The moment I knew we’d reached Peak Hackney

@hackneyalamode is a Twitter account posting brilliant little tweets about a fictional food scene in Hackney. It’s screamingly funny and always, it seems, quite terrifyingly accurate.

It says it’s a bot. That’s a computer program, a bit of code, that performs a repetitive function without human intervention. In this case, one might imagine that the code searches for tweets with “Hackney” and “food” in them and builds its own little vocabulary from the words they ­contain. A well-written bot can seem uncannily like a human; a clever human could easily impersonate a bot. We have no way of telling because once it’s out there and running, the bot is anonymous and autonomous.

@hackneyalamode fascinates me, and like all good satire, it provokes questions. If someone, or something, can make consistently accurate jokes over a sustained period about Hackney Food, there must really be “Hackney Food”.

In 1989, the United Kingdom Monopolies and Mergers Commission recommended measures that eventually led brewers to divest themselves of 14,000 public houses. They dumped remote country pubs, but also many in urban enclaves of old, rundown, working-class housing.

Young cooks took on these pubs because they had food and drink licences and created gastropubs. They thrived as the areas around them naturally gentrified. By a complete coincidence — at least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t planned — The Eagle, widely credited as London’s first gastropub, opened a few doors away from what were then the offices of The Guardian newspaper.

Gastropubs became a huge phenomenon, eventually reaching all over the country, into the smallest towns and villages. More importantly, they created a Canon of Gastropub food. Out went the curling sandwich and the mystery-meat pie, in came the fishfinger sandwich, the steak and Guinness pie and the “gourmet” Scotch egg. A lot of it was a knowing reinvention of British favourites, but much involved new influences (Thai green curry) or new techniques (baked Camembert) — all pretty routine stuff today.

At the same time the new, young metropolitan middle class were colonising and gentrifying areas of east London. Hackney and its surrounding postcodes grew a thriving restaurant scene, a kind of counterbalance to the West End, a new cutting edge.

@hackneyalamode Jun 6
Visit Craven Clapton & order pollutant-free, dry-roasted chitterlings #poutine alongside Harrow bok choy

But @hackneyalamode had it cracked, somehow parsing the strands of interest, performative sustainability, championing unfashionable food cultures, extreme localism, artisanal manufacture and a kind of righteous/sulky stroppiness.

@hackneyalamode May 18
Just saw lunch treat at The Eight Greasy Spoon non-intensive Gipsy Hill ex-performing bear paired with #Faroese walnut

Human or algorithm, it has collated an enviable list of ingredients and curated a comprehensive collection of the concerns of a generation. House-made mortadella, low-intervention wine list, foraged ingredients, odd game, obscure fungi, pickles and ferments . . . all are as characteristic of the location, the social preconditions and the consumer group as Sausages and Mash with red wine and onion gravy or halloumi fries.

@hackneyalamode Jan 8
Guilty #working lunch at The Creaky Cornershop down Well St. get the crunchy prison allotment #moose fondue with Swansea purslane

But what I love is that out there at the bleeding edge, fearlessly rejecting the turgid, sclerotic foodways of earlier generations, we’ve actually ended up every bit as utterly predictable.

What’s happening on the Eastern Frontier isn’t just some kind of intellectually liberated, unconstrained culinary creativity.

It has a coherent shape, even a direction of movement, the Hackney Axis, if you will. It isn’t just “a thing”, it’s a thing that’s been predictable by a perceptive comedian or, dear god, by possibly a dozen lines of code — since 2017, according to the only existing piece of information on the account, which makes the terrifying wisdom of the algorithm infinitely more perceptive than any trendspotter or food writer to date.

I’ve followed @hackneyalamode since just after it launched and laughed like a drain at each post. I’ve tried every available method to track down either the author of the words or the genius coder, without success. Recently, the grammar in some proclamations has run a little awry. It’s difficult to explain precisely how, but the framework of the sentences is starting to show through in places, like it’s gently coming apart. This could be the exit strategy of a talented writer or signs of the algorithm failing. Alternatively, @hackneyalamode might have achieved sentience, worrying it’s too accurate and has strayed beyond parody. It might just have worked out it can no longer afford to live in the postcode.

Theodore Zeldin, philosopher, historian and founder of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, was originally thinking about humour and joie de vivre when he wrote, “Every serious political proclamation, every achievement of science and industry, needs to be seen also from the point of view of the jokes that were made about it.” He might just as easily have been talking about @hackneyalamode.

Tim Hayward is the winner of best food writer at the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2022

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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