Bottomless lasagne? London's latest foodie trend fills me with dread

Telegraph

17-02-2025

There are some culinary artefacts among the marvels in the British Museum's Silk Roads exhibition. A platter for a flatbread that found its way from Central Asia to China; a wine jug repurposed as a funeral urn; countless ornate goblets and bowls that wound up thousands of miles from their place of origin. Astonishingly, there are even some 1,500-year-old baked goods, found at Astana Cemetery in the Gobi Desert. Insert your own joke about your local bakery.
Gazing on these items, imagining the intrepid travellers who conveyed them across unknown or hostile land, I wondered what archaeologists from the future might learn from our food and drink curiosities. Would they marvel at Huel and its ilk, forerunners of the meal replacements they inject into themselves? Or gaze on air fryers with awe, as we do with Stonehenge? Will they revere Charlie Bigham as a deity?
It was with these thoughts swirling that I checked my phone after the exhibition and saw an email about a new east London concept: 'bottomless lasagne'.
Senza Fondo, which translates as 'without bottom', will open on February 20 offering unlimited lasagne for £20 a head. 'Lasagne lends itself to bulk production,' says the founder, Joe Worthington, who calls himself the 'chief bechamel officer'. 'You sit down, have a big, chunky piece of lasagne and – if you want – you can order it again.'
'Bottomless.' Of all the ominous terms in food – deconstructed, gooey, ultra-processed, nutritionally complete – none inspires as much dread. The word reassures the diner that they will not be judged, no matter how base their urges. The implication is not only that there is no bottom to your bowl, plate, trough or whatever else you are eating from, but possibly no bottom to you, either. As with Casper the Friendly Ghost, food and drink will simply plummet through you.
This is not to denigrate 'lavish' or 'indulgent', which are ancient and admirable qualities in a meal. Nor is it to dismiss buffets, which at their best have a democratic sense of generosity and acknowledge that you want to add ham to stuff.
No, bottomless is really a 21st-century curiosity. It started with unlimited soft drinks, fries and Pizza Hut pizza at lunchtime. But it achieved its zenith with the 'bottomless brunch' where, for a fixed fee, diners are given as much cheap booze as they can glug within their allotted time. Bottomless brunch not only normalises drinking in the morning, but specifically normalises drinking many low-quality drinks. Hopped up on lowest-common-denominator plonk, the bottomless mob make themselves vulnerable to sides, pudding and other cunning upselling.
The bottomless promise also uses the diner's essential stinginess against them. To a certain cast of mind, hearing the word will get the cogs whirring. 'I will beat the system,' they think. 'I will be the outlier.' They crave a bargain, rather than endless layers of bechamel, ragu and pasta. Nobody has ever had a serving of lasagne and still felt hungry. That's the point of lasagne. One might as well offer bottomless mashed potato or risotto or bread and butter pudding. When archaeologists unearth the 'Senza Fondo' menu buried in the mud by Old Street, they will wonder about our priorities.