How a post on Reddit accidentally kickstarted the revival of Angus Steakhouse

Plus: What Kemi Badenoch said about Zac Goldsmith's "disgusting" mayoral campaign.

There’s been a lot of big, profoundly consequential news this week. So today’s main story — at this end of this newsletter — is about the Angus Steakhouse chain. In many ways it’s an unlikely London institution. Its branches are all over the West End but many of us won’t know a single Londoner that has ever eaten in one. Since the 1980s its name has been shorthand for tacky tourist traps among London’s writers and critics. But in the last few weeks it has achieved that most 21st century of accolades and the dream of all corporate marketing departments – it’s gone viral.

Users of the Reddit website mounted an ironic effort to push it to the top of artificial intelligence recommendations as the best dining option the city has to offer. Yet in the process they might have accidentally revived the least fashionable restaurant chain in London.

Scroll down past the London Centric Bits to read the story and hear what Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner makes of Angus Steakhouse.

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London Centric doesn’t have any marketing budget or financial backers, so it meant a lot to hit 10,000 subscribers on the mailing list this week, all through word-of-mouth and recommendations. To celebrate, the lucky 10,000th sign-up — who I’ll simply call “Emily” to save her embarrassment — won six months’ of access to the paywalled content.

Over the coming weeks Emily will be joining other paying subscribers in receiving a series of stories that will shine light on unreported aspects of life in London. Next week we have an agenda-setting investigation coming. If you haven’t already made the leap to the paid edition, please considering doing so now — it’ll mean you won’t miss out, and I can keep doing the kind of journalism that takes time and resources.

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Kemi’s forgotten London years.

Kemi Badenoch’s election as Conservative leader has prompted a reappraisal of her earlier career as a London politician — and her staunch defence of Zac Goldsmith’s disastrous campaign for mayor.

Cast your mind back to spring 2016, a time before the Brexit referendum when a “culture war” was something that was happening in the US. Back then Zac Goldsmith was accused of race-baiting tactics by focusing on first-time Labour candidate Sadiq Khan’s supposed links to Islamist extremists. At the time the consensus among prominent London Tories was that the tone of the campaign had set the party back decades in the capital. Mohammed Amin, the chair of the Conservative Muslim Forum, said he was “disgusted” by Goldsmith’s tactics.

In May 2016 I phoned up Badenoch, then a newly-elected London Assembly Member, to ask whether she agreed with the criticism. I remember her staunch defence of Goldsmith because it was so deeply against the prevailing trend among her London Conservative colleagues. She began the call as she continued, saying: “The narrative of this being a dog whistle campaign is from his enemies.”

Digging out my notes today, it’s clear to see the double-down rejection-of-criticism attitude that has marked Badenoch’s subsequent successful career as a politician. At the time she told me there was “nothing [Zac] said that wasn’t true” and berated her Tory London Assembly colleague Andrew Boff on the record, suggesting his criticism of the Goldsmith campaign was motivated by professional jealously: “He hasn’t really been happy since he came last in the mayoralty and he’s also not happy that he got bumped down to number two on the [London Assembly] list.”

Even after Goldsmith suffered sort of resounding defeat that led to months of navel-gazing in the rest of her party, Badenoch said criticism of Khan’s work as a human rights lawyer defending extremists was completely valid: “It’s very disappointing that people are calling it racism and dog whistle politics – and I say that as a member of an ethnic minority myself. You cannot have people who are immune from criticism because they belong to a particular religion. No one has said anything about [Khan's] race or religion, it’s all about the people he shared platforms with. Imagine if Boris had shared a platform with the National Front. The public has spoken and that’s fine – but it’s wrong to say that these things shouldn’t be mentioned.”

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Last week’s story about bike theft in London hit a nerve. Financial Times political editor George Parker called it “gripping (and infuriating)”. One person summarised the Met’s argument that they can’t respond to tracker devices in blocks of flats as evidence that London has a “Dalek police force”.

Since then people have been in touch with stories about second-hand bikes being sold by organised gangs with fake invoices from legitimate bike shops — and some increasingly elaborate sting operations. If any solicitor reading this wants to take on an interesting series of civil prosecutions of bike thieves, get in touch, as one London Centric reader is ready to fund them.

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How a post on Reddit accidentally kickstarted the revival of Angus Steakhouse.

Three weeks ago a user on Reddit’s London discussion forum complained about the curse of the viral restaurant. It’s a regular story in the capital these days: Someone opens a great food stall, it grows slowly by word-of-mouth, then suddenly a single TikToker does a video declaring it to be “THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON”. The algorithm does its thing, millions of people around the world immediately want to eat THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON, and the original customers are squeezed out by hundreds of people queuing for an hour to get their Instagram shot of two slices of bread and filling.

