London is witnessing the unlikely rise of the single-item restaurant
Research by Zomato revealed one in 10 new restaurants in the capital only serves one thing
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Your support makes all the difference.According to new research from the “restaurant discovery” app Zomato, an astonishing one in 10 new restaurants opening in London serves only one thing – single-item restaurants, they are being called until a better term comes along. And before you go talking about kebabies and fried-chicken places, and so on, these are not that type of establishment; they are more along the lines of Potato Project (try and guess), Mussel Men (ahem, top right) and Bao (Taiwanese steamed buns).
Apparently, the formula is set in stone (or, rather, exposed brick): “Take food-pun name, add simple menu displayed on an exposed brick wall, add single classic dish and hipster servers”. To that end, this column did a quick office sweep in an attempt to second-guess the next big thing in eating out. The best we could come up with include Tripe for the Picking, Keep ’em Quinoa, Kimchee Kardashian, Epic Kale and Chant OMlette. Tweet your ideas to @indyonsunday.
It’s the way they sell ’em
How to do marketing … In an environment awash with “creative solutions”, it is not easy to get your voice heard. So you have to hand it to the team tasked with promoting Disney Pixar’s Inside Out (above centre), which is released on DVD on 23 November.
Joining forces with Comedy Club 4 Kids – which holds workshops for aspiring young comedians – the launch has inspired a first-come-first-served daytime event at London’s Phoenix Arts Club next Sunday (doors open 12.30pm). The idea is that five young stand-ups will, in turn, perform a routine based on an emotion from the film: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness.
The (adult) host for the day is Tiernan Douieb, who will introduce the youngsters, most of whom he has worked with previously. So what might we expect? “We’ve tried to find out if they have something in their set that focuses on their chosen emotion already,” he says. “So Callum Simons [Disgust] will run through his dead zombie chickens song and so on.”
And what’s the best joke he’s ever heard from the mouths of babes? “Grace the Child got a joke in the top 10 of the Edinburgh Fringe: she says something like, ‘I’m amazed that Putin and Russia are so homophobic when the Trans-Siberian railway runs through their country’.”
Would he, then, recommend the comic’s life to children? “Sure,” he says. “You get to stand on stage, say what you like and make people laugh. And you can lie in. But you’ll have to get used to service-station food.”
Great rock’n’roll swindle
How not to do marketing … A week or so ago, an article appeared on the shiny new NME.com called “10 of the Best Debut Albums of 2015”. Standard fare, you might imagine, nothing to see here unless you are particularly interested in the subject. But what’s this in paragraph two? “With so many album reviews on NME.com, we armed ourselves with Windows 10 on the lightning-fast Surface Pro 3 tablet, a device Microsoft promise can replace your laptop.” It gets worse: “One click and your web page eliminates all the faff … It meant the only thing taking our attention away from our review was the album itself, which we streamed via Groove Music – the Windows 10 digital streaming service with an online catalogue of over 38 million tracks.”
Originally posted with the name of the writer, one Adam Bychawski, at the top, all was going perfectly until Bychawski announced on Twitter last Thursday: “Um, so this gonna sound like a massive denial but I didn’t actually write that.”
Bychawski’s name on the “article” has since been replaced with the words “Sponsored post”.
Call to arms
As the battle about police brutality rages across the Atlantic, with Quentin Tarantino the latest to be caught in the crossfire, one resident of Arizona took to Facebook to describe his recent experience in a post that has been shared more than 500,000 times.
Steven Hildreth Jnr is a veteran of the Iraq war and a “firearms enthusiast”. Late last month, the Tucson PD pulled him over for having a broken headlight and asked him if he had a weapon. “Yes, sir,” Hildreth replied, “I’m a concealed-carry permit holder and my weapon is located on my right hip.” Long story short, Hildreth (below left) wrote: “I’m a black man wearing a hoodie and strapped. According to certain social movements, I shouldn’t be alive. Maybe if you treat police officers with respect, they will do the same to you.”
Aw, bless, etc. Although, as one voice of the “blacklash” pointed out, “surely we shouldn’t be celebrating the fact that a black man got pulled over and survived”.
No rhyme or reason
Another in a regular series of limericks based on recent events:
Britain knows that Nigella’s a goddess,
But there’s something all now must confess,
Of her recipe boast,
For avocado on toast,
We ‘Simply’ just couldn’t care less.
Twitter: @simmyrichman
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