Espresso: Rory Sutherland on London Hipsters

0:00Yes, yes, people. So the hungry reading list is here, right? If you listen to the podcast regularly, you know I love reading. I think books are the most beautiful thing in the world. As Stephen King said, they're teleportable magic or something like that. these books I whittled down my gargantuan bookshelf into 46 absolute 30 bangers the link is in the show notes to get the list whatever and it'll also make you a subscriber to our weekly newsletter which I think is sick so yeah get your fucking books buddy bring this into the restaurant conversation if you like I don't think that the advantage that london confers on consumers relative to the rest of the country like smaller provincial towns okay is nearly as stark and nearly as impressive as it was in 1988 you know in 1988 when i left london and kind of went back to stay in the country where my parents were at the time after about a week i was climbing up the walls you know and when i finally got back on the west way and saw the signs going you know the west end the city and i was driving along the west way because there were no speed cameras then you'd hit 80 on the west way and i'd pull off for the sort of turning for where was it westbourne grove and i felt you know i felt myself come alive okay now part of this is me getting older but part of it is things like the internet okay the internet large parts of consumerism now are effectively geographically irrelevant okay if you want to buy weird hi-fi equipment when i was a kid you had to go to well you sometimes go to london you'd certainly go to bristol or cardiff to buy the kid okay now you just go online if you want to buy a weird book if you want to watch a korean film all of that stuff if you want weird food ingredients a cardo okay that's the best shop in britain right okay you know if you want to buy really interesting you know you know if you're interested in high quality food of any kind of in variety um there isn't a shop in london that competes with it well isn't he okay that competes with the cardio you've got gusto you've got one of the things i really like is michelin star restaurants um for example there's a great website ubchef.com which is a restaurant michelin started in the isle of wight where they'll cook and ship the food to you yeah okay i actually spurn off i order a meal and i spread it over three days in other words rather than having one fantastic meal you have three meals with a fantastic component it's better value for money you have businesses like my supper hero okay which will send you utterly fantastic food so all i'm saying is that okay london offers fantastic employment opportunities currently although flexible working might slightly blur that line a little bit but in terms of the quality of consumption particularly when you consider the hassle you've got to go through to live there you know okay you've got lots of friends yeah but it takes three weeks to arrange to meet them all of those disadvantages all i'm saying is the advantage of living in london over living in monmouth where i grew up which was stark and absolutely self-evident in 1988 isn't altogether clear to me now the so the couple of things on that is about you're younger than me about rest so in fairness london has more upside are you single or are you single yeah single okay if you're single there are you know i imagine that tinder and cornwall gets a bit repetitive you know right okay you know um you know um you know there are huge advantages if you're single obviously living in london there are huge opportunities early in life in terms of simple opportunities which present themselves and what you might call you know being there showing up being present but those diminish i think with age and also in many ways the the extent to which for a person aged 45 or 50 who already has kids the benefits that london confers are not really that clear cut to me i'm where i sit on that kind of spectrum but in terms of the the restaurants and kind of leveling the playing field is you've and this middle ground piece right so you'll have somewhere um hips has raised the floor chains um no hips has raised the ceiling change yeah i love that so and what you have this is my defense of everything from travel lodge to premier inn to starbucks to costa etc it's very fashionable to deride them but what they do is they say if you can open a hotel you can compete with us that's fine but you've got to be at least that good yeah now if anybody who remembers british hotels from the 1970s or early 80s okay it was possible to survive as a hotel simply on what you might call distress purchases while being absolutely shit.

4:42I mean, literally appallingly crap.

4:48Broadly speaking, if you want to survive as a coffee shop now, you've got to be at least pretty good. Yeah. And so that business of eradicating the worst, that's the role that chains play, which is actually very valuable. Yeah, so that's raising the floor. And what hipsters do... Raise the ceiling. What happens is the hipsters generally gravitate in areas where there are low property prices or cheaper rates. Because you can afford to experiment. Yeah. Okay. And I'm not sure. If you gave me a week and said, do you want to do a culinary tour of London? Or do you want to spend the week doing a culinary tour of East Kent?

