Ignore the name — Mr Potatoes was special. A Columbian café run by a friendly husband-and-wife team, it was a jewel on Evelyn Street in Deptford. Flanked by spots called Delicias Colombianas and Balboa, it catered to the area’s small but significant South American community, many of whom had moved from Elephant and Castle, having been chased east by redevelopment. I myself only visited a few times, but it wasn’t hard to understand the appeal. There were papas rellenas, or stuffed and fried potato balls, bursting with chicken, ideal with a beer. Or else there were arepas, arguably Colombia’s most famous culinary export, endlessly moreish and satisfying, and which yearn to be thrust into hot sauce.
Today, Mr Potatoes is dead, having closed last year. Café and restaurants will always come and go, but keeping them open is harder than ever. There are all the old reasons: soaring rents, food costs, tariffs that make imports more expensive. Then there’s the rise in wages — many junior staff in hospitality hover on minimum wage — and rocketing bills from gas firms and landlords. It’s places such as Mr Potatoes that are most vulnerable here, only existing to feed a small community, without a concept or marketing, or social media to nurture a buzz. It all speaks to how London’s food scene is increasingly divided between a shrinking elite and the scrambling rest, with ominous consequences for the city’s shared identity.
All told, around 250 pubs and restaurants opened in London last year — and 500 closed. It’s a notable figure, if unsurprising: as tastes change, and the city becomes more diverse, it’s implausible for nothing to alter. That’s clear enough if you trace the story of London’s pie and mash shops. About a century ago there were as many as 130 such establishments across the capital; today they number less than 20.
Is it as much a matter of evolving tastes? No doubt a drop in demand is part of the problem: not only do younger generations have so much more choice, but older ones have moved away or died. It is understandable to forgo steak pie when, within a mile radius, there are Sichuan noodles, Korean bao, US-style fried chicken and proper Neapolitan pizza. This isn’t to say pie and mash doesn’t have its place or is any less good to eat, though you may have to grow up eating the stuff to truly enjoy it. For any newcomers out there: pies aren’t filled with eels any more, so let that reassure you.
There’s an irony here. Failing they might be, but together with greasy spoons and, to a degree, old Italian fixtures, pie and mash shops have become something of a working class pin-up. That’s presumably because expensively educated journalists who had never been to one before can readily understand why they were once so beloved: the white tiles; the characters in aprons ladling mashed potato onto battered plates; the steam billowing from rickety pots before slouched cabbies drinking Sarsaparilla. Not only do these places make for easy copy, they’re guaranteed hits on Instagram: “Video reviewers” love pretending to have known about them for years before “spilling the beans” to their mostly paid-for lists of followers.
Maybe the bitterest pie and mash loss of recent times was a branch of Manze’s in Deptford, not far from the former Mr Potatoes. It shut as veteran owner George Mascall decided to call time but it’s wildly unlikely to continue as a traditional pie and mash shop now. I dread to think it being replaced by a Pret or a Gail’s — or dare I mention Greggs? They wouldn’t, would they? At this point, it doesn’t seem outside the realms of possibility.
Well, I probably shouldn’t rail too hard against the changing times, let alone bring up the “gentrification” debate for the hundredth time. Call it regeneration — it’s happening anyway. Think of somewhere like Bow. A friend from there recently bemoaned “displacement” in the neighbourhood, arguing it sullied the place. Yet all the while, he acknowledged that exciting new things were afoot. Among other things, Bow happens to be home to London’s best Italian restaurant. Run by self-taught chef Sophia Massarella, Polentina sits in the corner of an upmarket clothing factory on an industrial estate. Eat there, I implore you.
Yet if change is constant in a big city, especially one that’s seen as much upheaval as London, there’s surely something more going on than the retirement of the old guard. Certainly, the demise of Mr Potatoes suggests as much, and there are plenty of other examples too. I’m reminded, for instance, of Zaibatsu, an unassuming fixture in Greenwich that closed in January 2024. Though there’s been chatter of a new premises since, nothing has materialised so far, and so Trafalgar Road has lost an affordable restaurant for well-crafted sushi, one where keen diners can get change from two £20 notes.
