Clare Smyth is currently serving a £10 chicken nugget.
Not a plate of nuggets. Not nuggets to share. A single chicken nugget, topped with a little caviar, listed on the “snacks” section of the menu at her new restaurant, Corenucopia. It’s essentially a Michelin-starred McNugget. And it keeps distinguished company: oysters at £5.50 each, wild venison salami for £6, grilled olives at £6.25 each (each?!) and bread and butter – for the purists – at £5.50.
Let’s say you’re dining for two and feeling peckish: that’s easily £40 or £50 before you’ve even ordered a starter.
The rise of the restaurant “snack course” is one of those things that’s crept in without anyone really noticing – and certainly without anyone asking for it.
The logic isn’t new. First came small plates that asked: “What if diners ordered five dishes instead of three?” Snacks came along and said: “What if they ordered three dishes before the first dish even arrives?” They’re the restaurant equivalent of an in-app purchase: small, optional and very good at making the bill bigger before you’ve really eaten anything.
Take four restaurants that opened in London in January alone.
At Cafe Kowloon, the opening “snack” section features curry fish ball skewers for £3 each, beef tendons for £6 and rice crackers and dip for £7. At DakaDaka in Mayfair, the cornbread starts at £6.50, while the nakhvatsa, literally crisps made from corn and millet, will set you back £7.50. At Sartoria’s new Liverpool Street outpost, sourdough breadsticks – breadsticks! – cost £7. And at Tiella, you can treat yourself to bread and oil for £5, olives for £5.50, a hunk of ricotta di Romagna for £9 and a plate of nothing but mortadella ham for a whopping £16.
None of these dishes is unusual, extravagant or particularly hard to source. Quite the opposite. Bread, olives, cheese, charcuterie. They are among the oldest restaurant foods in existence.
In other words: antipasti. Aperitivo. Tapas. The idea of nibbling before dinner is hardly revolutionary. The only real innovation is the price tag.
Don’t get me started on bread courses. All we ever wanted was a slice of baguette with a bit of butter – maybe some olives – which used to arrive on the table for free. Gone are the days of genuine hospitality. Now it’s heritage-grain sourdough, whipped up by a baker with a sleeve tattoo and a fermentation fridge the size of a Fiat. And it’ll cost you upwards of a fiver at any self-respecting restaurant.
The economics are obvious enough. Restaurants are famously difficult businesses to run. Rent is punishing, labour is expensive, energy bills eye-watering and ingredients more costly than ever. For years, operators have relied on certain reliable margin-makers to stay afloat – most obviously wine, where bottles routinely appear on London menus at four, five, sometimes 10 times their retail price.
Snacks operate on much the same principle.
From a restaurant’s perspective, they are a dream: cheap ingredients, tiny portions, quick to prepare and priced at a level that makes the margin extremely healthy. And – crucially – they multiply. No table orders a single snack – who’s seriously cutting one chicken nugget into four?
It’s clever. It’s psychology. But it also summons tiny violins when the average dinner out is already creeping north of £100 a head at the “cheapest” restaurants.
The idea isn’t entirely new, of course. Pubs and bars have been operating on the same principle for decades. Order a packet of Quavers or a bowl of peanuts with your pint and the salt will almost certainly make you order another drink.
Restaurants are simply applying the same logic to dinner. Start the evening with a few salty nibbles – olives, anchovies, crisps, a nugget if you’re feeling flush – and the wine tends to disappear a little faster.
Other restaurants are taking the pub logic rather literally.
At Toklas, diners can order mussel escabeche with crisps for £9. At Kol, the Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant in Marylebone, totopos – essentially tortilla chips – arrive with mole and guacamole. Elsewhere, there have been crisp amuse-bouches, crisps dipped in crème fraîche and caviar, and in Spanish restaurants, crisps smashed up with jamón, eggs and cheese.
At a certain point, you start to wonder what it means when restaurants begin serving crisps.
Crisps are what you eat when you’re hangry and there’s nothing else in the house. They’re what you put into bowls for dinner party guests while you stir something vaguely more impressive in the kitchen. Yes, supermarkets have “gourmeted” them – olive oil, Iberian ham, black truffle – but the basic social contract has always been the same: crisps are the thing you snack on while waiting for the real food.
Now they are the food apparen
Which, in a way, makes perfect sense. According to last year’s Waitrose Food & Drink Report, 57 per cent of its shoppers say they have replaced traditional meals with “snacky” eating – what TikTok calls “girl dinner” and what every other normal Brit calls “picky bits”.
Restaurants, as they often do, appear to have noticed, capitalised and given it a linen napkin.
None of this is especially shocking. Restaurants are expensive to run and margins have to come from somewhere. But there is still something faintly absurd about paying £5 for bread, £7 for crisps or £10 for a single chicken nugget – no matter how much caviar comes with it.
Perhaps this is simply the modern restaurant economy in action: every moment of the meal monetised, every pause between courses turned into an opportunity for a £7 nibble.
Or perhaps the simplest solution is the obvious one. Eat a packet of Quavers or a McNuggets Sharebox on the way to the restaurant and go straight to the starters.
At least then you’ll know exactly what you’re paying for.
