‘In March, when almost everything stopped, a reality set in that restaurants may never be quite the same again’
I vividly remember the conversation as we were walking through Covent Garden back in early February, on the way home from dinner at the Korean restaurant Yori. Or at least my idiotic part in it. “It sounds like flu,” I said, tipsy on a surfeit of peach soju. “I’ve had bad flu before and, well, it didn’t kill me. How bad can this Covid thing be?”
Reports of this lurgy weren’t the type of problem I had time for. Not when there were proper things to worry about, such as how the British restaurant scene in early 2020 was so jubilant, and there was so much going on, that paying it tribute was quite difficult to plot. Poor me, I know. I needed to make the time to go to Abergavenny to revisit The Walnut Tree, perhaps in the spring, then hopefully another dinner at Gareth Ward’s very brilliant Ynyshir; there were openings to review in Edinburgh, and I’d possibly already spent too much time in the food quarter of Ancoats, which some Mancunians were calling Scrancoats.