Delia Smith and The Gentrification of Food at The Races
When culinary legend Delia Smith drunkenly screamed at Norwich City players during an important home tie at Carrow Road, it quickly went viral, but this was not the first time that food and football had locked horns. Delia’s relationship with the club goes far deeper than a life long love of the sport.
She runs the catering operations there from a bar serving snacks to the corporate and fine dining options. This was the culmination of a ten-year ad hoc programme across the whole of the beautiful game to introduce better food at grounds for the fans. Visiting supporters would compare pies and pasties and rate them as they toured the country for their away fixtures. This forced an improvement not only in the hygiene aspects of these provisions, but also of the quality and variety. Now the biggest issue the fans appear to have is the ever-rising prices. However, as a hot-bed, or should that be hot-plate, for invention, football has now taken a back seat to another pastime, the so-called Sport of Kings, horse racing.
Horse racing, through the 350 years of the official Jockey club and before has always been a mixing pot of the classes. A place where strumpets and Lords would regularly brush shoulders as they gambolled and gambled their days away. However, the provision of food at these events has always been a mainstay. There were times in the 19th century when crowds of 300,000 plus would be in attendance at the Epsom Derby. Think of today’s mass catering challenges and imagine the queues. This year at Longchamp in Paris for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe meeting, after the uproar of 2018, there were twice as many bars and food outlets after mass complaints from the rich and not so rich alike. Obviously in this context, access to the sport is far better controlled than in the heady days of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but the same challenges exist and these have been exacerbated by the growing demand for quality food in all our walks of life.
Horse racing now appears at the forefront of both food trends and the gentrification of food. If we take a journey back thirty years to the strains of Dickie Davis and the World of Sport, racing was the conundrum of both the common man pitting his wits with a fifty-pence each way bet and the wealthy owners in their boxes, who still rubbed shoulders around the parade ring. The cheapest tickets had access to pie, chips and if they were lucky burgers. The members and owners would be tucking into picnic baskets of smoked salmon blinis, crab and champagne. Simple fare, easy to produce and really only differentiated by the cost price of the ingredients, not the services provided.
Roll the clock forward now and what do we find at a modern race track? Firstly, we operate a class system. There are still cheap tickets; lower cost entry, with often no access to a seat itself and reduced levels of visibility. They may not get cover from the rain, but nowadays they have access to every cuisine across the world in the form of Asian street food, German sausages, Mexican burritos and Indian curries. These are not the greasy snacks of old, but rather quality food, often with nutritional information provided, the now requisite allergen information and good vegan and vegetarian options.
Next up, we have the premier ticket. The one up-man-ship here allows you to access bars with less queues, often sit-down brassieres, the ubiquitous champagne bar and often full day table service restaurants. What we are eating in these establishments has also grown up. Yes, in the most basic establishments the starter is mis-en-place and then you stand in line for a carvery, but most race tracks these days offer silver service fine dining options, with the flexibility to cater for the periodicity of the racing.
Finally, we come to what appears to be the new cherry on the cake. One of the devices of the industrial revolution was the advent of the “new money” nouveau riche. In those days the landed gentry despised the money brought in by the new industrialists who appeared to lack class or breeding. In a modern context, I present the concept of corporate hospitality. In the same way this phenomenon has swept football and rugby it is now prevalent and even a major part of the value proposition for horse racing. Why sit outside with the hoi polloi when you can stand or sit in a cocooned box with hot and cold running drinks and anything from canapes to a three course sit down meal and afternoon tea? Obviously, these are sales pitches in motion and sometimes this is the only pitch the punter will see. If we are not careful, the corporate box will see the sporting event itself become an irrelevance. This is now reaching across into the world of the superstar chefs, with the likes of Michelin Masters Albert Roux running pop-up restaurants at the Cheltenham festival.
We are seeing the separation of the classes becoming more defined in racing but the only difference in the availability and quality of food appears to be if you have a seat or if you use metal cutlery. Street food continues its meteoric rise as a way of bringing the entire world to your door. The only thing that appears to be verboten at a race track is any sign of horse meat, including the tracks in France and Germany where of course this is seen as a delicacy. What comes next would require a crystal ball, but the economics of corporate hospitality suggests we are destined to see more folk at the racing who know nothing about the sport, let’s hope we can convert them to this glorious pastime, over a canape and a coup of champagne.
