A Taste of the Action

 Across the country, demand for chef's tables, where diners are sat either in the kitchen or adjacent to it, are soaring, according to restaurateurs. Indeed, they say these premium seats, often just feet from the heat of service, have become the dining room's most coveted spots...

Head chef, Craig Johnston said the demand was coming from a younger crowd of food lovers who wanted a "behind the scenes" experience or those who wanted to mark a special occasion with "great food and good company, rather than the usual night out"...

Kitchen Interior with a Man  Bringing Fish For Sale
Hendrick Martensz (1609/1611-1670)
Photo Credit Manchester Art Gallery [CC  BY-NC-ND]

The trend is not confined to London either. At Tallow in Tunbridge Wells, guests can book a place at a marble counter overlooking the kitchen while Glasgow's Michelin-starred Cail Bruich offers a setup where Lorna McNee, its head chef, serves dishes directly from the pass.

Social media, as ever, has turbocharged the trend. But television has  played a key part. Shows like Ramsay's documentary, Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars, made professional kitchens gripping viewing....

But the experience does not come cheap. A seat at High's chef's table costs £250, with wine pairing adding a further £160 or £210 if you want it.

Yet not everyone is impressed. Giles Coren, The Times's restaurant critic, believes chef's tables are a pantomime that diners can do without. He said: "You sit between these botox influencers and Russian plutocrats. They don't talk to each other, they're not interested in the food. They take photos of it, and the chef puts it down and takes it away. It's joyless. It's the thing that's driving me back to just local pizza.

Many of these kitchens have an "eating bar" in front of them, modelled on the Japanese omakase counter where you can "witness the theatre". But theatre is Henry V rallying the troops at Agincourt or King Lear raging against the storm. It's not some tattooed goon tweezering caviar eggs on to a weeny bit of turbot.

It's bad enough that chefs in posh restaurants these days often bring out the dishes themselves to the table and tell you all about them - what they "foraged" and how they "fried it off" and what it's got "going through it" and how it all relates to their dreary childhood. And now they want to actually sit at your table? And bore the pants off you for your whole meal.

No way. I can just about live with these chefs charging fifty quid a plateful and marking up the wine by 500 per cent to cover the gap in their finances when their crappy cookbook didn't sell...

My message to chefs is this: we appreciate that hospitality is hard work, financially insecure ans especially stressful in the current financial climate. That's why we don't mind paying ridiculous prices to feed our faces. Now, push off back to the kitchen and make my dinner. And shut the door behind you"

(Andrew Ellson, Giles Coren, The Times, 2025)

Ah, the botox influencers taking photos of their food and the chef's kitchen. Perhaps they stand on their chairs to pursue the perfect shot. Or even better, set up their tripod and lights. Why, they might even ask ask the waiters or perhaps the chef to remove and re-serve the plates of food with a greater flourish. Or dim all the lights in the restaurant to better capture the flaming crepe suzette. Or best of all hire a drone to get that perfect picture from above. What a grand end that would be to a meal at the chef's table.