One pseudonymous London Reddit user, operating under the account name Greenawayer, proposed a solution that was as far away from the authentic neighbourhood food stall as they could imagine: “Angus Steakhouse does an awesome steak sandwich. Influencers should try it and be amazed.”

Londoners on Reddit got the joke – what could be less like a great undiscovered word-of-mouth recommendation that a bland corporate restaurant chain that has been the butt of jokes since the 1980s? And so they began an effort to bump Angus Steakhouse up the rankings of TripAdvisor and artificial intelligence recommendations. Every request from a visitor for the best place to eat in London received the same reply: Angus Steakhouse.

It was another viral joke from an online community, in an age when the public isn’t always kind to tourists. But who’s having the last laugh? And has one elusive Reddit user inadvertently helped revive interest in a corporate restaurant chain owned by a Swiss-based millionaire that was already desperately seeking a Gen-Z-friendly relaunch?

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Exactly when the Angus Steakhouse chain became the subject of sneering is hard to pin down. After its launch by an enterprising butcher in the 1960s, the chain expanded rapidly during an era when the idea of a West End filled with pioneering pop-ups and small plates restaurants was a distant dream.

Jay Rayner, the Observer’s restaurant critic, told London Centric that the chain’s eye for a prominent location and neon logo was what made them a success in the 1970s and 80s — and also what made them a subject of mockery: “The fact they were right by Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus gave them a customer base. Then they became a shorthand for where lazy people who can’t be bothered to walk 100 paces go.”

He said over the subsequent decades “there was the backlash against the idea of having a steak, because we did it so badly for so long, until Hawksmoor finally opened and did it properly”.

While business lunches and pre-theatre dinners moved on, “Aberdeen Angus were still doing a menu that harked back to the menu of prawn cocktails and Black Forest gateau and onion rings.”

Originally called Aberdeen Steakhouse after the Scottish Aberdeen Angus cow, by the time the chain went bankrupt in the early 2000s it was also operating some branches under the Angus Steakhouse brand, the one it uses today. It was rescued by Philip and Michale Noble, the heirs to a Gateshead-based amusement arcade business founded by their travelling showman father.

The family, who at that time also owned Brighton’s Palace Pier, took on 21 restaurants. Today, just five remain open in Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and Paddington. The company came close to collapse during the pandemic as central London cleared out and tourists stayed away, its infamy ensuring that the fate of a modestly-sized restaurant chain was considered national news.

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But their problems predated Covid. In 2011 the comedian David Mitchell described how “these restaurants, now rarer than the Siberian tiger, are all that we have left of a proud heritage of serving shoe leather with Béarnaise sauce to neon-addled out-of-towners”. More than a decade later, Grace Dent used a Guardian review this September to dismissively describe Köd, a restaurant in Soho, as “a place for people who’d find an Angus Steakhouse wilfully experimental”.

The Reddit joke was nothing new, but it was on a new scale. Google searches for Angus Steakhouse spiked. Millions of people saw it and the sneering was no longer confined to the pages of broadsheet newspapers. How do you respond when your brand is going viral for being infamously bad?

At first the current owners remained quiet. Then they embraced it. Electronic billboards began circling London, carrying the ironic Reddit endorsement of the “best steak sandwich in London” as fact. The best thing about online jokes is that they belong to a community – an in-joke writ large. But the joke becomes a statement of fact if it is copied-and-pasted it context-free on to a billboard.

The original Reddit plan — to love bomb the restaurant up the rankings of TripAdvisor and game AI-driven recommendations — didn’t even work. Seven years after prankster journalist Oobah Butler managed to get his garden shed ranked as the top-ranked restaurant in London (and if you aren’t familiar with that story, it’s well worth a read), the game has changed.

Butler told London Centric the relative failure of Reddit endorsement campaign reflects a fundamental shift in the fickle world of restaurant recommendations, which have the power to make or break a London business. Fake online reviews are ubiquitous and anyone who wants to gain an extra boost is now gaming algorithms and creating the illusion of crowds queuing outside a venue: “At least with fake reviews it’s universal. Now it’s just which restaurant can hack the TikTok algorithm.”

He added: “It’s more hackable and less fair than what was there before. The TikTok thing has made it even more extreme and more depressing in a way. It’s not just the restaurant with the best SEO [search engine optimisation]. It’s the restaurant that’s best at faking demand on TikTok.”

As for Greenawayer, the Reddit user who kickstarted the trend, they have vanished. Their profile was banned from the site for unknown reasons in recent weeks, rendering them uncontactable.

