Haughty waiters, hushed rooms and starched tablecloths are a thing of the past; today's top chefs are all about casual dining. But don't expect burgers and chips - or rock-bottom pricesMayfair restaurants are many things; fashionable is rarely one of them. By introducing a new, informal style of service, however, Marcus Wareing's once buttoned-up, two Michelin star restaurant - newly reopened and renamed Marcus - is bang on the prevailing trend of casual dining. It is a trend that, some argue, sounds the death knell for traditional high-end restaurants. That may be overstating it, but it certainly seems that fine dining is having an identity crisis.Top chefs have rarely questioned the oppressive, buttock-clenching theatre: haughty waiters; hushed rooms; starched table linen; endless interruptions to pour wine and water. But from Gordon Ramsay's former wingman Mark Sargeant to Nathan Outlaw, suddenly they are lining up to throw off the shackles of fussy service. Wareing's eponymous restaurant is but the most recent, high-profile example.This change has been forced upon such chefs. In recent years, the rise of street food, upmarket fast food and quality casual restaurants such as Polpo have triggered a marked casualisation of good food. You no longer have to book ahead or spend big to eat well in Britain - and to compete, Michelin-starred restaurants must now offer quicker, cheaper dining options.Not that Wareing will be serving burgers and chips. Instead, following a £1.4m refit, he is promising a warmer, New York-style service ("A great welcome, a different type of hospitality") and more menu flexibility. Marcus will still serve a £120 tasting menu, but diners will be spared lengthy descriptions of each dish ("It's boring. I'm sorry. It is."). Lunch dishes will be priced individually, and guests can eat as few as two courses at dinner, albeit priced at a whopping £60. "You can come at lunch and have one course for £8, if you wish, which is very unusual for a restaurant like this," says Wareing.
In Newcastle, at Kenny Atkinson's new House of Tides, this modernisation of fine dining is more dramatic. Keen to keep prices down, the previously Michelin-starred chef has dispensed with a sommelier and tablecloths ("I can't spend £13,000 a year on laundry"), there are no hovering waiters, customers pour their own wine. Atkinson says: "The food's at a very high level, but everything else isn't. When people think of fine dining, they think of waiters in suits, tons of cutlery, being expensive. We tried to break all that down. We want guests to have a laugh and enjoy the food. We have to be accessible. If people come in jeans and trainers, their money is as good as anybody else's."HoT is hardly cheap, but its nine-course £55-£65 tasting menu is good value for cooking of this calibre: "People think of fine dining as 'posh', but it's quality ingredients, attention to detail in the cooking, finesse."Whether any of this amounts to the death of fine dining is a moot point. "There is certainly a move away from stuffy, traditional French fine dining," says Stefan Chomka, the editor of Restaurant magazine, "but I'd argue that what has replaced it is still fine dining. At Dabbous, there are no tablecloths, no fussy service, but it's still fine dining. It's not somewhere you have a quick bite to eat, and it's still bloody expensive."
Restaurateur Russell Norman, who, when he isn't running restaurants (including the aforementioned Polpo), dishes out advice on BBC2's The Restaurant Man, agrees: "It's evolved. Trailblazers such as Pollen Street Social have shown it's possible to serve exceptional food in casual surroundings, without the dated fine dining elements."Nonetheless, fine dining's identity crisis highlights a significant change in the mentality around British food. Five years ago, food seemed to be on an ever more daring, complex and costly trajectory. Upmarket restaurants defined food's pinnacle of achievement for young chefs and diners alike. That is no longer a given, says Chomka: "Before people would look at Michelin and the Good Food Guide as the ultimate benchmark; now they're happy to go to places that aren't feted by the guides."Likewise, chefs are reassessing their priorities. Just as nouvelle cuisine was replaced by the relative simplicity of modern British cooking, there is, arguably, a similar recalibration under way now. Instead of expensive molecular techniques, older skills such as foraging, smoking and pickling are making a splash. Atkinson is acutely aware that he cannot serve food "where you don't know what the hell it is." Similarly, at the soon to launch Coast in Pembrokeshire, former Michelin-starred chef Will Holland wants to do brilliant, affordable things with cheaper ingredients (mains, £12-£20), rather than falling back on fine dining's truffles and technical wizardry. "I can hold my hand up," says Holland, "and say, sometimes, you forget who you're actually cooking for."
Back at Marcus, Wareing says the customer will dictate how his staff behave: "If they want the wine on the table, that's what we'll do. If they want it done the old-fashioned way, we'll do that. We all need to chill out. Relax. Look after the client. Simple."Customer-focused restaurants, eh? What will they think of next?
Photo: Crab, courgette flower, rouille and chicory at Marcus, Marcus Wareing's new restaurant. 