NW Much of the press about the Yellow Bittern has included that there’s a picture of Lenin in the restaurant, but only as furnishing detail. Why’s Lenin here?

HC One very obvious reason is because my mother brought it back from Moscow in 1987. My parents aren’t Marxist intellectuals. My mother grew up in Yorkshire with an appreciation of trade unionism, left-wing politics and the Labour Party, and would have raised money for miners, and my father in West Belfast would have been briefly flirtatious with left-wing and Marxist politics, particularly when he lived in England in the 1990s. But Marxism wasn’t massively controversial where I grew up. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the growth of neoliberalism, the idea of radical left-wing politics is either derided or seen as very dangerous.

NW Or both.

HC Or both. On the nationalist Republican side of Belfast, many people believe in some version of Marxism or Republican socialism. I mean, you can’t escape politics where I grew up. Most people I knew in my teenage years and early 20s were extremely politically fluent and could debate you on all sorts of historical and philosophical ideas, and then on my rambles around Europe in the Basque Country and France and other places where I’ve either briefly lived or visited, not only Lenin but the Communist Party are something quite noble. These were the people who stood up to Hitler and Mussolini and Franco when the time came. In this country, not only the mainstream media and the right-wing media but the so-called left media treats the idea that somebody would actually believe in something as laughable. The West believes in Armageddon – let’s keep producing, consuming, and destroying. Lenin inspired oppressed people throughout the world – the Soviet Union acted as the economic and military backing for the fight against apartheid, for example, and the liberation of Vietnam. Apartheid would still be in place if Russia and Cuba had not backed the South African Communist Party and the ANC. We need to defend the intellectual integrity of Marxist and communist movements throughout Europe in the 20th century because today, we have a right wing that has won a kind of ideological battle, and we’ve all been convinced that the only genuine ideology is individualism and capitalism. We also have a left that is more and more convinced by some kind of identity politics than class politics. Marxism gives us a philosophy of French socialism, English political economy and German ideology, and this gives us a way to interpret the world. Instead of just reacting to the election of Trump, we should analyse the material conditions of ordinary Americans. In this country, there are portraits of fucking Winston Churchill in every pub. What about Winston Churchill starving millions of Indians? Nobody bats an eyelid when they come into a pub and there’s a picture of him on the wall, but when there’s a picture of Lenin on the wall, people find it offensive. If I were to put a picture of Robespierre, maybe people wouldn’t have a clue who he was, but in France, the bourgeoisie are still afraid of Robespierre. The Metro station named after Robespierre is in Montreuil, a working-class area that traditionally votes communist or very left-wing.

NW How did you end up here at the Yellow Bittern?

HC I was in Europe for 10 years, and then I moved to London to be with my partner, Frances, and then we decided that we would try to run a little restaurant. In Ireland, you have “spirit grocer” pubs that sell everything from shampoo to firelighters to pints of Guinness, and I quite liked the idea of opening a shop that sold bits and pieces, but that could also serve you a drink.

NW I feel you see those in rural parts of countries like Greece.

HC I suppose it’s a very rural thing. In London, it’s not really possible. We looked at a few spaces, and what attracted me to this one was the sash window at the back and the fact it was a small space. For Frances [Armstrong-Jones] and Oisín [Davies] who came on board, it was also about the area. They loved the idea of it being in the Caledonian Road. Frances was especially interested in the fact that it was right beside King’s Cross. She’s a romantic character, and she thinks it’s romantic to be beside a big train station, with trains coming from everywhere in the country and Europe.

NW Contemporary King’s Cross isn’t a very romantic area, though. 

HC I would disagree. I think it’s terribly romantic. Every day, walking to work, I look up at all the departures on the board. When I was growing up in Belfast, I used to look out to the docks at the ships leaving, and it gave me a great sense of freedom. I always have an idea that maybe I could jump on a train after service one day and go to Scotland. I like the fact that King’s Cross is so central to everything that happens in London, and accessible for everybody to get to. And I like the fact that we’re fighting tooth and nail among the McDonald’s and all the shite around here for a space that’s human and authentic to the people who work there and run the place. All of a sudden we’ve become this kind of radical restaurant that refuses to do this and that and the other, but I just thought that this was a normal way to run a restaurant. People say, “Oh, he only makes pies when he wants to.” On whose whims should I be making pies? Or people say, he’s only playing at restaurants. But all good things come from play. I don’t want to go to a restaurant where people don’t have a sense of childish play. Yet, it’s also very serious. Not only have we put all our money into this, but we work very long, hard hours. We come in here at seven o’clock in the morning and leave at seven in the evening, sometimes ten in the evening. On the weekends, we’re in here doing bits and pieces, or we’re going and picking up wine, or we’re gardening. This occupies all of our time, and it’s done in a yes, somewhat naive, but a generous and open manner. I grow my vegetables; I cook the food; I pick the wines that I like to drink. We can only do five services a week because we don’t have any more time. It’s only three of us and we have three kids, we have people to look after and other responsibilities that are more important than this restaurant. The only other way to avoid doing that is to employ staff. Ideologically, I don’t want to make money off somebody else’s labour but also, a customer, I don’t like going into restaurants where the owner is never there. The restaurants and pubs which I frequent are restaurants and pubs where the owner is likely to be there, and they’re the ones that I admire and look up to.

NW There’s an implicit rejection of growth, then.

