Jimi Famurewa on restaurant delivery in lockdown London: 'A new frontier of jogging-bottomed gastronomy'

Even aboard the ever-shifting sands of epidemiological apocalypse — in the age of awkward elbow bumps, houses filled with teetering piles of hoarded toilet roll and WhatsApped vaccine conspiracy theories from someone with ‘a friend of a friend in the civil service’ — it felt like an especially unusual new development. The Deliveroo rider knocked at the door. I stepped into the porch of our freshly sort-of-quarantined house and, having requested recently introduced ‘contact-free’ delivery, muttered something through the glass about leaving it outside.

He smiled, backed away like someone retreating from a recently lit black market firework and watched as I fished a fragrant, knotted sack of Thai food from his cool bag. He stepped forward again; we locked eyes through the shut door. If it had actually been the ratchetingly tense disaster movie that the past few weeks have resembled then we may have, I don’t know, tearfully saluted; two men forever bonded by the strange new normal of trying to protect each other from a madly contagious, world-changing pathogen.

Except, of course, none of this is actually normal. The words you are reading were meant to be a fairly straightforward, enthusiastic review of Tottenham ‘Nigerian tapas’ place, Chuku’s (one of my best, if I say so myself). But to run it — with that restaurant, like so many others in London, closed for the forseeable future because of Covid-19 — would have been weird to the point of almost trolling ghoulishness. And, so, what is a restaurant critic to do? In a time when our vocation could only feel more redundant if we specifically wrote about cruise tours aimed at over-70s who think hand washing is a scam?

Well, it seems to me, we follow what many of London’s threatened restaurants are doing as they, at the time of writing, thrash in unknown waters awaiting the life-raft of more robust financial aid from the Government. Which is to say, we pivot to takeaway and home delivery; we embrace and highlight the intensified work of services such as Deliveroo and Just Eat, and the various in-house operations desperately trying to keep some semblance of their livelihoods (not to mention a vital, immeasurably enriching component of a UK hospitality sector that generates £72 billion a year) going.

Monty’s Deli, selling gnarled whole joints of salt beef by post; Highbury’s Top Cuvée shipping out ready meal beef ragout and recipe cards; Bao launching an entirely new, typically idiosyncratic delivery brand called Rice Error; at a blink, too many hospitality outfits to name here responded to an unanticipated cataclysm with wit, inventiveness and a dogged desire to either survive or go out swinging. Over the coming weeks, with as much certainty as we can say anything at the moment, I plan to navigate this new frontier of housebound, jogging-bottomed gastronomy. And as someone with a fairly decorated career in this field (I am choosing, here, to conveniently ignore the time I forgot to change my last address on Uber Eats and drunkenly sent a Quarter Pounder with Cheese to an Edinburgh Airbnb 400 miles away) I am embracing this shift with something like hopeful excitement.

Yes, home restaurant delivery won’t be feasible or possible for everyone; yes, the number of small businesses across all sectors justifiably asking for help right now can feel overwhelming. And no, scurrying outside to retrieve a Dead Hippie burger from the floor can’t possibly replicate the atmosphere, glamour and giddying whirl of a drawn-out meal at a white-hot new restaurant opening.

But imperfect times demand imperfect solutions. And as the daily roulette wheel of anxiety spins within us all, it’s a chance to seek crumbs of comfort and a jolt of joy at the end of these oddly draining, Twitter-glued days; to sustain ourselves and those places that we hope will exist, in some form, when a vaguely recognisable life resumes. It is an awkward smile between strangers on either side of a door, the comforting certainty of the same perspiring bag of pad krapow you always order, and, perhaps, a wordless promise that we’ll find a way to get through this together.