I’ve always wondered what’s so wrong about wanting to have your cake and eat it – and in the absence of bread, I’m more than happy to follow Marie Antoinette’s advice, “Let them eat cake!” But as someone who gains a great deal of intellectual and emotional sustenance from going to the theatre, I do sometimes want to attend to other, more basic, hungers, and preferably not to be ripped off in the process.
The West End’s catering has long been, at best, rudimentary, relying on overpriced, understaffed bars that attend to alcoholic needs, but very little to food ones. The subsidised sector has long won the battle on this front, but if the tickets are cheaper than the West End, they sometimes lose that price advantage in over-charging on the catering front. We’re not, of course, obliged to pay it – we can eat elsewhere before we arrive, or bring our own packed lunches with us – but it can still rankle.
At least the National offers a range of offerings – from the cheap(ish) and cheerful slice-of-pizza and salad bar inbetween the Olivier stalls and circle, to the Mezzanine restaurant. But if it’s just a pot of tea and a scone you wanted, there was only one place to go to: the Lyttelton stalls buffet. Except that its just been handsomely refurbished – and gone are the teapots (replaced by single servings of cups of tea) and also, more disastrously, the scones. (And whereas before they would also offer little plastic containers of fresh milk and also skimmed and semi-skimmed options, its now only UHT full milk that’s offered). These may be tiny things, but they matter: visiting the new buffet yesterday before going to the matinee of The Reporter, three members of the public complained to me about this.
And then I went on to the Young Vic for the press opening of The Soldiers’ Fortune, and ate at the restaurant for the first time there. While the old café there was a long, narrow room with catering by Konditer and Cook, the wonderful bakery who are based just around the corner from the Young Vic, the concession for the restaurant (which sprawls incoherently the public spaces, to merge with the bar crowd) is now being managed by someone else. And I miss the cakes.
The food offering is quite limited as well – and, given the democracy of this space that tries to make the theatre itself affordable – I’m wondering who the restaurant is intended to appeal to. There are lots of good dining opportunities in The Cut now that weren’t there a few years ago, and it seems a little over-priced of the Young Vic’s restaurant to be charging £9 for my sausage (South African boerewors, delicious) and potato salad, with sides like a green salad and chips at £2 extra each.
But at least I could eat. The only time you manage a snack before a show in the West End, unless you arrive early enough to go to a sandwich bar on your own steam, is when a producer thoughtfully provides one, as Bill Kenwright routinely does for the press at his openings. It’s a small touch, but a significant one; now maybe West End audiences could get fed, too, and not just by what’s onstage? It’s just a thought.
I wrote the above entry on Friday at 8am. Later in the day in the Evening Standard I see that columnist Simon Davis was preoccupied with a similar theme about the difficulty of eating — when, where and what — if you want to combine it with a trip to the theatre. He came up to town, he reports, to see Rock ‘n’ Roll: “The play started at 7.30pm, so to have dinner beforehand would have meant eating at 6.30pm. The only people, to my knowledge, who eat this time are the residents of old people’s homes, children and American tourists.” So he books a table at Rules for after the show. But he’s not done his research about when that might be. The interval arrives at 8.40pm and he heads to the bar, but though he’s feeling a bit peckish, “the only food on offer was dry roasted peanuts”. As he writes, “This is jus so short-sighted. London has some of the best restaurants in the world yet the food in its theatres is stuck in 1981. A friend visiting from Barcelona tells me that tapas is served in the interval at some theatres there. Why don’t West End theatres? It’s such a missed opportunity.”
The play resumes at 8.55pm, and he writes, “I assumed it would go on until about 9.45pm. But no, this being Tom Hard to Stop, the play went on until 10.30pm.” (Actually, they must have trimmed it a bit in that case — it used to hit the 3 hour 10 min mark before!) “By this time I was furiously lookingat my watch and started to huff and rumble to the annoyance of my wife and those around me. In fairness to Rules they were more than accommodating but I do not like eating at 11pm….”
There are, he concludes, “several possible ways around this problem. Not going to the theatre (a shame), taking sandwiches (weird), better food at the interval and, my favourite, shorter plays. Admit it, if there was a theatre that ony performed hour-long plays you’d go more often, wouldn’t you? We would, and we could eat at 8.45pm. Far more civilised.”
Actually, if he’d researched not just the running time of the play he was actually seeing but also those of others, he’d find that he’s already getting his wish at many London theatres, where the attention-deficit-disordered age we live in — and that he so proudly wants to position himself and his belly ahead of his mind — regularly dispenses with intervals altogether. Clearly going to the theatre is an uncomfortable penance to be endured before the pleasure of the meal afterwards to him; so perhaps he should head to The Dumb Waiter (55 minutes), or Generations (30 minutes), opening at the Young Vic this week, so it doesn’t interfere with his culinary pursuits too much.
