A tale of two caffs

Goodbye to Norman’s, and goodbye to the Regency

The least meaningful criticism of food is that it is not ‘authentic’. Like, seriously, why does that matter? Inauthenticity is great. Fusion is great when it works. I want penne alla vodka right now. I used to turn up my nose at places like ‘Angelina’, an Italian-Japanese restaurant in Dalston. Then lots of friends went and they all said it was great, and as much of an obstinate food snob that I am, I trust my friends. You must trust your friends.

It makes me sad when I see a restaurant try to sell itself as authentic. I had this at Halia in Bayswater. It was great – some lovely oxtail broths, a nice nasi goreng – but the chef kept promising us it was authentic. I couldn’t care less. Do what you want with it. Add HP sauce to the broth if you believe in it. He or she who criticises food for not being ‘authentic’ is just a travel show-off. I’ve been to Kuala Lumpur and let me tell you… No. I’ve been to several restaurants in Italy and all of them made worse pastas than my friend Max does, who sacrilegiously nicks the French way of doing things and folds cold butter in his pasta sauces at the end.

Where I have some sympathy is that the restaurant itself should be real. If you were to be a tosser about it, you could say I’m with Burke over Paine on restaurants: I prefer the organic restaurant over the curated, rational one: restaurants born out of love in the kitchen, not calculations in the boardroom. A restaurant that reflects a sense of place versus the unrooted PE-backed simulacrum. It’s boring stuff, this, but it’s correct.

So, onto a tale of two caffs. One closing, one changing. Norman’s Cafe in Tufnell Park (closing), and the Regency Cafe in Westminster (changing).

Norman’s was on Junction Road, on the way up to Archway (don’t get too close or it bites). Let me put what Norman’s was for you in the most tabloid terms I can: in 2020, some moustache-wearing baggy-trousered posh hipsters set up a fake caff and sold a fry-up at a rip-off. Now let me put it in terms from the other side of the political spectrum: Cadres of the upper classes gentrified and commodified working-class culture, reconstituting the greasy spoon from its historical role as a shelter and a space for working people, and transfigured it into a simulacrum of their fantastical conception of the proletarian life. What I mean is: no matter your worldview, lots of commentators really hated it.

But guess what? It seemed fucking popular. Their Instagram page – imagine your local caff having an Instagram page! – was perfectly designed and come on, it’s nice to look at. I used to actually just stare at it during lockdown, and I wanted to go there, because I was 20 and I wasn’t aware of the gentrifying discourse, so I just saw a nice sausage and wanted to eat a nice sausage.

And I did go over there a couple of times during lockdown, walking from my place in Swiss Cottage over the Heath, and I ate an escalope sandwich inside an English muffin with my friends Max and Nora on Dartmouth Park while you were only allowed to meet outside. It was a really fine chicken sandwich: it was thigh meat, rather than breast, so it was juicy, and the breadcrumbs were shardy and glass-like without any grease. Then I got older and became aware of the discourse and took up opinions about Norman’s, like that it was larping or somesuch, and decided I hated it. Their 2023 collaboration with Burberry didn’t really do them many favours on my snobby high-horse.

Norman’s – with its red flooring and formica tables and art deco-ish style – was undoubtedly copying the Regency Cafe, by an absolute mile my favourite caff. As I said about the Regency when I ranked it as my third favourite restaurant:

If you’d eaten somewhere probably over 100 times, starting with when your dad took you when you were tiny and you got terrified out of your skin by the man shouting ‘SET BREAKFAST BEANS!!’, then went every Saturday morning from 16 to 18 with your best mate, as slowly, slowly, Marco and Claudia became less scary and started to know your name and say hello, then went there in the morning in a tux after an all-nighter upon leaving school and therefore entering into adulthood as the sun rose, then later found yourself getting a job nearby and nursing more cups of copper-strong tea, going through more of the highest quality food any caff can serve, and being helped and guided through more hangovers and personal dramas and bad days after bad nights of sleep that can be counted, how could it not be this high?

And I meant it. Every morsel, every nanometre, tastes emphatically as it should at the Regency. The bacon is high-quality, the sausage has amazing snap, the egg yolk is glassy, and the tea is the strength of a double espresso.

But the Regency is changing. The owners are selling up – in fact, they might even be sold by now. I’ve said before that if even one thing is changed about the Regency, it’s all ruined, and I don’t think that’s just me being sentimental. The sale process has been rumbling for seven or eight months, and it’s been heroic to see the brilliant Claudia running it by herself after the other owner Marco – who I miss dearly – left at some point last year (details unclear, but the last time someone I know saw him in there, he was offering a tourist a fight). So with that, I resolved to go to the Regency as much as I could before it changed hands (although I didn’t think it would take this long – there’s only so many times you can say ‘but it might close next week!)

And Norman’s is closing for good. After five years, it couldn’t quite make the numbers add up. So I decided to go to each of them before they closed / changed drastically.

On Normans’ final Saturday service, the queue extended for about an hour’s wait down the street if you wanted to sit inside. I was the lonesome weirdo so I took an outside table and got seated quickly. Inside, 2010s hip-hop played incredibly loudly. And the breakfast looked like this:

And it was OK. I think it proved that this place’s cooking was ultimately designed with Instagram in mind: the photogenic orange yolk of a Burford Brown egg that everyone knows isn’t actually indicative of flavour, the plump sausage that tasted far too herb-y for a caff sausage, the hash brown that could have done with longer in the fryer, the homemade beans that literally no one would rather eat over Heinz, and the single under-toasted piece of toast squished under everything else (I cannot fault the delicious bacon). This was not a generous offering, and if you can believe it, I didn’t get that paralytic stuffed feeling you want after a full English.

Then, a few days later, on a terrible hangover, to the Regency. Utterly superb. Heinz beans! Crispy hash browns. Perfect sausage, perfect bacon, perfect egg. Perfect cup of tea that lapped over my smudged brain.

And I left, feeling vindicated in my view that the Regency is BETTER than Norman’s. But then I realised: that’s exclusively because of the food! Really, all we can do with any restaurant is compare them on purely food terms, because otherwise you get lost in politics and semantics and discourse, all of which are shams and excuses to get away from the tricky skill of saying what is good.

One caff does not have a monopoly on ‘realness’ over the other. Norman’s may have been larping, but the Regency insists on a huge amount of theatre. You can’t sit down when you walk in, and your order is yelled at the same decibel-score as a Metallica gig. You can’t technically order a full English and there’s no toilet. All of these adjustments could have been made, but they know – secretly – that performance is part of it.

Then suddenly I thought of the Norman’s guys, and I felt sad that their business had folded. Like them, I’m vulnerable to ‘gentrifier’ accusations. And I would love to run a caff. I would like to play the music that I love really loud. I bet they thought they were going to have a great time.

I hope they did.