picture from Belfast Telegraph

The fictional diarist Adrian Mole worked for a period of time in a Soho restaurant that prided itself on serving no nonsense working class food. As a result of this, the place became popular with the trendy set that enjoyed the amusement of eating from a menu that typically included tinned Heinz soup for a starter, Fray Bentos pie with oven chips for main course, and Angel Delight for dessert. Sue Townsend was satirising the way that slaves to fashion will basically do anything they are told is ‘in’, observing through Adrian’s father George that people would stick ten pound notes up their bums if they heard it was fashionable. Townsend was obviously writing a fictitious piece of comedy, but sixteen years later the world is slowly becoming the work of a comedic writer. A restaurant selling cheap convenience food dressed up as an ironic experience can’t be that far away.

Following on from the success of the Cereal Killer Café in Shoreditch (a place where the national dress includes rolled up trousers), the latest experiment proved a huge success – a café selling crisp sandwiches. Think for a minute (those old enough) about how far we have come in this country when it comes to eating out. These days we take restaurants for granted and eating out is something we do without thinking about it, yet when I was a child the concept of going out to eat was something that happened on extremely special occasions. I remember the unsophisticated days when fresh orange juice was a starter and Chinese and Indian (no other nationality of restaurant exists in my childhood memory banks, I’m sure the UK had other options but I was brought up in the North East and foreign people were treated with suspicion) restaurants offered steak and chips for the less adventurous. Have our taste buds advanced so much that we are now looking for ways to go back to basics? Or is a competition taking place that we don’t know about between eateries to see how far irony can be pushed before someone twigs that we are all participating in a nightmare combination of The Truman Show and Beadle’s About?

At the moment the cereal café and the crisp sandwich café are doing well, which is something that the owners should make the most of because it won’t last once the novelty wears off and the hipster crowd decide to turn their short attention spans elsewhere. You only need to look at the casualties of cool that have now been forgotten, the oxygen bar being a good example. If you mention the idea of oxygen bars to someone today it might trigger a memory of times gone by, or they will have forgotten it altogether and will accuse you of making it up. Even the juice bar seems to have vanished, which goes to show how transient catering fads can be. These two new flash in the pan hipster favourites will soon be a distant memory, but it is hard to try and imagine what joke will be played on the so-called cool people next. I once came up with the idea of a restaurant holding a none-food evening; you read the menu as usual and make your choices, but instead of getting your meal you had it described to you by a waiter before being presented with the bill and going away hungry. In my imagination I described it as an opportunity to make a statement on how eat nice food in expensive restaurants while there are people starving in other areas of society. It reminded me of the patronising craze for Nicaraguan coffee in the late 1980s in which we were encouraged to buy the shittiest tasting coffee and give the proceeds to a country that were probably pissing themselves laughing at our stupidity, there’s probably a large amount of it in Regents Canal thanks to the stall holders on Camden Market realising that they were never going to sell it.

This is where the current trend for empty shops becoming ‘pop up’ shops (once known as ‘squatters’) these days comes from – you wouldn’t sign a ten year lease on some daft fashion statement when a ten minute lease would be a generous estimate in some cases. Only last year you couldn’t walk more than two paces without seeing cupcakes, it was like being trapped in Pinterest.

My idea for a hipster spin on the mushy pea shop seems a less ridiculous proposition every day, especially in Nottingham. On the face of it the idea of eating mushy peas with mint sauce must seem to the rest of the country no less funny than a crisp sandwich café. It does make me wonder where we can go next, a Pot Noodle bar perhaps. I remember years ago seeing a sign outside a pub advertising that they sell coffee and thinking it a crazy idea, now we have coffee in pubs and an alcohol free pub, and you can’t smoke in either. Bonkers.

Moving away from food slightly, in the 1980s Clive James used to show us clips of television shows from those funny foreigners in which game show contestants had to eat slugs as a forfeit. Nowadays we treat unemployed weather presenters and forgotten pop stars in exactly the same way on prime time television. The world as we know it is increasingly becoming a Monty Python sketch with each new idea pushing the boundaries one step closer to the point of stupidity.

As Morrissey once observed, that joke isn't funny anymore.

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