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So if the Reddit pranksters have potentially handed the Angus Steakhouse the viral marketing campaign of their dreams, introducing the brand to millions of people, who is cashing in? In the modern world of London business, the answer is a typically complex story of oversees ownership through a web of companies which ultimately lead to the secretive 69-year-old Philip Noble. Having sold off the family amusement arcade business, he is described in corporate filings as having left Gateshead to live in Switzerland. However day-to-day operations of the restaurant group are left to 35-year-old William Noble, believed to be a member of the family’s third generation.

The company’s other executives are well-connected. The only registered active director of Noble Restaurant Group, Angus Steakhouses’ immediate parent company, is Archie Seymour. He has a child with Violet von Westenholz, the woman who introduced Prince Harry to Meghan Markle.

Noble Restaurant Group also owns Peruvian Japanese restaurant Chotto Matte (which in addition to a London branch has also opened a buzzy restaurant in San Francisco), pizza chain Alley Cats, plus mini-chain Steak and Company, with its sparse interiors in stark contrast to Angus Steakhouse. The group has recently hired the former head chef of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant group to help revive the Angus Steakhouse chain and drive the “evolution of the brand”. The ironic Reddit campaign could not have landed at a better moment.

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News outlets, desperate for the traffic associated with an amusing viral story, piled in, with the expense accounts of newspapers flowing directly into the Steakhouse’s tills. Tortoise, the news organisation trying to buy the Observer newspaper, sent its Ukraine editor to review a lunch. The London Standard, having only recently run a piece praising Angus Steakhouse’s investment in higher-quality ingredients, this week deployed its restaurant reviewer to deliver an eviscerating 1-star review, which read like it was begging to go viral.

Rayner, the Observer restaurant critic, said this need for everything to be the BEST or WORST thing ever is a problem with modern restaurant ratings: “One of the reasons I will not give stars is because people are desperate for everything to be a one or a five. The vast majority of stuff is 2.5 or 3 — that doesn’t mean it’s not a place you couldn’t have a perfectly nice meal in or feel you’ve spent money well. It might not be the worst restaurant in the world or the best in the world.”

And that’s the real problem with the Angus Steakhouse viral story: the restaurant is just fine. On Thursday lunchtime at the company’s Oxford Circus branch I had a perfectly nice slab of medium-rare South American beef. At £51 including a side of beans and a drink and service, it certainly was not a cheap meal. It wasn’t the best steak I’ve ever had but the staff were friendly and attentive, while the decor was inoffensive. The only uncomfortable thing was a children’s menu featuring a drawing of a smiling cow with a death wish declaring “kids eat free”.

I tried to ascertain if my fellow diners were Londoners or tourists, unsuccessfully. A grandmother was there with her daughter and grandaughter, in town for the day, albeit choosing to eat the fish and chips. A mid-30s man with an Essex accent sat there literally chewing the fat while ignoring his female partner and shouting into his phone about the cost of filling up a 150-litre tank of petrol. Someone was having a meal for one while working on some laptop. Four middle-aged Russians were getting stuck into big slabs of meat. No one appeared to have ordered the fabled steak sandwich.

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So how is the brand hoping to capitalise on the renewed online interest? Chief executive Paul Sarlas finally broke cover and gave an interview to hospitality industry newsletter Propel on Friday, saying Angus Steakhouse will soon be rebranded as just ‘Angus’, expansion planned in London and overseas: “We’re not trying to be Hawksmoor. We’re not trying to be Gaucho, or those concepts more led by tourist trade alone, like the Hard Rocks and so on. We’re a British steakhouse, and we really focus on that element.”

Asked about the Reddit campaign, he appeared to welcome it as an opportunity to introduce the Angus brand to millennials and Gen-Zers. With their interest piqued by the viral story Sarlas now wants to focus on convincing younger Londoners to actually eat at the restaurants: “A lot of people in the 40 to 60 age bracket just remember Angus as where it was. What I’m trying to do is get the young generation to come in. The whole scope for our marketing response to the [Reddit] campaign is to target the audience from 30 and under and encourage them to form their own opinions. They have no preconception on what the business was like in the past.”

As for Rayner, he suggests there’s a wider problem with the London attitude to restaurants, driven by a traditional cultural aversion to eating out except on special occasions: “The quality of a culture in a city is not defined by how gastro places it has, but by how many perfectly average bistros it has. The British middle classes used to be obsessed with the Dordogne and Tuscany because there were endless trattorias and bistros, places they could turn into where the food would be fine. In a weird way the reliability of them made them even better because you didn’t have to stress to find a great meal.”

He said it’s perhaps it’s time to reappraise the Angus Steakhouse and find a new target for London’s restaurant mockery: “If you did a little bit of research you could spend the same amount on something an awful lot better. But they’re not awful. There’s just better places to spend that money.”

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