Eating dinner at 10pm is nothing short of pyschopathic
Almost everything about Covid was bad, obviously. The virus itself, the pain it inflicted across the world, the restrictions on individual liberty, and the banging of pots with wooden spoons on our doorsteps every Thursday evening (astonishing to think this is the country that came up with Magna Carta, and yet over 800 years later we'd regressed to the point where we decided to show our appreciation by behaving like deranged toddlers with a set of kitchen equipment).
On the other hand, it shifted our body clocks forward a bit, did it not? It did for me, anyway. Pre-Covid, an 8pm table booking was no problem. Splendid, in fact. Dinner out with friends, nothing could be lovelier. Post-Covid, it seemed mad. Practically wanton. Be out at that time, away from my home? Only sitting down for dinner at 8pm? What is this, Spain?
Now, if I'm meeting pals for supper, I generally try to get away with a 7.30 booking, although ideally 7pm. That allows plenty of time for chit-chat but means we can still be in bed by 10. If friends are coming over for dinner, I often say to them airily 'any time from 6.30' in the hope this means I might be tucked up with my book even earlier. At any sign of lingering over the coffee and bag of Minstrels, I start loading the dishwasher. It's enormously relaxed, an evening with me.
Last November, while having dinner with friends in New York – 'the city that never sleeps' – I practically fell asleep at the table because our reservation was for 9pm (although I suspect jet lag and the three margaritas before dinner didn't help matters much). But a friend across the pond says there's been a more general shift to earlier eating even there.
And yet there remain among us a good number of psychopaths who want to eat at 10.30pm, or even later. I'm not referring to our southern European friends; various London restaurants have recently announced that they're opening reservation slots for later tables. Mountain, a Soho restaurant where I once tried tripe (not for me), is now offering punters the chance of a slot at 10.30pm. Tomos Parry, the co-founder and chef of Brat, a very trendy Shoreditch restaurant, says he's noticed late-night diners creeping back. If you fancy a plate of extremely spicy noodles, you can book a table at Speedboat Bar, an excellent Thai restaurant also in Soho, until 12.30am on Friday and Saturday nights.
This has been hailed as a 'late-night dining revolution', which I don't remember Marx banging on about much. Restaurateurs are, naturally, delighted. Times are hard, getting punters in to eat is challenging, especially when everyone's on the fat jabs, so if they can keep throwing out plates until the wee hours for those who do want to eat, so much the better. Jeremy King, restaurant impresario, has recently unveiled a new late-night menu at his new-ish joints, The Park and Arlington. Book a table after 9.45pm and you get 25 per cent off.
Notably, these are all fairly central London restaurants, and I wonder how many of their late-night clientele live reasonably close. Or at least only one zone away. Well-heeled sorts who don't baulk at the price of fillet steak and can totter home or hail a black cab for a fare under a tenner. Because if you book a table at 10.30pm, you're not going to be heading home much before midnight. The trains have stopped running back to my parts by then. There's the odd night bus if I don't mind two hours crawling southwards, or it'll be a £50 Uber. Bed by 1am, maybe, which isn't hugely practical if you have to work for a living, or have small children, or a small and unruly terrier who demands his first outing to the park at 6am.
That's to say nothing of the potential digestion issues. I don't wish to be indelicate, but can one get a good night's kip if you hit the pillow with a stomach full of tripe after midnight? As Pepys himself once surmised: 'I did eat very late at night, which I perceive makes me feel heavy and sleepy.' Quite. Experts quoted in health articles constantly extol the health benefits of intermittent fasting, or restricting one's eating to an eight- or 10-hour window. But good luck with that if you're swallowing your last mouthful of crispy egg noodles after Cinderella's curfew. No more for you until at least lunchtime the following day.
Many years ago, one late night as a teenager, I sat across a table from a boy I had a crush on in a restaurant called Vingt-Quatre on the Fulham Road. It had opened in 1995, London's first 24-hour restaurant, and the novelty was thrilling. The novelty of sitting near a boy, I mean, although the restaurant was pretty thrilling too. We shared a burger and the bill came with a small pot of Smarties, which seemed the height of ironic decadence. He paid and afterwards walked me back through the dark streets of Chelsea to put me on the N137 home to Stockwell, so it was a relatively chaste evening. Not the sort of thing that gets poets excited. But it felt practically Byronic to me – the late night, the Smarties, the slow meander to the Sloane Street bus stop. I swooned about it for months once safely back at boarding school.
I understand it, in other words. I understand that late-night dining can be exciting, and romantic, possibly even a little dangerous if your alarm is going off soon. But my appetite for danger must have waned in the intervening 23 years because dicey behaviour these days means going to sleep after 11pm. Perhaps this is more to do with age than Covid. Or both. Still, if restaurants are increasingly catering for daredevils who wish to risk indigestion and trapped wind, those of us who prefer 7pm tables may stand more of a chance. Or maybe even 6.30pm. Could you make 6.30?
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