a tale told through booking data

Hundreds of restaurants open every year in the UK. Check back 18 months later and some will have closed, many will be ticking over and a handful busy. One or two, though, will be packed, their names on every trend hound’s lips, their tables locked down faster than Taylor Swift tickets. They will, in short, be hyped.

With so many restaurants to try, why do we all seem to end up lusting after the same places? It’s easy to blame the internet. Social media channels such as Eating With Tod and Topjaw rack up millions of views for videos that appear to offer the inside track on places to eat. Depending on your “food tribe”, you can scour specialist sites such as Vittles, The Nudge or The Infatuation for hyper-curated recommendations.

But Instagram is just the newest of several forums that seem designed to pile attention on particular restaurants. Does it actually matter more than the views of traditional tastemakers such as The Michelin Guide or (gulp) national newspaper critics?

To find out, we asked four of the UK’s buzziest restaurants to let us nose around in their booking data.

Newspaper reviews still matter (phew)

Cloth, City of London

For Cloth, a candlelit British restaurant down a historic alley on the fringe of London’s finance district, the reason for its popularity appears to be straightforward.

Bookings got off to a slow start after it opened in April 2024. But a triple whammy of glowing reviews in the Financial Times, The Times and The Guardian last summer led to an “immediate, massive change”, says co-founder Joe Haynes.

The number of diners shot up from 40 on a good day to more than 200, with a rush of corporate PAs booking tables for their bosses.

Haynes says Cloth doesn’t do much marketing or social media. Its location in an “old school” area of London with a slightly older, more traditional clientele means it’s unlikely to ever blow up overnight on TikTok, he believes.

But he does admit to bringing in a PR agent early on to invite carefully selected influencers in for a free meal to “get a bit of a buzz and get awareness out”.

It’s hard to know how successful the strategy was, Haynes says. “People say you need to see something three times before you’re convinced. So [customers] may have seen three separate videos or the same video three times . . . It’s quite difficult to actually point fingers at what worked.”

Tastemakers are changing

Bistro Freddie, Shoreditch

Bistro Freddie is just a mile from Cloth, but worlds away. When Tim Hayward’s verdict in the FT was “I’m sorry but it doesn’t work”, it barely broke the bistro’s stride. “National paper reviews certainly still have their place,” says the sanguine owner, Dominic Hamdy. “But there is a different audience that aren’t reading The Times, that are looking to influencers, or people of influence, that they trust.”

There was a flurry of attention shortly after opening, with Hamdy citing a feature in Hot Dinners as particularly influential. Then came the kingpin of the new tastemakers: Jesse Burgess, the ebullient presenter of Instagram channel Topjaw. He dropped by to deem Bistro Freddie one of London’s best new restaurant openings and film a video joking around with the team and gushing over its ox-cheek-and-Guinness pies. Reservations soared.

Hamdy is all polished business jargon, as befits the director of a budding restaurant empire. Unlike his other ventures, Spitalfields’ Crispin and its spin-offs, he wanted Bistro Freddie to appeal to a wide audience, or “fulfil the interests of a few different demographics” as he puts it.

So while Gen Z might be reeled in by social media clips of Bistro Freddie’s young chefs, its prim white tablecloths and “relatively traditional flavours” will keep their parents happy, too.

“Everything helps, I think,” says Hamdy. “Whether it’s your team or your interiors or your designers or food or socials, we look at everything [to] see what levers we can pull on to get more visibility.”

Nothing hits quite like Michelin

Chishuru, Fitzrovia

For some, the equation isn’t so linear. Chishuru’s head chef Adejoké Bakare has become something of a media darling thanks to her unique take on west African cuisine. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times, CBS and The Guardian, was named one of the FT’s most influential women of 2024 and has notched up a string of awards.

But her business partner Matt Paice, who talks about reservation trends like a season-ticket holder might their team’s performance, is sceptical. “No customer has ever said to me, ‘I saw you guys were in the National Restaurant Awards Top 100’ or ‘I read your review in the Evening Standard.’”

Courting social media buzz is a waste of time, too, he says, unless you’re “the kind of place that starts doing Cronuts with flaming marshmallows”.

Winning a Michelin star did move the needle. Almost 1,000 people booked a table in just one week. But many of them were “trend-hunting” diners more used to mid-market chains, Paice says, perhaps lured by articles hyping Chishuru’s £75 dinner as one of the lowest-cost Michelin tasting menus in the country.

So he put up the prices. Bookings dropped, but the crowd improved. “I don’t want to say ‘foodies’, but people who are actually interested in what we’re trying to do.”

With customers like these, who needs influencers?

Goodbye Horses, De Beauvoir Town

Even Goodbye Horses’ founders aren’t sure why it blew up. The wine bar/restaurant/café in Islington became a smash hit with London’s loafers and Lime bikes crowd almost immediately after it opened last year.

Reservations drop once a month at midnight with the best slots vanishing, Cinderella-like, soon after. Walk-ins face up to three-hour waits — oh, and they will wait.

“In the summer, the garden was completely packed out. Every inch of it,” says George de Vos, over sips of Vichy Catalan, a fizzy water I’m told tastes like licking limestone.

But the bar is tucked away on a residential side street, keeps its social media accounts studiously bare and its sole national newspaper review to date (by Charlotte Ivers in The Times) was less than effusive.

Search for the restaurant (or its sister bar across the street, The Dreamery) on TikTok or Instagram, however, and it begins to feel like less of a mystery.

A downright avalanche of images and videos captures every extremely photogenic detail: hand-illustrated textiles, a swooshy custom wooden bar, stacks of vintage records, wine glasses etched with horses, a psychedelic ceiling and mounds of colourful gelato. “Recipe for a perfect Thursday night” reads one caption; “Stunning interior . . . very vibey” says another.

De Vos and Alex Young, the other founder, reject suggestions it was engineered to go down well online. Young says they don’t work with influencers (although their inbox is a “hellscape” of requests) and in fact spent a couple of months discouraging them to try to damp down the queues. They have even turned off tagging on Instagram, making it harder for users to track them down.

The founders see their trajectory as proof that all you need is a good business, not media hype. As Young says: “If you will build it, they will come.”

But a slow burn is still possible

Gloriosa, Glasgow

Outside of London, the dynamic can be quite different. Gloriosa flew under the radar for years, according to Rosie Healey, its down-to-earth head chef and founder. In part because the restaurant in Glasgow’s trendy West End spent much of its first 18 months closed by the Covid-19 lockdowns.

But Healey’s brand of simple Mediterranean cooking was also a hard left turn for the city’s food scene, where many locals expected a fancy restaurant to involve “foam jelly and making everything into little cubes,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of negative feedback.”

Gloriosa lost its reputation as a hidden gem after Dua Lipa posted about her meal there. (The popstar’s visit was so unexpected that Healey mistook her security detail for a police raid.) Young women trooped in for weeks afterwards to try the exact same dish Dua had eaten: butter beans with cod and salsa verde. “We’ve never sold so many,” Healey deadpans. “[But] I don’t think they liked it.”

Then Jay Rayner called its cooking a “delight” in a late 2023 review for The Observer. Now, it is a regular in listicles rounding up Glasgow’s top restaurants, with tourists often making detours just to visit.

“A knee-jerk reaction to not being busy is to change the concept, but I think you just need to stick to what you’re doing,” Healey says. “As long as you do it well and it’s good quality, people will want it.”

Clara Murray is a data journalist for the FT