Fine Dining, Finer Exclusion: A Critique of London's Edible Elitism

There’s a certain kind of Londoner—let’s call them Londrich—who genuinely believes their table at a Dalston restaurant is a form of cultural participation. They sit under moody lighting, sipping skin-contact Syrah and pretending to ponder a dish described as “cured radish cloud on a bed of sea-salted millet.” But let’s be honest: they’re mostly there to be seen, not fed.

Meanwhile, I’m at the Kurdish grill near Seven Sisters, elbows deep in smoky lamb and pickled onions, paying a third of the price and having triple the joy. No "chef’s concept." No “playful umami echoes.” Just food. Delicious, actual food.

The London restaurant scene has become a theatre of absurdity, a revolving carousel of softly lit spaces where portion sizes are inversely proportional to the price tag and the waitstaff have been trained to say “curated” instead of “tiny.” Somehow, we’ve all been gaslit into thinking dining out means surrendering your dignity along with your debit card.

These places aren’t about hospitality—they’re about hierarchy. You can feel it in the host’s glance when you don’t name-drop your booking app. You can taste it in the sommelier’s smirk when you mispronounce “Lagrein.” And you can definitely see it in the clientele: affluent, white-adjacent thirtysomethings in expensive trainers and carefully distressed sweaters, posing with a glass of orange wine like they’ve just made peace with their ancestors.

Here’s the truth: London’s elite dining scene is built on invisible labor, class separation, and subtle racial hierarchies. Who washes the dishes after the £27 pork belly? Who clears the plates from the table where two hedge fund interns just performed a tasting menu like it was a TED Talk?

More often than not, it’s South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European workers— overworked, and rarely acknowledged beyond a passing mention in the “team” section of a restaurant’s Instagram grid. Meanwhile, the chefs are being called “artists” for reinventing cabbage.

It’s not just annoying—it’s structural. The fine dining world thrives on exclusion. The prices aren’t high just because of quality—they’re high to keep the riffraff out. It’s lifestyle branding masquerading as gastronomy.

Here, it’s impossible not to invoke the ghost of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist who mapped the intricate relationships between taste, capital, and class. In his seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu argues that what we consider “taste” is far from universal or innocent—it’s a tool of social differentiation. When you choose to dine at a £120-a-head establishment in Clerkenwell over the Vietnamese café around the corner, you’re not just selecting a cuisine. You’re performing your class position.

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital (like knowing the difference between Jura and Savoie wines, or why a dish is “deconstructed”) functions just like economic capital—it grants access, status, and legitimacy. And in London’s upscale food scene, those with the right aesthetic literacy and economic means weaponize that knowledge to set themselves apart from the rest.

Fine dining, then, isn’t just about taste. It’s about tasting correctly. It’s about being fluent in the codes of elite consumption: how to order, what to Instagram, when to feign delight at a microgreen garnish. Those who don’t—or can’t—are left out, priced out, or shamed into silence.

Bourdieu saw this clearly: "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." The £24 risotto doesn’t just feed—it stratifies. It tells you who belongs, and who doesn’t. And worst of all, it masquerades this exclusion as refinement.

But if Bourdieu helps us understand how these divides are maintained, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci explains why so many of us buy into them. Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony reveals how the dominant class’s tastes and values are presented as the norm—so convincingly that even those excluded from elite spaces come to see them as aspirational.

The idea that fine dining is more “civilised,” that a £16 starter with three components is inherently superior to a generous £6 bánh mì, isn’t just snobbery—it’s ideology. We’ve absorbed the belief that minimalist plates and obscure ingredients are marks of sophistication, and that anything outside this framework is inferior. That’s Gramsci’s hegemony at work: the internalisation of elite preferences as common sense.

In this way, the Londrich crowd aren’t just performing status—they’re reproducing it. And the rest of us, by accepting the rules of this game, often end up participating in our own marginalisation. To choose the kebab shop over the wine bar isn’t just a financial decision—it’s a small act of cultural rebellion.

