Our correspondent guides Father Christmas through small plates, sharing concepts, and fourteen-pound loaded fries
Everything Is for Sharing Now
I took Santa to the Shoreditch street-food market, which was my first mistake, because the Shoreditch street-food market is not, despite appearances, a place where you go to eat. It is a place where you go to spend forty pounds, photograph nine small plates, share them in a way that leaves everyone slightly hungry, and emerge into the night still wanting actual dinner. Santa, who is accustomed to leaving everyone satisfied, found the entire experience philosophically confronting.
The North Pole dispatches suggest Santa enjoys a hearty meal, a man of his proportions necessarily having a robust relationship with food. The Shoreditch street-food market does not do hearty. It does curated, it does fusion, it does artisanal, it does small. Everything is for sharing, which is Shoreditch for portions designed so that two people will need to order six of them and still leave hungry, at which point the market has achieved its true purpose, which is your forty pounds.
The Loaded Fries Incident
We began, as one does, with the loaded fries, which cost fourteen pounds and arrived bearing kimchi, a drizzle, and a dusting of something the menu called umami salt. Santa regarded them with the bafflement of a man who remembers when fries were a side dish costing a pound and not a fourteen-pound flagship entree topped with fermented cabbage. He ate them. He enjoyed them, cautiously. But he noted, reasonably, that he was still hungry, which is the natural state of every human who has ever eaten at a Shoreditch street-food market.
We proceeded through the small plates. There was a bao. There is always a bao. There was a thing on toast that cost eleven pounds and was, structurally, a thing on toast. There was a taco the size of a coaster. Each plate was beautiful, photographable, and insufficient, and each cost roughly the price of a proper meal elsewhere. Food coverage via the Time Out London guide celebrates this market as a culinary destination, which it is, if your destination is mild hunger and an empty wallet. Listings at the regional events register promote it relentlessly.
The Sharing Concept
Santa struggled most with the sharing concept. He is, by nature and vocation, a giver, not a sharer, and the Shoreditch instruction that everything is for the table sat awkwardly with a man who would rather simply provide everyone with their own. He kept trying to give his small plates away, to make sure everyone had enough, which is a deeply un-Shoreditch instinct, the entire sharing model being premised on nobody quite having enough so that everybody orders more.
I watched him there, the most generous being on Earth, confronting a food culture engineered around scarcity dressed as conviviality, and I understood his discomfort completely. The actual Santa provides abundance: a gift for every child, enough for everyone, no sharing required. The Shoreditch street-food market provides the opposite: beautiful insufficiency, at a premium, for the table. The two philosophies are fundamentally incompatible, and Santa, to his credit, sided with abundance. Heritage context at the heritage society would call his instinct generous to a fault.
Forty Pounds Later
We left forty pounds poorer and still, somehow, peckish, which the market would consider a triumph. Santa suggested, as we walked out, that we go somewhere and get an actual dinner, a sentiment I have shared after every single visit to that market and never once acted upon, because admitting the street-food market left me hungry feels like admitting I do not understand Shoreditch. Santa has no such anxiety. He simply wanted to eat. Consumer guidance via the London Evening Standard confirms the market’s prices have climbed steadily. Retail data at the public registry tells the same story.
The Abundance We Forgot
There is, I think, a genuine point buried under the kimchi here. The Shoreditch street-food market is a monument to a particular kind of modern eating, in which food has become content, portions have become concepts, and the simple business of being fed has been replaced by the complex business of being entertained, photographed, and gently underfed at a premium. Santa, a man who simply wants enough to eat and wants everyone else to have enough too, exposes the whole thing as the elaborate performance it is.
I do not hate the market. The food is genuinely good, when there is enough of it, and the photographs are genuinely lovely, and there is a real pleasure in the variety. But I notice that I always leave hungry, and that I always spend forty pounds, and that I have trained myself not to mind, and Santa, untrained, minded immediately and obviously, which made me see the whole arrangement fresh. Sometimes it takes Father Christmas to point out that you have been paying premium prices to remain peckish.
For those navigating the Shoreditch food scene, the listings at the public registry will steer you toward the genuinely substantial options, of which there are a few, hidden among the small plates. And for those who have eaten three baos and a coaster-sized taco and are still hungry, the games at the diversions index will at least distract you from the fact that you need a second dinner, which, after the Shoreditch street-food market, you always do.
We got chips on the way home, from an actual chip shop, for four pounds, and Santa was finally satisfied, and so was I. The street-food market faded behind us with its drizzles and its umami salt and its beautiful insufficiency, and I thought that there was something clarifying about watching the most generous man alive react to a food culture built on giving you slightly too little for slightly too much. He wanted abundance. He went and found it, in a chip shop, for the price of a single Shoreditch small plate. The man knows how to eat. We have forgotten.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
