We’re All The Same on the Inside: Why your favourite food venues all look so similar
Our Food and Drink editor looks at the changing face(s) of your favourite venues, offers some top-notch interior design advice, and ponders a future where everywhere is a burger restaurant.
Modern life can be pretty confusing sometimes; with so much to do and so many little bits of information to keep track of, it’s easy to get mixed up and end up locking yourself out of all your email addresses, or accidentally misremembering what words mean. As such, it’s a good idea to look for visual cues and special details when creating that mental map of where all the bits of your life are at any one time.
Which leads us on to coffee. A couple of weeks ago your friendly neighbourhood Food ed was out on his rounds, tutting at sandwiches and swaggering around with an overblown sense of self-importance, when he popped into an Edinburgh cafe for a coffee. Past the glass frontage and impressive typography outside, there was exposed brickwork on the walls, polished wooden benches, some rather snazzy light bulbs, and an equally snazzy parquet floor.
Fast-forward to a week later, and yours truly is out and about again when he stops at a cafe for a coffee. Past the glass frontage and impressive typography outside, there was exposed brickwork on the walls, polished wooden benches, and HANG ON A MINUTE WE’VE JUST BEEN HERE. The walls, the glass, the hilariously underpowered but over-the-top light fittings – it was all eerily similar. It was only on looking directly at the ground (partly to make sure it wasn’t melting beneath my feet) that the lack of patterned wooden loveliness made it clear that we were, in fact, somewhere else.
Now this does sound like the set-up for a tubthumping rant, or the origin story for some kind of Death Row vs Bad Boy-style coffee rivalry, but it actually isn’t. Both these cafes – Brew Lab and Cult Espresso, by the way – make great coffee, are run by switched-on folk who know what they’re doing with an espresso tamper, and are interesting, nice places to be. But they are strikingly similar, and emblematic of one of the main conundrums faced by food lovers – as more and more venues make great coffee, or pour great beer, or cook great food, your choice often comes down to which venue’s interior and vibe you like the best. So what do you do when all the best places are basically the same inside?
When setting up a foodie venue in urban Scotland in 2015, it seems there are a few key styles to go for. There is the post-industrial, which comes in actual and pseudo varieties – that’s the place with bare walls, dangling light fixtures, a super-simple colour scheme and enormous windows. There’s the ‘country kitchen’, whose lovely pine counters and desire to house all its stock in baskets are noble, setting aside the obvious fact that we are neither in the country nor in someone’s kitchen. Or perhaps you would care to try the canteen-inspired look, where 40 covers fit around three tables, all of which overlook a sweary open kitchen, and there’s a three-hour wait for one of the pair of two-seater booths should you not want a side order of 'being repeatedly elbowed in the face' with your dinner.
In the world of bars, one of the key tropes is what might be dubbed the ‘Artist Formerly Known as Old Man’s Pub’. It entails getting a few of the building’s original features done up to their former glory, adding some more features around the edges that are convincing enough to maintain the restoration vibe, giving the place a nice matt coat of paint (an eggshell blue, or perhaps a washed-out emerald), and jet washing the interior to give it that ‘new old pub’ smell and make all the tables super-shiny.
If that doesn’t sound familiar, you’ll certainly recognise the ‘neo-boho’ cafe-bar that looks like the result of a furniture binge by Wes Anderson, with more cornicing and pattern flashes than you can shake an Ikea catalogue at. All the signs are penned in the style of a 19th-century calligrapher, and good luck reading them in the low light (if you were wondering where all the lampshades went earlier, here’s your answer).
In a sense it was always thus; this year’s stripped-back wall was last year’s style bar feature, painted head to toe in a colour from the very depths of the Pantone colour chart, and if you look hard enough you can still see the colonial-style fans spinning in bars where the owners have long since realised that enormous spinning blades might not be the smartest thing to put in a busy, darkened room. Styles change, trends develop, and everyone bets on a new shade of matt emulsion as the colour of the moment – it’s fun to watch, if occasionally slightly infuriating.
The real problem comes when the similarities between venues outweigh the differences, and there becomes very little to choose between them. Case in point – Glasgow city centre’s almost comical love affair with the burger. Burger Meats Bun, Bread Meats Bread, Handmade Burger Company, Meat Bar, Jacker de Viande; all these venues do the same thing, in similar surroundings, literally within earshot of one another. And that’s just one corner of one part of the city.
There are a series of venues – some of which are good, some very good – that would be fine individually, but when put together create one powerful message: If you don’t like red meat and modern interior design techniques, you can pretty much fuck off. It may be fine for now – people won’t just stay in their homes chewing on their slippers, they’ll have to go out to eat at some point – but it won’t be ‘now’ forever.
When presented with a series of choices they don’t want, some foodies will just disengage entirely, and then when the hip trend of the moment changes – as it has a funny habit of doing from time-to-time – it becomes that much harder to track those people down and convince them you were never that sure about red meat either.
The trick to remember, food and drink proprietors of Scotland, is to use your design and style tropes carefully. We know your venues will sometimes look similar, or you might all simultaneously hit on the same idea for a kooky vessel to put your cocktails in (have watering cans been done yet?). Just make sure you don’t take it too far… oh, and buy some proper bloody lightbulbs.