Between bites of crispy prawn heads, mussel skewers and minced venison curry at the recently-opened Kolae in Borough, we chatted with the TopJaw boys about everything from unexpected virality to Joe Jonas
Words: Joseph Bullmore
Photography: Tom Cockram
The reason our generation will never be able to afford a house, we’re often told, is because we spend far too much money on avocado toast and cappuccinos. This is entirely incorrect. The cash has actually gone on lobster toast and affogatos. Or whitebait ceviche and pet nat. Or bottarga sweetbreads and manzanilla spritzes. Or spider-crab sobrasada and wild fennel stout. Half of those things, by the way, I just made up. But pop them on a menu in all lower-case lettering and suggest we take ‘three to four per person’ and you can happily kiss granny’s inheritance goodbye. (Great pub, by the way, The Granny’s Inheritance. Try the mince on toast.)
At some point in the last decade or so, food stopped becoming something we ate and started to become something we were. As our culture became increasingly fragmented and atomised, we found that we needed ever more subtle signifiers to flag that we were part of some hyper-niche club or tribe. Tote bags have been useful in this way. Bookshelves, too, perhaps. Caring far too much about Guinness, certainly (we’ll get to all that later). But these micro-clubs don’t stay cool forever ( just ask Soho House). Anyone can buy a Daunt Books tote if they’re middle-class enough, and Guinness is available in the Gatwick Wetherspoons.
A restaurant reservation, however? That’s different. That’s finite. That’s scarce. That’s got the true quality of a tribal rite or initiation: feverish desire, some shadowy gatekeepers, an obscure application process, a darkened basement, a few bloody entrails guzzled in the half-light. And then the warm, fuzzy glow of superiority and acceptance and gout. I recently had dinner at The Devonshire at 4.45 in the afternoon, which sounds like an oxymoron. I haven’t eaten dinner at that hour since I was four years old and visiting an aunt who’d forgotten to put the clocks forward. The hunt for fashionable crayfish makes children of us all.
Thank god, then, for the boys of TopJaw – Will Warr and Jesse Burgess, to be precise. They are the modern soothsayers of London’s fiendish tribespeople. You’ll have seen them on your Instagram reels, perhaps. You know the pattern by now. A famous chef or foodie person. An exterior shot in delicious lighting. A young man in Byronic ringlets. Mischievous eyes down the barrel of the lens. A crash zoom and a crop. And then straight into it, no mucking about, don’t hold the dopamine. Best restaurant in London? Best bar or pub? Best coffee spot? Best burger? Best roast? Etc etc, on and on, in a torrent of A-grade recommendations and sumptuous name drops. They’ve had Tom Kerridge, Marcus Wareing, Angela Hartnett, Monica Galetti, Big Zuu, Claude Bosi, Michel Roux Jr, Oisín Rogers, Michelle Trusselle, Pierre Koffmann, Wolfgang Puck, Jeremy Lee, Lee Tiernan, and many, many more in the mix – all opining down the lens at short notice. The central appeal, of course, is that people in the food industry – not glossy, paid-up influencers – have a much better read on where one should or should not eat in the capital. This insight, leavened with sprightly, layered editing and Burgess’s wry enthusiasm make for proper ‘cut-through’, as they say. The boys have collected around 490,000 followers on Instagram, and their videos sometimes rack up as many as half a million plays.
“We’re just trying to give people very accurate information about the places that they might spend their hard-earned money at,” says Burgess. “But at the same time, we’re just in awe of the industry we’re trying to constantly promote, without having any real expertise in it ourselves.” Warr and Burgess have been doing this for about nine years now. They started out doing long-form content on YouTube, with a series of Best Burger In London guides in 2015. Did the boys have particularly foodie upbringings before that?
“Not really,” laughs Burgess. “My mum had the same repertoire of six to eight dinners that she cycled through. And she was good at them! But there have always been distinct holes in our knowledge.”
For a long time, TopJaw – the name may well be a pun on ‘top drawer’, but they can’t quite remember – was very much a hobby. “We’d been doing it as a side project,” says Warr. “And we were getting the results we deserved for it being a side project. We’ve come to realise that it’s now so coin operated: the more we put in, the more we get out, and the better the response. It’s exciting. But the thing about us that most people might not think about, is that we’ve had nine years of making videos, some of which basically no one saw. What’s that expression? It took nine years to become an overnight success…”
“We’ve gone from putting out a film per month or every two months to one every day,” says Burgess. “And surprise, surprise, that works.” Over those endless iterations – some short clips go through dozens and dozens of edits, worked on by a crack squad of full-time editors who are encouraged to insert their own gags and jokes as they go – Burgess and Warr have identified what does and doesn’t work. “Less introductions. Go straight in,” says Warr.
