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Hello team.
I always think that Chicken Shop – a lightly upscale stripped-back rotisserie brand, launched in 2012 by Soho House – was one of London’s more prescient and quietly influential restaurant concepts. By this, I’m referring to the pointedly minimalist, proto-Norbert’s menu (free-range roast chickens, US-influenced sides, beers, and wines at appealing post-crash prices). But I also mean the dish that was the indelible main attraction on the pudding menu: a burnished, house-made bruiser of an apple pie, which lurked on the counter like something cooling on a cartoon window sill, before it would be paraded around the room and trowelled out onto plates in gargantuan, “say when” portions that were implicitly limitless.
Chicken Shop is long-gone of course; consigned to the dustbin of history and the faltering memory banks of restaurant-goers of a certain vintage. Yet in 2026, surveying some of the capital’s more prominent new desserts, it is hard to shake the sense that its apple pie walked so today’s abundant, meal-punctuating confections could run. These days, at Cafe Francois in Borough, the trundling approach of the dessert trolley heralds the possibility of unlimited chocolate mousse, splatted down from a deep dish in rich, fluffy mounds. At both Agrodolce in Fitzrovia and Adam Byatt’s Rosina in Wandsworth, nap-inducing slabs of tiramisu are served direct from a vast nonnacore tray that is either explicitly bottomless (as at Agrodolce on Sundays) or primed for seconds, thirds and perhaps even fourths. Order the gulab jamun at Oudh 1722 and it arrives with as much thickly spooned chantilly cream as you'd like. And just last week, the team at Gina – Ravneet Gill and Mattie Taiano’s celebrated Chingford chophouse – announced that, for one night only, they’d be offering all-you-can-eat apple crumble at a weeknight dinner service.
So what’s sparking all this crazed generosity theatre? Why exactly are so many of the city’s dessert menus seemingly channeling the sugar-crashing spirit of Augustus Gloop? And how, at a time of continued financial difficulties within hospitality, can deals like this possibly make economic sense?
For Ravneet Gill, the decision to introduce Gina’s unlimited dessert option unfurled from a simple dispute over portion size. “We put a crumble on the menu that comes with salted milk ice cream and a jug of custard on the side,” she says. “I’d say it’s enough for two to share, or a generous portion for one, but people just haven’t been finishing it at all. Every day, the front of house reports have been saying, ‘Rav, I think we should reduce the crumble size – people think it’s too big.’” Rather than back down, Gill dug in and put the question to her 218,000 Instagram followers: did people really think 300 grams of crumble was too much? “And the vast majority of people were like, ‘No! Those people are silly! I can eat more actually!’ Everyone was bragging about how much crumble they could eat, and we had our last steak night of the year coming, which wasn’t that busy, so I just thought, as a joke I’d ask: ‘If we did an all-you-can-eat crumble situation on steak night, would you come?’”
To say that this offer struck a chord would be to wildly understate it – Gill says that she woke to find that the eight existing bookings for this week’s valedictory steak night at Gina had turned into “hundreds of bookings and a huge wait list” overnight. “It shows that the Instagram community are loyal, that there’s demand for this style of all-you-can-eat, and that you can reach a new audience through something that started as a silly social media question” she says.
And Gina isn’t the only place to have experienced uplift by tapping into the lizard brain of London’s amateur Adam Richmans. “We introduced the unlimited chocolate mousse in January as a playful way to bring some fun and drama to our desserts and trolley service,” says Cafe Francois founder François O’Neill of the £5 infinite pudding that has become something of a viral, digital calling card. “It’s not a profit leader, but it is a business generator, and it gives us that nod to old-school hospitality that makes people feel comfortable.”
The climactic ceremony of a giant cauldron of mousse perhaps explains why it is desserts, rather than starters or mains, that are suddenly at the heart of the all-you-can-eat craze. Yes, other restaurants have introduced headline-grabbing bottomless servings higher up the menu (think Senza Fondo’s lasagne and Bone’s unlimited fries). But there is something about our emotional relationship to pudding – and its traditional role as the endpoint of a meal – that makes it especially well-suited to these deceptively controlled shows of generosity.
“From a cost perspective, it makes more sense for restaurants to offer bottomless dessert because ‘the dessert stomach’ can only handle so much,” Gill says. “There’s a limit. Whereas I think most diners could probably put away a lot of steak frites or chicken pie, for example. Plus dessert is kind of the memory of the meal – it’s what a lot of restaurants will give away for free when customers are annoyed or there’s a birthday. They are bribes, really, to make people feel better and give them something sweet at the end.”
So how far can this go? The generosity theatre and cartoonish proportions of a bottomless dessert feel like a particularly good fit for this era of mukbang-adjacent attention economy dining. That the Gina team have drummed up such high-profile excitement (and, crucially, an exponential boost in diners ordering at least a main dish to unlock their unlimited crumble) will undoubtedly see plenty of other businesses attempting something similar. Yet one of the biggest determining factors may just be that, at a time of economic anxiety and general bleakness, a limitless serving of crumble, mousse or even just cream gives both diners and operators the chance to lean into frivolity, playfulness and indulgence for its own sake. “It’s a turbulent time,” Gill says. “So it’s just a way to hopefully create some fun memories and show our customers that we care.” Perhaps fittingly, London’s unlimited dessert boom looks, to me, like a trend with no end.
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