The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and the running track. But it is something else too. It is a paradigm.
The Corporation of London announced that the D’Auria family, who have run the café for 33 years, would not get a new contract; instead, it would go to a firm called Benugo. This has been reported as a fable with universal meaning, which it is; the café is Cinderella, or the frog, or Anna Karenina. Benugo is Karenin, or consumer capitalism, or the ball.
The north London intelligentsia organised a petition and a public meeting. Giles Coren added his voice, and I hope the gourmet inside him is ashamed of the other one. They talked about social value, which here I think is the inalienable right to subsidised spaghetti vongole; Benugo withdrew its bid; the café lives.
I was going to stay out of it.
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