Here’s Why These Restaurants Are Rejecting Technology

In London’s King’s Cross, where locale names like Granary Square and Coal Drops Yard hark back to the neighborhood’s industrial heyday, Hugh Corcoran recently opened a restaurant that has attracted both outrage and praise, less for its food than for a refusal to enter the 21st century. The Yellow Bittern has two lunchtime seatings, weekdays only; as there are just 18 seats, reservations are required, and they must be made by phone or postcard; only cash is accepted. The menu is short, not inexpensive, and unashamedly simple, which is understandable since the kitchen is a handkerchief-size space at the end of the dining room.

If your eyes wander from your Irish stew or your dining companion, past the mustard pots on every table and the paintings and photographs on the canary-colored walls, they will alight on Corcoran, whose curls and waistcoats give him the appearance of a Dickensian shopkeeper, busy plating, pouring, or polishing glasses. On my visit, his only help was from his business partner Lady Frances von Hofmannsthal, who was given the thankless task of seating guests. (“That would help me so much,” she breathed, when I asked to look around their even tinier bookshop downstairs.) And Oisín Davis, arts curator and overseer of the bookshop, seemed to be washing up, though there is, Corcoran assured me, a dishwasher. Even retro dining has its limits.

The food is really good: thick, tasty soups, tender roast guinea fowl, housemade soda bread. There’s no physical wine list, but there are lots of bottles. Getting Corcoran’s attention to discuss them can be a challenge, but everyone seems to manage eventually: I’ve rarely seen such enthusiastic lunchtime drinking. Or so few cell phones. “I thought of putting up a sign, but we haven’t needed one,” says Corcoran. “And everyone talks to their neighbors!”

He doesn’t want a credit card machine or a computer. His reservation book works fine. “I cook food and serve wine,” he says. “You pay cash at the end.” They don’t, of course, object to tips. 

Corcoran isn’t alone in trying to bring an old-fashioned kind of pleasure back to modern restaurants. At Eulalie in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, Chip Smith and Tina Vaughn also take reservations by phone (and note them in a book), though they do accept credit cards. “We are dinner only, in an attempt to offer maximum relaxation while not overloading the kitchen,” says Vaughn. “And we don’t really turn tables.” They live with tiny margins and no regrets. “I understand the math,” she says. “But Chip and I didn’t go into this for math.”

An ocean apart, both restaurants are united by an appetite for hard work and a belief that serving good food to loyal, appreciative customers is its own reward. In an era of takeout apps and slickly impersonal chains, cozy intimacy with house-baked bread may be just what diners hunger for.

The attitude in those small French restaurants that inspired Vaughn was that “we are here to take care of you,” she says, and that is what she tries to emulate. “People are craving that,” Vaughn says, “especially young people who aren’t used to it.” More than good food or wine, diners want a connection. Otherwise, as Corcoran asks, speaking perhaps for an entire society, “What’s the point?”