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Few topics stir debate quite like the gastropub movement. What does the term actually mean? Has it changed since its conception? Is it now a parody of itself? Tom Vaughan gets to grips with these questions and looks at where the movement is heading
"Cast into the Government's free market, local country pubs, no longer subsidised by the paternalistic brewers, will close in droves, the brewers say. Gone will be the crackling fire and the local pub dog. The pub of the future, they warn darkly, will be a watered-down mass-market version, essentially a characterless pub, all plastic plants and piped-in Barry Manilow music.'' Such was the rather gloomy outlook for the sector painted by the New York Times, reporting on the findings of the UK Government's Monopolies and Mergers Commission, on 15 May 1989.
Two decades on, some observers of the UK restaurant scene might lump this prediction in with other famous ham-fisted prophecies: Margaret Thatcher pooh-poohing the idea of a female prime minister, Decca Records telling the Beatles that guitar music was on the way out, and so on. They'd state that the idealised concept of the English pub - good beer, good food, quaint setting - is probably more a reality now than it was in the dark days of the brewery-monopolised 1980s.
Then there are those who would argue that, in an eerily prescient way, this statement has come true. Lost in a sea of stripped floorboards and overpriced restaurant food, UK operators have abandoned the hotchpotch of bizarrely themed pubs that marked the 1980s and settled on one universal theme: the gastropub. The only difference from the New York Times prediction is that now they're piping in Norah Jones through the sound system.
"I saw an advert in a trade magazine the other day looking for a chef for a 'gastro-restaurant'," says Michael Belben, co-founder of what's touted as the first-ever gastropub, the Eagle in London's Farringdon. "What does that mean? The whole thing has become a theme: a gastropub theme."
Welcome to the glorious mix of opinions that surround the UK's gastropub movement. Want some more? OK: we should no longer refer to them as gastropubs; they should be owner-operated; they should always be wetled; there shouldn't...