Building on this critique, we can turn to Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whose work on cultural identity and representation helps illuminate how these dining spaces construct and reinforce a particular image of what it means to be cultured, sophisticated, or “London.” Hall’s theory of articulation tells us that cultural practices—like fine dining—are not fixed, but constantly redefined by those in power. In this context, the aesthetic of the restaurant scene becomes a kind of selective tradition, one that privileges white, upper-class, cosmopolitan sensibilities while marginalising the culinary expressions of immigrant and working-class communities.

Fine dining becomes part of a wider semiotic system, in which cuisine, like fashion or language, is coded. These codes reinforce boundaries between who is “in” and who is “out.” The curated interiors, the obscure ingredients, the hushed atmosphere—these are all signs that communicate belonging. As Hall might say, they are representations loaded with ideological significance, encoding assumptions about race, class, and taste.

British-Australian writer Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and institutional whiteness offers yet another critical lens. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed explores how feelings are not just personal, but deeply political. The discomfort a working-class diner might feel in a high-end restaurant—the sense of not fitting in—is not incidental. It’s systemic. Ahmed argues that spaces are oriented around certain bodies and histories; they are “whitened” through the repetition of exclusionary norms.

The fine dining scene operates as one such whitened space. It demands certain affective performances—restraint, sophistication, irony—that not all diners can or wish to embody. Those who fail to perform the expected emotions—who are too loud, too enthusiastic, too unfamiliar—are subtly (or not so subtly) pushed out. The result is a sanitized, affectively policed space where inclusion is conditional and fragile.

Contrast this with the cheap eats joints—the noodle counters in Chinatown, the biryani spots in Whitechapel, the Caribbean takeaways with laminated menus and no social media presence. These are the places that fuel real London, not the curated fantasy sold on tasting menus and clean lines. Here, the food comes hot, honest, and plentiful. The staff actually smile. The prices reflect a desire to nourish, not extract. You don’t have to pretend to know about biodynamic farming or forage trends. You just eat. And guess what? These places are cool because they don’t try to be.

There’s something deeply broken in how we’ve come to associate cost with credibility. As if the only food worth talking about comes plated on bespoke pottery with edible moss. As if culinary value lives exclusively in Fitzrovia, and not on a folding table in Elephant & Castle.

We’ve developed a weird cultural kink for scarcity: fewer bites, more adjectives. Simpler dishes made complicated. Familiar flavors rebranded as “elevated.” But the food that really matters isn’t about performance. It’s about people. History. Comfort. Resistance.

In Bourdieu’s language, cheap eats represent an alternative taste regime—one grounded in necessity, community, and emotional memory. Not the performative “good taste” of the elite, but what he might call popular taste: practical, pleasurable, and not obsessed with status anxiety. To choose it is to resist what he calls “symbolic violence”—the internalized belief that our desires must be shaped by the ruling class’s aesthetic preferences.

Gramsci would add: to choose these spaces is also to challenge the hegemonic narrative that equates refinement with power. It’s about reasserting cultural agency in a city increasingly defined by exclusion.

And if we follow Hall and Ahmed, we see that reclaiming these spaces also means reclaiming representations, feelings, and ways of being that have long been othered by dominant cultural scripts.

So next time someone waxes poetic about a £13 spoonful of fermented barley, raise a plastic pint at the Turkish ocakbasi instead. Clap back with your £4 samosa chaat. Tip your server at that place where they still call you “boss.” Forget the table with “views.” Find the spot with tables sticky from real use, where families eat together, where you don’t need to decode the menu before ordering. That’s where life happens. That’s where London eats. Not in the hush-toned temples of kale foam and curated ambiance. Not under the watchful eye of the cool crowd sipping their second Pét-Nat. But right there, beside the grill smoke, the sound of shared laughter, and a generous portion of reality.