Let There Be Lightbulbs
Aurell S. Norms rewired the city’s appetite...
‘The music should always be a bit too loud,’ declared Aurell S. Norms, ‘and the lights just dim enough that you’re not entirely sure who you’re cheating on.’ He shrugged off a 1950s herringbone overcoat, its lining the colour of rationed absinthe, and slid into a cracked leather booth at F. Krupkin’s Gentleman’s Luncheonette & Cocktailorium - his gleaming paean to a non-specific Mittel-European shtetl which may never have existed. Above us, a coven of exposed filament bulbs fizzed like Orwellian fairy lights, flanked by glowing tubes on the walls carefully extracted from bathroom cabinets.
Norms ordered an espresso so stark it ought to be classified as a controlled substance, served in a repurposed ink pot. I sipped something involving hot gin, devised by a comprehensively tattooed Lithuanian conceptual artist turned bartender who once DJ’d deep, unforgiving electronica in a Vilnius tram depot.
Norms was, of course, the man who taught London to eat vinegary anchovies at dusk and drink brilliant, budget Negronis pierced with olives skewered on long, sadistic sticks, while teetering on stools seemingly lifted from a Florentine nursery. But his true legacy was less edible - and more luminal. For it was Norms who may be blamed, or canonised, for the wholesale resurrection of the Edison filament bulb: once the flickering preserve of moth-eaten railway waiting rooms and municipal abattoirs, now the guiding light of capital chic.
‘It started with a trip to Brooklyn,’ said Norms, as if this were not also true of chlamydia. ‘I saw one glowing in a barber’s that also sold craft pickles. It was love at first filament.’
So began his crusade. ‘The British current is a bitch,’ he sighed. ‘Everything burns hotter here. Like Australians, or bad news.’ He scoured Europe for a 240-volt squirrel cage bulb - which sounded like a military torture technique, but was in fact the Kardashian of lighting: attention-seeking, golden, and forever on. He finally sourced them from a Dutch man with strong opinions on wattage and a concrete barn full of them in Utrecht. £18 per bulb. A bargain for art which doesn’t require a label.
Norms’s establishments became shrines to this sepia sleaze. His first, Baccalà e Bugie - housed, improbably, in what was once the London residence of Canaletto - featured 86 hand-blown bulbs swinging from ropes once used to hoist salted cod in Genoa. The décor was literally stripped back: flaking plaster, exposed pipework, bare joists. Norms adored it. ‘I love how buildings look without their clothes on,’ he said, with the air of a man who’d undressed more than architecture. It was less a restaurant, more an artisanal ruin with snacks. ‘The bulb’s glow makes people look better,’ he added. ‘And when people look better, they behave worse and spend more. That’s the real calculus of hospitality.’
The look was swiftly appropriated by the lower orders. ‘I saw one in a Slug & Lettuce in Croydon and knew the dream had flatlined,’ he said, without blinking - nor clarifying why he was in Croydon. ‘They’ve made an LED version. It’s like vegan foie gras: insipid, soulless, and a little bit fascist.’
Saint Edison of Soho
His lament was not merely aesthetic. There were philosophical depths. ‘These bulbs waste 90% of their energy as heat,’ he said, beckoning another ink pot of coffee as black as a Sunderlands winter morning. ‘They are like poets. Or pub bands. Burning up in obscurity. Inefficient. Glorious. And always a little too much for the room they’re in.’
We walked through Soho, where he was king, past a Pret where Edison bulbs hung in obedient formation, casting their once-seductive glow - now cranked up to the luminosity of a vet’s operating theatre - over photos of smashed avocados, faux brick walls, and motivational lies in hideous Helvetica. Norms winced, like a man glimpsing a Botticelli in a public toilet. ‘They’re everywhere now. Even in John Lewis. What’s next - Edison bulbs in Wetherspoons, illuminating pies and populism? A warm, nostalgic glow over £1.99 pints and Nigel Farage tribute nights?’
Inside Trattoria Traffico, one of Norms’s middle-era ventures, we examined a chandelier fashioned from bits of ancient shipping manifests from the Arsenale, and drafts from his gravity observing Venetian cookery book - all gently singed. ‘The lighting must be seductive - but not so low you end up eating someone else’s meal,’ he said, tweaking a dimmer which looked like a graphic equaliser with the delicacy of a surgeon adjusting a colostomy.