“With a bit of short-form content, the viewer is making their mind up whether to stay with that content instantly. So we make sure to think: what’s this content about? And let’s let the viewer know exactly what they’ll be getting in those first few seconds,” adds Burgess. The other thing that’s key, they say, is a sense of chemistry, of connection, of naturalism, which begins with Burgess’s quizzical eyes to the camera, and works because the pair know each other so well. “TopJaw has always been me talking to Will. So that looking at the camera, that’s always been me looking at Will and just talking to him.”
Virality comes unexpectedly. Last summer, standing in spotless chef whites outside his Michelin-starred restaurant at The Berkeley, Marcus Wareing announced that his favourite pizza in London came from Pizza Express. “In the revolving door, literally just as we finished the Marcus Wareing interview, Will turns to me and goes: let’s just put that Pizza Express answer out on its own, and let’s do it today, just to see what happens…” The clip made headlines. It appeared to strike an unexpected seam of feeling around restaurant snobbery, food chain ubiquity, declining standards, and the existential purpose of pizza in the first place. “So that was fun,” Burgess says.
A lot of heat is also generated by a particular question in their list. “What’s the most overrated spot in London?” Sexy Fish gets a lot of nominations. Others cite Nusr-Et (Salt Bae’s steakhouse) and Duck & Waffle. “It’s an interesting question, because everyone in the industry has a slight axe to grind about certain parts of it, or perhaps a business model that frustrates them for whatever reason,” says Burgess. “But we have to explain that ‘most overrated’ question beforehand. We’re not saying: ‘which restaurant should close tomorrow?’”
“It’s not about slagging people off at all,” adds Warr. But things can get spicy. José Pizarro took umbrage at one point to his restaurant in Bermondsey being branded ‘overrated’. He took to the comments section to brand the video “an unbridled, unqualified attack.” The joy to the viewer, however, is the same as in all decent gossip – a sense that we are seeing a flash of genuine opinion below the industry’s sometimes glossy, chummy exterior.
Burgess and Warr are not afraid to have opinions of their own, either. They seem to have been steeped and stewed in London’s food culture for such a long time that any single mention of a place, a food trend, a chain, or a chef sends them off in tangents of bon mots, hot takes, considered praise, damning judgements. The thin line between hype and deserved acclaim is one of their main concerns. The rise of social media means that certain places can now gain huge popularity thanks to surface-level gimmicks or photogenic foodstuffs that are divorced from any actual quality or skill. “You can tell now that some people have thought: let’s make a load of money and expand this as quickly as possible. I mentioned It’s Bagels! in an interview recently, this place on Primrose Hill. (It’s Bagels! routinely has long, snakey queues down the high street for its glowing, New York-style sandwiches.) “Their product is okay. They did pretty well on social media. And they opened with a line of merch from day one. And it’s like: what the fuck? It’s like someone’s designed a hype restaurant in a lab, and not like someone’s necessarily started for the love of the product.” There’s something interesting in the way that short-form social media is being used to illuminate the blind spots in short-form social media.
The boys’ chief pleasure, however – and it lights up their faces when they speak about it – is in the time when they turn their followers onto some undiscovered or overlooked places, of which London has thousands. “I took Joe Jonas to the roast at Parlour in Kensal Rise,” says Burgess. “And the following week we did an interview with him, and he said the best roast was the one at Parlour. And ever since then they’ve had to double the staff on a Sunday. It’s been cool, man. What I also like is a story like Ollie Gold and Pophams. Pophams [in London Fields] is a fan-tas-tic place. And I love that Ollie has had a big influx of people going to Pophams since we’ve mentioned him a few times.”
TopJaw has also played a part – along with many gushing broadsheet reviews – in the manic popularity of The Devonshire in Soho, which is impossible to get a table at, and which serves an ungodly amount of Guinness each night to a sea of 30-something men who, one feels, are precisely the TopJaw demographic. Burgess is going there after our interview, and says he’s often mobbed for selfies when he enters. (As it happens, a few minutes later, as we are leaving our exceptional lunch at Kolae in Borough Market, the pair are approached in 30 seconds by four separate fans asking for selfies.)
“We also did a big thing on the French House [the ancient, eccentric Soho pub], and 5,000 people went in a weekend. And a lot of people who loved it before said: what are you doing!” he laughs. “When you’re looking at a number on a screen, sometimes you might forget the cause and effect of these videos…”
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