Last month, what was perhaps the last great indie restaurant holdout from the great community-led reinvention of Covent Garden closed its doors. Food for Thought – started in the wake of Covent Garden’s demise as a working fruit-and-vegetable market – served vegetarian fare at affordable prices over more than four decades. Along the way, it become a London institution.
But as the area’s cachet attracted deep-pocketed chain stores, rents began to skyrocket. The most recent rental increase would have forced Food for Thought to cut the living wages it pays to staff, and to nearly double what punters paid for a meal, says owner Vanessa Garrett. That in turn would have meant an entire swathe of the community shut out, which again in turn would have taken all the fun out of running the restaurant, she says.
“What’s happening in Covent Garden is not any longer to our flavour,” she tells Roann Ghosh, whose short film explores the plight of the small business owner in what used to be a countercultural haven in central London. The aim, Garrett says, appears to be to turn it into “a sort of funked up Bond Street”.
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