The quiet rise of the English gastropub

Where it started

The gastropub is conventionally dated to 1991, when The Eagle on Farringdon Road in London began serving restaurant-quality food in a pub environment. The format - kitchen open to the bar, food available without booking, cooking that borrowed from European bistro traditions rather than the pub carvery - spread quickly and reached critical mass by the early 2000s.

The argument against it was straightforward: the pub exists to be a pub, and the kitchen’s encroachment on the bar space - more tables, fewer standing drinkers, menus that require sustained reading - changed the nature of the experience. The argument for it was more nuanced: the alternative, for many country and market-town pubs in the 1990s, was not a traditional pub but closure.

The rescue operation

The gastropub format arrived during a period of rapid pub closure - particularly in rural and semi-rural England, where changing work patterns and the car had made the evening local pub economically fragile. The gastro conversion turned a failing business model into a viable one by attracting a different customer: the couple having dinner, the family with children, the group celebrating something. These customers spent more per head than traditional pub drinkers, which kept the lights on.

Whether this was salvation or transformation depends on what you valued about the original. The pub regulars who had been there for years often found themselves squeezed to a smaller section of the bar, outnumbered by diners, the ambient noise shifted from conversation to the clatter of cutlery. Many of them did not forgive the format for this.

Where it has landed

Twenty-five years on, the gastropub has settled into a stable format that most people accept without much thought. The best examples - The Hand and Flowers in Marlow, The Punter in Cambridge, The Thames Court in Staines - manage the tension between pub and restaurant with genuine skill. They are places where you can drink without eating, but where the kitchen is a genuine reason to come.

The worst examples are restaurants that have kept the pub vocabulary for marketing purposes - the bar stools that nobody sits in, the handpumps that dispense nothing interesting, the chalkboard specials that change every three weeks. These are not pubs. The gastropub format, at its best, produces something that is both pub and restaurant without being fully either, and that hybrid form has genuine value.

The Hand and Flowers question

Tom Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers in Marlow is the most extreme case. Two Michelin stars in a building that is, structurally and aesthetically, a pub. The case it makes - that the pub format is compatible with the highest level of cooking - is the most compelling argument for the gastropub as a positive development. The counter-case - that two Michelin stars and a pub are philosophically incompatible - is harder to make when the experience is as good as it is.

The gastropub continues to evolve. The current direction is toward informality - fewer white tablecloths, more counter seating, menus that acknowledge the pub’s origins rather than apologising for them. This seems like the right direction.