HC Yes. We will never become bigger than this. We’ll never add seats or tables or take over next door. Life is about so much more than making money and being successful. What I would like to achieve in my life, apart from having loving friends and family around me, is being able to work every day at something that I truly believe in and love and enjoy doing. I don’t enjoy managing people, and I don’t enjoy doing accounts, so I don’t want to work in an office, managing a big restaurant and earning loads of money. All I want to do is cook food and serve wine. I’m very happy every single day this place is full of people. It’s busy with chatter. We don’t play any music, and you just have the sound of people talking and eating – plates clattering, and food being served and washing up being done. This piece is more convivial sometimes than a pub – people at different tables start talking to each other start sharing bottles of wine. I just want to have a room for the people who, for a couple of hours, have escaped the loneliness of modern life and have found some kind of conviviality and friendship in a calm, relaxing room. It may be extremely ideological, and maybe extremely romantic to say that, but it’s better than being the opposite.

NW The opposite is ideological too, it just has become naturalised into looking like the only way to be.

HC Well, that’s true.

NW The politics of food is sometimes very apparent in this country, and the way that food is talked about in the UK is often extremely top-down.

HC To a certain extent, food is always top-down because the food that we recognise as national cuisine in most countries, is a standard aristocratic cuisine, or at the very least bourgeois cuisine. Lasagna, tortellini, all these things that we would expect to eat at a good Italian restaurant in London, were invented and cooked by cooks working for aristocratic families; poor people ate polenta. What we see as good French cooking today is still referred to in France as cuisine bourgeoise, invented by cooks employed by bourgeois households. I got accused of cooking an “ideological dish” by [food magazine] Vittles, because I cooked potatoes and chard with water, salt and olive oil. I mean, that’s a dish I enjoy eating, which I learned to cook in the Basque Country, because that’s what people in the Basque country would eat on a weekday. I like to take bits and pieces from all those cuisines and assemble something that I like to eat. I’ll give them that it’s extremely simple and you don’t have to be a particularly talented cook to cook it, but you have to have a sensitivity. I think femininity, not in a gendered sense, but in a cultural sense, must be present in food – the values that we associate with femininity in terms of generosity and care and kindness. I don’t want to see the values that we associate with masculinity. I don’t mean that I want food to be cooked by women, I mean that I want it to be cooked with a certain orientation towards nurturing rather than impressing. I don’t want anybody to talk about the food. Sometimes it does become the centre of attention, if you make a really nice pie, for example, but I want the food to be a conduit for wine. The whole point is conviviality. When I go to a restaurant and I feel that the place is stiff with commercial interest, I feel very unrelaxed. In Europe, people will start up restaurants as a family business. Even in the centre of Paris, restaurants might open for just five services a week. But in London, a lot of restaurants are opened with huge financial interest, and therefore they’re open lunch and dinner, six, seven days a week.

NW I worked in a restaurant like that in Manchester, owned by three businessmen, and it was a fairly horrible place to spend time in. 

HC We only have a finite time on this earth, and it’s nice to spend it in places in which w feel comfortable. There’s obviously the question of money. We’ve been accused of being too expensive. I mean, fuck me, it’s like 20 quid for a main course, 6 quid for a starter. We’ve had accusations that we’ve only opened at lunchtime to keep the poor and the working class out, which is slanderous. Not only do we have a mix of all classes and ages and races and cultures, but a huge number of our customers are members of the organised working class. When I mention that, people are like, is this some kind of moral attack on me that I’m not in a trade union? Well, it is your fault if you’re not in a trade union, as you have an onus on you to support your fellow workers. If you’ve chosen not to do that, and your wages are being cut, it’s your own fucking fault, right? The organised working class – nurses, train drivers, bus drivers – have seen their wages, in real terms, increase over the last 15 years because they have fought for it. The downwardly mobile middle classes who are involved in media and creative industries have less money than they did 10, 15 years ago. So they feel very offended. But they’re also the people who feel entitled to be in restaurant – “How dare you tell me that I’m not spending enough money in your restaurant!” Whereas we get a lot of people who don’t necessarily feel entitled to be in a restaurant, but it's their birthday, their day off, or they’re celebrating something. I also realise it’s fo working-class people who have got good jobs. There are certain people who can’t afford to eat here – people on the dole, people working in very lowly paid shit jobs, you know, delivering shit – all these crap jobs that have been invented for people to have now. It’s terrible they can’t afford to eat here, but it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of these companies paying people poverty wages. It’s the fault of the capitalist class that creates the conditions for people to be unemployed. We’re not publicly funded, so we can’t just get people on the dole free meals. But we’re an empathetic restaurant. We know when people don’t have money but are good people, and they get stuff on the house. We react to every singl customer in a different way. We don’t have a wine list, because we want people to drink th wine we have, and while we have an idea of what we should be charging, it’s nearly always under. I should be multiplying by three plus VAT, but nearly every time I serve a bottle these days, it’s a good bit under – and it’s only us getting kicked in the teeth because we’re going to get the fucking bill for the VAT and everything else. But, you know, you know, somebody comes in to say, I’d like an elegant bottle of Beaujolais, and I think, I’ll bring you one I’m supposed to charge 90 quid for. But I don’t want you to pay 90 quid because I think it’s worth 70, so I’ll charge you 70. There’s an expectation today that everybody should get that, but not everybody can. Relationships develop through human processes. .