Then, at his Smithfield offshoot, Fegato & Fizz, the bulbs wore Venetian lace bonnets, stitched by a Soho seamstress who moonlights in corsetry for minor celebrities and major eccentrics. ‘It’s called faggoting,’ declared Norms, ignoring my smirk, with the brittle pride of a man who’d once skim-read a haberdasher’s thesis. ‘A lost Victorian art. Sadly, the entire first batch was annihilated by an Indian dry cleaner - said it looked like I’d murdered Miss Havisham in a haberdashery.’
Did he mind being copied? ‘It’s not theft, it’s homage,’ he shrugged. ‘Anyway, I stole it first.’ A nod, perhaps, to the Moon River Grill in Sleepy Hollow, whose EXIT sign inspired his own red-globed sentinel at Spindle’s, his late-night bar replete with a dimmed popcorn machine, for those who cannot sleep and shouldn’t be allowed to.
Astonishingly, his next project was to be a pub. A huge one. ‘But not for pub people,’ he sneered. ‘The sort who think a Scotch egg is a starter and call cumin “foreign grit.”’ It would be carpeted, curtained, lamp-shaded. There would be no Edison bulbs. And, resolutely, no beer on tap to accompany the octopus. He was even considering hanging the gigantic crystal chandelier in there - a sumptuous piece an oligarch paid him for as ‘consultancy’ - as the ultimate flourish. ‘I’m moving from bare brick to chintz,’ he said. ‘It’s the only rebellion left. Besides, I don’t like the scale and melancholy of Duralex pint glasses - they always feel like they remember better tables.’
And then, as if the fragile filament of his existence had finally burned out, his light went dark.
Aurell S. Norms - the man who, inadvertently, lit a thousand restaurants and plunged them all into ecclesiastical gloom - succumbed not to age, nor overexposure to Negroni vapours, but to a freak accident involving an antique dimmer switch, a dripping magnum of Fernet Branca, and a particularly irate electrician from Walthamstow.
The funeral took place at a decommissioned power station in Bermondsey, converted into an event space called #MortalityAndSons. The order of service was silkscreened onto rolls of golden, oil-absorbing paper meant to cosset fritto misto. Guests were asked to wear faded denim and Ray-Bans. A string quartet played a slowed-down version of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, which caused three separate men to cry into their Cynar spritzes.
And then came the speeches.
‘He taught us that atmosphere outweighed food,’ declared one former sous-chef - now a ceramicist in Hastings - with a wry smile. ‘So I quit cooking on the spot.’ After a measured pause, he added, ‘He was the only man I’ve known who made a tealight feel like a manifesto.’
‘A light has gone out,’ murmured another, a lifestyle blogger now curating a ‘gastro boudoir’ pop-up in Clerkenwell, shielding his face behind a folded copy of Monocle to avoid being recognised. Then he glanced at his phone. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to dash - there’s a Guinness activation beneath The Ned and they’re doing stout foam art shaped like aphorisms.’
A former Oxford station announcer turned restaurant critic added, ‘He believed in low lighting, high hopes, and middle-priced wine. His restaurants were deafening, of course - one shattered my sound meter during a particularly bassy tiramisu - but that was part of the theatre. And Norms knew theatre.’
Even the electrician came, hat in hand. ‘I never understood him,’ he said, blinking into the filament’s feeble flicker. ‘But I wired every bloody one of his places. I always thought he was a bit of a tosser. But, still, I’ll miss him.’
Then, unexpectedly, a disgraced former children’s TV presenter rose from the back, clutching what may have been a homemade urn. ‘He once told me that good lighting could absolve almost anything,’ he said, voice trembling. ‘It didn’t work for me, obviously. But I believed him.’
Finally, an usher-turned-Indian comedian - son of a social worker, armed with a Netflix special and a fear of soft furnishings - took the mic. ‘Norms once told me I had the bone structure for low lighting,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been sure if that was a compliment. But under those bulbs, I genuinely believed I could host Question Time. He gave all of us delusions of grandeur - and that’s what good lighting does.’
In the silence which followed - broken only by the soft hum of poorly wired transformers - someone, perhaps God, or perhaps just the waiter, dimmed the lights to their lowest setting. And for one flickering moment, London looked beautiful again.
Aurell S. Norms is a fictional character. If he resembles anyone in the real world, I suggest they take it up with their sparky.