5:26I'm including Margate, Ramsgate, Sandwich Deal. That's why I was literally about to say the middle of the ground is Margate. I'm not sure. i'll give them a shout out up down a house just outside deal extraordinary place which you wouldn't find in london yeah and there's parking and it's tragic thing okay but but we can crap on as much as we like but the best restaurant is the one with the fucking car park yeah okay because you turn up you pull in and you walk into the restaurant you don't have you know um there's affordable property there for people to experiment i'd rather spend um i think a week on a culinary tour of you know thanet and east kent and by the way i'd cover the whole waterfront you know i'd go to nell's cafe just off the a2 which is a fantastic transport cafe it's just you know and actually i think the variety experimentation and interest but that's the great creative they're two great creative tricks if you want to move to suburbia and stay cool okay you move to the seaside that's okay I don't know why that is, but you go to Brighton, you go to Hastings, Whitstable, Folkestone, Margate, okay, that's cool.

6:31Okay? If you move to the Cotswolds, not cool, really. Okay? Cotswolds are many things, not cool, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the second thing you can do is move to Los Angeles, where, of course, everybody lives in suburbia. And one of my theories is that creative Brits love LA because they can actually live in a suburban house, but all their friends back home in the UK go, it's my cool friend in Los Angeles. yes you don't have a cool friend in siren sester to the same extent yeah let's state this so the status so you so and then probably that's true of chicago to an extent you can live this because american suburbia is brilliant okay uh it's british suburbia is pretty good daniel belgian suburbia is very good and one of the things how's belgian suburbia good there are certain countries that just do suburbs really quite well but like how would you say they're different how would you say they're different slash better than the uk american suburbia if do i really envy really rich people who live in new york no not really um but i had some friends who lived in wallingford pennsylvania and it literally is beautiful white weatherboard house you know picket fence around the outside um you know nice lawn um and you know lots of parking and you do go actually this is a pretty nice quality of life you know i mean really really good classy american suburbia is a pretty pretty high quality of lash in terms back to the um look these i think while the living the playing field's being leveled out is because the hipsters raising the ceiling they are not geographically bound now to london and actually actually it's most of the rates in london have become punitive yeah but it's high state they still get high status by saying i've traveled to this new and discovered x yes so so gross so grosso in uh margates you've got the fish restaurant there which is called the name is fucking escape me but by the way is absurdly under discovered because everybody in london when they leave london they head to the nearest single digit a road and they keep going so west london has always went out on the a4 well okay that's a two digit a road they go out on the a40 they go out on the m4 they go out on the a3 and they go southwest or west north londoners go north and what was so interesting about the kent coast is shits on the cotswolds in my opinion i mean i have a particular version my my mother's family lived in the cotswolds effectively from about i think literally it's like the the late 11th century or the early 12th century pretty much until but there's some of them still there yeah so i'd also resent going down to a place where your family have lived for you know 900 years but you're considered as a twat down from london now in east kent i am a twat down from london so i don't mind who treats me like that yeah but i i would uh uh you know those you're absolutely right to mention uh those restaurants in market which one by the way i haven't been to yet but the level of experimentation and interest and you can get a table and you're not ripped off okay and the clientele are vastly more agreeable in my opinion you know your fellow diners are much more likable but it all starts with the hipster it starts with the hipster so for example they're the shock troops of gentrification yes yes people we're trying to make hungry into the most valuable food and drink business podcast on planet earth but i really need your help i want to make this podcast so valuable for you to help you grow your business faster are stronger, better, have way more fun.

10:07We've got a super short customer feedback, sorry, consumer survey, audience survey thing on Google Forms. There's a link at the top of the show notes. If you could fill that out, it would be so helpful. We make this podcast way better for you.