The Most Divisive Restaurant in London Is Open Only for Lunch

The cook at the London restaurant the Yellow Bittern serves up controversy alongside hearty stews. And it all boils down to class.

The Yellow Bittern, an 18-seat restaurant and bookstore near King’s Cross station, hardly looks like the most divisive lunch spot in London.

It feels more like the farmhouse of a retired professor: Customers ring a bell to enter, then hang their coats on pegs by the door, while pots of Irish stew simmer in the tiny open kitchen. The food is hearty and hot, served with open jars of mustard. The décor includes books on Bertolt Brecht and an accordion.

But the cooking and ambience are not the only reasons that London’s top restaurant critics, chefs and gourmands have come to dine and opine. Many are curious for a taste of the controversy swirling around its head cook, Hugh Corcoran, a deeply read communist and vocal Instagrammer who managed to enrage half the city soon after the Yellow Bittern opened in October.

“I’ve arrived at dinner parties or meals with people and then we all say, ‘Shall we discuss the Yellow Bittern?’” said Margot Henderson, the chef of Rochelle Canteen in East London and a pioneer of modern British cooking. “It’s the talk of the town.”

Much of that talk boils down to issues of class, as it so often does in Britain. The Bittern is cash-only and open for two seatings, at noon and 2 p.m., only during the workweek. Detractors have noted that few Londoners can partake in a leisurely, multicourse midday meal with a bottle of wine, and fewer still can justify one that easily costs $300 for a group of four. And the suggestion that they could — coming from a man with a larger-than-life drawing of Vladimir Lenin in his restaurant — has set off a yowl of irritation.