Tourist Trap: the restaurant I’ll never build (but someone should)
I have a confession. I am not a chef. I have never run a restaurant, and I never will. I have watched enough kitchen documentaries to know that the gap between “I love food” and “I can run a profitable dining room in central London” is roughly the size of the Channel. So please read everything below with that firmly in mind. This is a musing, not a business plan. But it’s a musing I keep coming back to, and I’ve decided the only way to get it out of my head is to write it down.
The idea is called Tourist Trap. And yes, that’s the name I’d actually put above the door — leaning right into the joke rather than pretending it isn’t one.
The concept: two starters, two mains, and nothing else
You open a small chain of restaurants, one in each of a handful of major cities. Each location has a deliberately tiny menu: two starters, two mains. That’s it. No fifteen pages of laminated indecision, no “specials” scrawled on a chalkboard, no pasta section bolted on to hedge your bets. Two starters, two mains, and the confidence to stand behind them.
The twist is that the menu is different in every city. Because the two starters and two mains in each location are that city’s most famous, most stereotypical, most touristy dishes — the ones every guidebook tells you to try and every local rolls their eyes at. In London, you’re looking at fish and chips and shepherd’s pie. In Naples it’s pizza. In Vienna, schnitzel. In Lisbon, a pastel de nata and a bacalhau. The dishes everyone thinks they already know.
The twist: humble food, absurdly high standards
And that’s exactly the point everyone would miss. Because the trick — the whole reason it would work — is that you take these “basic,” done-to-death tourist dishes and you execute them to an absurdly high standard. Luxurious. Obsessive. Fish and chips where the fish was swimming yesterday, the batter is engineered like a soufflé, and the chips are triple-cooked in beef dripping by someone who takes it personally. Shepherd’s pie with slow-braised lamb, a mash you’d propose to, and a glass of something that costs more than the pie. Take the most humble, familiar plate in the country and treat it like the most important dish in the building. Because to you, it is. It’s the only dish in the building.
Why it would actually work
Why does this work? A few reasons I can’t stop thinking about.
The first is focus. A kitchen making four things, all day, every day, will get frighteningly good at those four things. There’s no station juggling twenty preps and doing all of them at seventy percent. You buy better ingredients because you’re buying in volume for a tiny list. You waste almost nothing. Your team could genuinely be world-class at fish and chips in a way that a forty-item gastropub simply cannot be.
The second is the name. Tourist Trap. It’s self-aware. It disarms the exact criticism people would throw at it. You’re not pretending to be a hidden gem that only real Londoners know — you’re openly serving the clichés, and daring people to discover they’re clichés for a reason. The comfort dishes we’re all a bit sniffy about are famous because, done properly, they’re incredible. Most people have simply never had a truly great one.
The third is the story, which sells itself. “The most famous dish in the city, done better than anywhere else in the city.” That’s a headline. That’s a booking. That’s the thing your friend visiting from abroad actually wants — not a nine-course tasting menu of foraged moss, but the definitive version of the thing they came here hoping to eat. You’d catch tourists, obviously. But you’d also catch locals who want to be reminded that their national dish is genuinely brilliant.
The bits I’d definitely get wrong
Now, do I have any idea what the food cost margins on triple-cooked chips in beef dripping actually look like? No. Do I know whether “two starters, two mains” collapses the moment someone in the party is vegetarian, or coeliac, or just fancies a salad? Also no — though I suspect the answer is a second, even smaller vegetarian option, and the discipline to say “this is what we do” to everyone else. Do I know how you’d stop the whole thing feeling like a gimmick after the first thousand covers? Genuinely not sure. These are the questions a real restaurateur would answer in about four seconds and I would spend four months getting wrong. Which is precisely why I’m not the person to build it.
But I’d eat there. Every week. And I think a lot of people would too.
A shameless note to investors
So here’s the part where, in the grand tradition of people who have ideas and no intention of executing them, I turn to the investors reading this. If you have a spare few million and a burning desire to serve the world’s best fish and chips under a sign that cheerfully admits it’s a tourist trap — I am, regrettably, unavailable to run it. But I will absolutely accept a permanent table, a small honorary stake for “concept,” and the right to say I called it. My consultancy fee is a lifetime supply of shepherd’s pie. Terms negotiable. Slightly.
Someone build this. Just send me a booking when you do.
