people and restaurant taking themselves far too seriously, a little irreverence is great.

The Gunmakers. The landlord tweets anecdotes of his customers (sometimes livetweeting peculiar customers and the frustrations of a landlord) and gives his strong opinions on everything, no holds barred. And he's funny, which helps.

The Dolphin. This isn't the real Twitter account for the Dolphin, but it's the one everyone follows, because it's absolutely ridiculous – follow for the utterly rude, inappropriate ramblings that comment on pop culture and very occasionally,  things that are relevant to pubs. If this was run by the dolphin, it would make me want to go there.

Hawksmoor. Interesting food and meat facts, witty observations and good interaction - they seem genuinely interested in seeing what customers have to say whilst maintaining a large following. They're just very likeable. If I see their avatar in my timeline, I look forward to reading a quality tweet.

Bob Bob Ricard. He gives a light-hearted impression of decadence and eccentricity, whilst being engaging and amusing. Never trying to sell his restaurant constantly, he gives us the occasional gorgeous insight into new dish ideas, but mainly his presence is a subtle reminder that Bob Bob Ricard is there - reliable, exotic and exciting, somehow managing to encapsulate the whole restaurant's USP in a Twitter feed.

Keep Your Empty Tables off Twitter, Please!

Restaurants. Those poor businesses, struggling to make ends meet. Existing to please us, the evil customer, the fickle, complaining pain in the arse who comes in and harrasses the waitresses, doesn't like paying service and threatens to write nasty Tripadvisor reviews.

We should pat these institutions on the back! They need all the help they can get, right?

Well of course, a business is a business. It needs to survive. How does it survive? Customers. Being full every night is surely the dream of restaurants everywhere. Booked, months in advance, kitchens ordering supplies happily, chefs and FoH working together like a well oiled machine. A performance, even. 

Yet somehow, through the wobbly vision of a dream fading away, I've come to realise that going out to dinner is precisely not this. A restaurant is not a performance. It's not an event. We are not there to witness art. 

Cooking and service is an art maybe, but not 'art'. It's not an expression of feeling. It's not there to entertain. It's not there to challenge your head intellectually and make you see the world in a different way. Well, apart from in some ridiculously pretentious Parisian three-starred Michelin kitchens I believe. So let's climb down from this extremely high horse and see restaurants for what they are, places to simply go and eat food in. Restore ourselves to a feeling of wellbeing, re-energise and raise our spirits.

Now, I love a restaurant as much as the next annoying blogger. In fact, going out to eat is my favourite thing to do in the world. I am a dream customer for a restaurant. I spend a huge proportion of my income on eating out. I like nothing more than being waited on efficiently, served lovely food and being treated like the king of Greece for the evening. That's what I'm paying for. 

How restaurants have attracted customers has changed over the years, from the small ad in the local newspaper, word of mouth, PR, email newsletters, even touts on the street with flyers and other collateral, asking, sometimes even hassling you to come in.

So when I look at twitter (as I do, occasionally) and see restaurants, who I've taken the time to follow, tweeting about their 'spare table tonight' again and again, I can't help thinking it's one step towards 'digital touting', an abuse of my time, a sales pitch I didn't sign up for.

What makes you think that your sudden table availability is of such importance it warrants tweeting, like a piece of news? 

Do you really consider yourselves so popular, so in demand, that a free table at your place is some kind of hot ticket? Like front row at a Justin Bieber show? Like a major sporting final? Are you expecting people to jump up and down and race to take you up on your generous offer to squeeze us in, and be the lucky part witness to the great sensational act known to us mere mortals as 'having dinner'?

This kind of short-sighted use of twitter is typical of DIY marketing and reeks of amateurishness, self importance, and is precisely what fuels the ridiculous hype, PR puff, fast turnover, backlash, dark void, waning of popularity then inevitable closure of restaurants. By playing this game you are fuelling the very devil you are fighting.

It's no coincidence that this practice is popular with a certain type of restaurant, recently opened and hype-hungry, generally. I can only predict that continually waving 'please come', many will shoot themselves in the foot and begin to irritate even the most loyal of fans. Because bottom line, it's boring.

It's a tiny, weeny, silly thing, but maybe that's because it's relatively new. But imagine the future, if it became commonplace for every business to tweet every time it wanted to sell something.

Let's not forget a few things. Twitter is not a marketing tool. It was not put here as a government funded free service to help small businesses sell their wares. Most people are not on it to watch advertising, or try and be sold things every two minutes. Businesses using twitter should be grateful they are even there, communicating with customers for free. They are guests at a party, and the party is not a trade show. Be here, yes, have fun, contribute to the atmosphere, but please don't talk shop constantly.

My gentle advice to restaurants would be to keep quiet, stop drawing attention to your thinly veiled desperation, concentrate on pleasing the customers that have taken the time to book and have kept their bookings, and work on making them regulars. 

I believe it will pay off, even if you occasionally have to have the odd empty table.

La Rugoletta: A Proper Old-School Italian

I have been vocal in my love for Ciao Bella, a little Italian in Bloomsbury, which is one of my favourite places in London - exactly what a proper old-fashioned Italian should be like. It doesn't pander to any current (or otherwise) trends and it doesn't try whatsoever to be cool. And this is exactly what La Rugoletta is like. 

La Rugoletta has a bit of a peculiar interior, with the food prep area and glass-fronted cabinet being visible, like a cafe sort of set-up, but it makes the experience all the more old-school. The lighting isn't the most flattering but it's still sort of romantic - it's still somewhere appropriate for a date. The tiny room somehow packs in about ten tables - there is, admittedly, not a lot of room to move around but that fact can be charmingly overlooked by the fact that it makes the room more cosy. 

It's not going to win any prizes for inventive menu design or attractive glassware or crockery, but La Rugoletta is the real deal, and a totally refreshing change from all of the zeitgeisty places that are opening up seemingly by the day. It is family-run, has no pretensions and best of all, it's cheap! Furthermore, because they don't have a license, they can't sell alcohol so you can bring your own wine. Corkage charge is minimal (about £2, I think).

We kicked things off with a hefty portion of salami, bread, olives and bruschetta. Bizarrely, oil and balsamic vinegar, and olives, were served in large tumblers. Then, onto main courses. Tagliatelle with scallops, mushroom and white wine sauce was light and (perhaps a bit too light on the miniscule scallops, though). The tagliatelle was gloriously wide and the mushrooms unlike the little slugs you so often find when they're cooked, and though I couldn't finish it, I made a valiant effort.

We staggered out of the door after paying a £45 bill for three of us, happy and full. If you decide to make the trek (it's always a trek if it's outside Central London or East Dulwich), make sure you book (you can actually book!) as it's tiny and even on a Wednesday that far out, there's often a queue. And it't not even a trendy American 4-hour burger pop-up.

59 Church Lane, London, N2 8DR
020 8815 1743

Restaurant Hipster Trap

Seems like every restaurant that opens these days has a new problem. Hipsters. These pests are everywhere!
They always get there first, poncing about in their little woolly hats and beards, demanding newer and more peculiar menus, more and more ironic decor.
Reviews of your hot new place don't even talk about the food anymore, focusing on these trendy customers instead.

Well, I've come up with the answer: The Restaurant Hipster Trap. Order yours now!