the rich, the mature and those spending
company money. But a revolution is hap -
pening: fine dining is now considered part of
the “experience economy” — of places to
make great memories and great social media
posts. And the surprising drivers of this are
Generation Z, ie those who are 25 and under.
This paper’s late, great AA Gill wrote a reli-
ably brutal takedown of the Michelin Guide —
“Francophile and bloated and snobbish” — in
November 2012’s Vanity Fair. Ten years on,
Netflix and YouTube are thick with documen-
taries, films and chef profiles, and the kids see
eating out as part of an IRL entertainment
lexicon that includes gigs, bars and clubs.
That also means the finest of dining experi-
ences, at places people once waited until their
25th wedding anniversary to visit.
Sam Ward is the managing director of the
Umbel Restaurant Group, the jewel of which
is L’Enclume, one of the UK’s eight restau-
rants with three Michelin stars — and the
only one north of Watford, tucked away in the
Lake District. The new generation of destina-
tion diners head here too, despite a tasting
menu that costs £250. “It hasn’t drastically
changed — we’ve still got the 50th-wedding
anniversaries, the big birthdays and your
traditional fine-dining crowd,” Ward says.
“But there is this new 25 to 30-year-old
crowd, and sometimes even younger. Fifteen
years ago the under-thirties were 5 per cent of
the room, now it’s more like 25 per cent.”
There is harder evidence that they’re eating
out loads more than other generations did.
By the age of 16 Gen Z are eating in restau-
rants as regularly as people twice their age,
according to a 2019 report commissioned by
the Food Standards Agency. “They are less
likely to smoke, drink or take drugs,” says the
report. And they aren’t shopaholics either —
“They would rather spend money on experi-
ences than products.”
On a recent Friday night at the Water
House Project, the whole mood is chilled in
the way that only a room full of people who
eat out a lot can be. A former industrial
building beside Regent’s Canal in east
London, the restaurant sits under two gas
towers and a business park made of shipping
containers. Doors lock at 7pm, and the 14
tables bed in for a 10-course tasting menu.
Maybe half the diners are under 30. There are
long-distance destination diners from Korea
and Paris: revenge travel (ie splurging on
bucket-list destinations since the lifting of
Covid restrictions) tends to include a bit
of revenge dining too. The chef and founder
Gabriel Waterhouse says he places no
emphasis on how his diners dress; instead an
etiquette faux pas is “if people come dressed
up and behave in an unpleasant and aloof ‘I’m
here, now serve me’ way”.
Sure, he says, “younger customers can do a
lot of reels, a lot of filming, and when we dosomething like pour a sauce on a plate we are
ready for that”. He is not joining that club that
complains about young people filming in
restaurants. “There has always been theatre
in restaurants, like the removing of a cloche,
so why not film it?”
A couple of miles down the road,
one-Michelin-starred Leroy in Shoreditch
could simply be the local corner bistro of
dreams, with its vintage vinyl crackling on the
record player, convivial bartender and tables
packed with animated twenty and thirty-
somethings chatting over bottles of quite
serious natural wine. No painful clatter of
cutlery on plates and politely murmured
conversations here. The owner, Ed Thaw,
knows this great surge of young diners isn’t
about just food, wine and hospitality, it’s
about being there. “The fact is, you can’t
download a restaurant. At its best, restaurant-
going is a life-affirming experience that’s not
replicable at home. Previously fine dining
meant French, now in London alone you have
Ikoyi [west African], Kol [Mexican], Sollip
[Korean inspired] and Jamavar [Indian]. The
‘new fine’ is diverse.”
Where eating out has gone is extraordi-
nary. In Stockholm last month the artist
Carsten Höller opened Brutalisten, a restau-
rant with a brutalist kitchen manifesto. If
your sine qua non is an experience, then
Höller’s going straight in the destination-
dining charts. As he has said himself: “The
taste of food is not something like music,
which you can listen to over and over again.
It’s there and then it disappears.”
Despite loving eating out, I cannot
remember thinking fine dining was for
me back in my twenties. How times have
changed. “Our generation has grown up ina time of globalism, internationalism, Insta-
gram and street food, which has made every
kind of food available to us,” says Max Evans,
23, a hospitality PR. “To us, the old-school
fine-dining experience is exotic.”
Katrynna Yu, a trainee solicitor, is also 23
and has a huge hit list of places she wants to
try. She spends, she says, pretty much all her
money on eating out. Bars and clubs are too
unreliable, you can’t guarantee a good time
like you can with dinner. Her boyfriend
doesn’t get it — “He doesn’t understand
paying that much money for food that
doesn’t make you full” — not that she minds:
she has a crew of friends who share her
passion for gastronomy.
Richard Turner’s new restaurant, Carnival,
opened in April at Manchester’s Escape to
Freight Island, a cool, contemporary and —
crucially — upmarket take on what the
Americans call a food court. But it’s not
about street food: along with six bars, it has
ten independent restaurants offering some-
thing significantly more high end. One of
those is the kebab stand One Star Doner Bar
(with its smiley face potato fries), launched
by Brad Carter, of Birmingham’s Michelin-
starred Carters of Moseley.
“Revenge travel has been good for us —
about 20 per cent of our customers are from
outside the UK now,” says Gemma Krysko,
a founding partner of Freight Island. “There
is nowhere else in the world like us. When
you walk in you can’t believe what you are
seeing. The vibe is magical — there’s art,
there’s sculpture, music, all under a canopy
of thousands of plants.”
That it’s popular with young people is no
surprise. Carnival is its most expensive
offering, and I ask Turner (the founder chef of
the steak restaurant Hawksmoor) what this is
all about. “Maybe we’re all just getting older,”
he jokes, going on to agree, “the diners are all
getting much younger. My 23-year-old son
eats out all the time — since he was 19 he has
been pretty clued up. He’ll go to a nice place
with his mates. They’re not out getting
pissed every night like we were, and I think
Trunk Archive, Getty Images that’s probably a good thing.” ■
Fine dining is now
considered part of
the ‘experience
economy’ – of places to
make great memories
Sketch’s Gallery
restaurantThe Sunday Times Style • 23