Beyond the food, what’s really relevant here is why Zaibatsu closed: according to local media due to a “dispute with the landlord”. Details remain scarse, but I’m struck by how similar Zaibatsu’s fate is to so many other rough-and-ready London restaurants, whether pie shops or Colombian cafés. After all, tighter margins hit harder when assets extend only to the single oven in the kitchen and the walk-in fridge, leaving places like this utterly vulnerable to landlords. Rates vary wildly between postcodes and square footage, while footfall expectations and innumerable factors besides play their part, but you’d be hard-pressed to set up a restaurant in a popular area in London today without having upwards of £100,000 to spare. And that’s just for the lease of a tiny, unmarketed site out of Zone 1, with a skeletal team and cheap food besides.
I suppose all this begs a question: where’s the line between preserving the old-school charm of a place and expanding out to avoid the economic headwinds? In recent years, classic working-class food has been latched on to by moneyed types who want to be part of the “conversation” and appear trendily inclusive. Burberry teaming up with Norman’s, the modern take on a greasy spoon in Archway, was the most egregious example here. But then Norman’s announced its closure a month or so ago — and Café Britaly, another new-age take on working class food, was open less than a year — suggesting that even slick marketing can only do so much when business rents are so brutal.
Besides, it isn’t just working-class joints, whether Cockney or Columbian, which struggle in today’s London. A great example here is Daquise, a Polish stalwart of South Kensington since the Fifties and which has long attracted a celebrity clientele. Marco Pierre White told me not so long ago that it was his favourite place to eat when he first arrived in London and was working as a junior chef for the Roux family. Yet that may not spare Daquise, all wood panelling, pierogi and vodka, from sharing the same fate as Mr Potatoes. The property it’s housed in is owned by Transport for London and it wants to redevelop (big money flats, I assume). TFL has promised the owners a new space afterwards, but a grand, historical spot doing well in a new build is hardly realistic.
There’s another problem. As much as the hype restaurants close, they open too. Leroy, a formerly Michelin-starred restaurant in Shoreditch, closed last year. But months later, the site was taken on by the former head chef, renamed Duchy, and relaunched with a menu that wasn’t the same as Leroy’s — but wasn’t hugely different either. But the pie and mash shops, the greasy spoons, the mad Chinese takeaways in the middle of nowhere? They don’t ever seem to be replaced like-for-like. I guess it’s tempting, here, to blame a saturated market. But that hardly seems likely when you consider the streets of New York, Athens and Bangkok. For many hospitality professionals in London today, starting from the bottom must seem like an insurmountable task.
This is about more than just cooking. London is a remarkable city. It’s an entrepreneurial one, one offering just about every cuisine imaginable. But it’s also in danger of becoming too sanitised, clinical and homogenous. One of the most telling current trends is a shift toward New York-style restaurants, which are as much about service, martinis, and white tablecloths as they are about the eating (a big shout-out to places like the Fat Badger here). It’s my favourite restaurant trend in ages. But having visited the Big Apple recently, it’s clear that New York is also a city flush with bodegas and budget sandwiches. Their greasy spoons are dollar slices and they have them in abundance; their pie and mash are hot-dog carts and they’re everywhere. We might meet in the middle with kebabs (gyros to New Yorkers), but the fact is that a functioning city must do cheap as well as expensive. Set menus are a saving grace for Zone 1 — The Devonshire is exemplary, outstanding for £25 per head — but we need much more of the same.
And so it remains that an uncompromising landscape is hurting too many. What might be done? Lowering VAT would be a start: allow businesses to operate as they do in Italy, France, and Spain, where rates are well below the 20% here. I realise suggesting rent caps for smaller traders is practically utopian, but one can dream. Whitehall might also conjure up a minister for hospitality. It is, after all, our third largest employer. Fail to act, anyway, and London will become just another Dubai, where flirty, fun tables are replaced by mere transactions. Maybe that’s inevitable. But for now, Mr Potatoes is gone, and I’m not sure anything will replace it.
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Author: Josh Barrie
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