For an utterance closing in on 200-years-old, “you are what you eat” has held up remarkably well. But today, perhaps more illuminative is this — you are where you eat. The person trekking to east London to buy miscellaneous fish in a car park is likely not the same sort who settles in for Dover sole at Scott’s. Not always but often, your choice of restaurant can be revealing.
Politicians know this, and restaurants are easily politicised. They always have been. That Churchill took his cabinet for lunches are the Savoy feels fitting; likewise, not such a shock to learn that Margaret Thatcher’s favourite restaurant was Wilton’s, somewhere that has stuck to its guns since 1742. In the mid-Ninties, modern, forward-thinking Granita in Islington was where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown plotted their future; by 2003 the place had been reborn as somewhere called Desperados. You can make your own jokes. That Boris Johnson would regularly eat in family-run Italian in Sheen, Mamma Mia, seemed odd — until it came out he was in at least four photos on the wall. Besides the ragu and tiramisu, the place was feeding his ego.
