Last week, when the Good Food Guide announced it was banning the term ‘gastropub,’ you’ll have heard a small cheer go up from the vicinity of me.
It’s not like the smoke ban, of course. People are still going to use the word. You’re not going to get the food police coming round and banging you up for saying “gastropub.” But it was a bold and refreshing emperor’s-new-clothes moment.
Some of us have for years argued there’s no such thing as a gastropub – just pubs that serve good food. We were drowned out by a buzz that was positive, at least, in drawing attention to the fact that pubs had gone beyond scampi-in-a-basket and serious chefs were coming into the trade.
But too many pubs claimed the name, seeing the chance to add a few quid to their prices. Worse, it encouraged some to go too far down the restaurant route, bringing out the white tablecloths and turning the bar into no more than a service counter.
Rural houses in particular were under pressure to increase their food trade to survive, but many did it at the expense of local drinkers. They put all their quail’s eggs in one spun-sugar basket and lost the very thing that makes a pub a pub.
Smarter operators saw that people like eating in pubs because of the sheer informality of it and the comforting background noise of chatter from the bar. Here was a place you could not only eat well in but relax.
Being a pub, rather than a gastropub, also means you can be more imaginative and flexible about the food you serve. As the Good Food Guide points out, pubs offer everything from bar snacks to a three-course meal without treating the customer any differently. Traditional pub meals mingle with the exotic.
Not least, pubs have made possible the rehabilitation of the scotch egg. “It’s the time of the pub again,” declares Guide editor Elizabeth Carter, perhaps a little too optimistically bearing in mind the present difficulties. But she’s right. We don’t need gastropubs.
A mystery remains, however. Who was it 20 years ago who decided that the Eagle in Farringdon was the first of a new breed? Who called it a gastropub? Come on. Own up.
Subscribe