At half past six on a Thursday morning in August, two young women arrived on Notting Hill Gate and joined a queue for a shop that would not open until midday. By the time the doors finally did, the line had become an event in its own right. People had travelled from Bristol, Manchester and Ireland; TikTok had acquired its own self-appointed “queue correspondents”, reporting on waiting times as if from an airport during a strike. For several days afterwards, the crowd remained part of the spectacle. The object of all this attention was not a new restaurant from a famous chef, an album signing or a fashion drop. It was frozen yoghurt.
London has been here before, or somewhere very close to it. In the late 2000s and early 2010s frozen yoghurt became one of those foods that seemed to have been designed in a laboratory containing equal quantities of wellness, celebrity and retail property. Pinkberry was photographed in Los Angeles with the stars of the period; London had SNOG, whose shops glowed pink across Soho, South Kensington and Westfield. Like cupcakes before it and a succession of edible fashions since, fro-yo moved from novelty to ubiquity and then largely out of view. Its return now can be filed neatly alongside the wider rehabilitation of the 2000s if you want it to be: Uggs, Juicy Couture, low-rise jeans and a dessert that once persuaded us that yoghurt covered in chocolate pieces was somehow the responsible option.
But nostalgia doesn't quite explain Yo-Chi.
The company began in Melbourne in 2012 and has grown into a sizeable Australian business, but its London arrival is interesting less for what the brand has built at home than for what happened before it got here. Oliver Allis, one of its owners, has said that the company had been receiving thousands of comments, messages and videos from Britain, some from people who had visited its shops while travelling in Australia, others from people who had simply come across Yo-Chi online. His description of the decision to open in London is unusually revealing: “the demand found us first.”
There is a lot sitting inside those five words.
For most of the history of restaurants, a business had to exist somewhere before the public could form much of an opinion about it. A site was found, a room fitted out, a menu written and a door opened. Curiosity then moved outwards from the address: through reviews, recommendations, advertising, passing traffic and the mysterious social chemistry by which one busy restaurant somehow creates another busy night. There were famous exceptions, of course, and London has always imported ideas from elsewhere, but the geography was broadly reliable. First the thing arrived; then most of us discovered it.
Yo-Chi's journey suggests another sequence. The audience was accumulating while the product was still on the other side of the world.
This is partly a story about Australia, which has become an extraordinarily effective exporter of a particular version of contemporary food and lifestyle culture. The Australia that circulates through British feeds is not, obviously, the whole country. It is a tightly edited one: Bondi swims before breakfast, good coffee, matcha, run clubs, Pilates, bowls of açaí, soft light, expensive-looking basics and people who appear to possess both remarkable quantities of leisure and very good skin. Frozen yoghurt sits comfortably within it. It is indulgence with enough fruit, protein and self-determination around the edges to pass through the wellness filter.
Every city has exported a fantasy of itself. Paris did it with cafés, bread, wine and cigarettes; New York with delis, bars, pizza and the promise of eating at almost any hour; Los Angeles has spent half a century convincing the rest of us that lunch might make us thinner, healthier or at least closer to the Pacific. What is different is the velocity and intimacy with which those fantasies now travel. They no longer require cinema, a magazine, a television series or somebody returning from a holiday with a story. They can arrive at breakfast, again at lunchtime and twice more while you are lying in bed.
This matters because repetition has always been one of the quiet engines of desire. A thing seen once may be interesting; seen often enough, it becomes familiar. Familiarity is a powerful commercial condition. By the time a British customer who has spent months watching Australian food content encounters Yo-Chi in London, the strange part of a new proposition has already been removed. She knows what the shop looks like, understands the ritual of taking a cup and pulling a handle, has watched somebody negotiate the toppings counter and may already have an opinion on what constitutes a good bowl. The first visit is still new, but it is no longer entirely unfamiliar.
The internet has, of course, been influencing restaurants for years. Yet much of the technology that hospitality adopted first sat towards the end of an existing decision. You were hungry, so you searched Google. You wanted a table, so you opened OpenTable. You fancied a takeaway and Deliveroo organised the transaction. The technology was extraordinarily powerful, but the intention generally preceded the interface.
The feed is less polite about the order of things.
It is the feed that manufactures the queue — and, soon, the agent that may book before you join it.
Nobody needs to type Australian frozen yoghurt near me for TikTok to introduce the possibility. The product can appear because somebody you follow visited Sydney, because you watched another food video for slightly longer than usual, because your behaviour resembles that of people interested in something adjacent, or because the machine has decided to test a piece of content against you. You may not have been hungry. You certainly were not searching for Yo-Chi. Nevertheless, a commercial idea has entered the room.
This is where the current conversation about algorithms and food can become too simplistic. The important point is not that TikTok has made another food “viral”. Viral has become such a loose description that it now tells us almost nothing. It collapses everything from a million passive views to a genuinely altered behaviour into the same convenient word. The more interesting question is what repeated exposure does between the moment of seeing something and the moment of wanting it.
Advertising has always tried to occupy that territory. The difference is that much of the material doing the persuading now does not look much like advertising at all.
A woman leaves Pilates in Sydney and makes a yoghurt bowl. Somebody films a Sunday walk through Melbourne and stops for one. A traveller posts the places she ate during three weeks in Australia. A group of friends meet under one of Yo-Chi's disco balls. Somewhere inside these perfectly ordinary fragments of other people's lives sits a brand, a product and a behaviour. The commercial message is not announced; it is embedded in a life. And because the feed is built around people rather than publications, the distance between recommendation, entertainment and advertising becomes increasingly difficult to see.
Frozen yoghurt happens to be extremely good material for this environment. The format is self-serve, colourful and infinitely variable. More than 30 toppings at Yo-Chi's London site allow the same basic product to emerge hundreds of different ways; the customer provides the final assembly and, increasingly, the art direction. One bowl is restrained fruit and granola, another disappears beneath chocolate, cookie dough, sauces and mochi. The scale at the till provides the inevitable final act, occasionally including the discovery that you have constructed a yoghurt costing more than lunch.
This kind of participation predates social media, but social media gives it a second function. The product is consumed twice: first as food and then as an image. The person who came because she saw somebody else's bowl makes another one, photographs it and feeds it back into the same system. What restaurants used to call word of mouth has acquired pictures, distribution and a recommendation engine.
Yet the most revealing thing about the London Yo-Chi may be how physical it is. The Notting Hill shop is more than 2,000 square feet, spread across two floors with room for more than 120 people. There is a DJ booth, live planting and an oversized strawberry disco ball. In Australia, Allis has described stores requiring bouncers at weekends and becoming “like the new club”. Whatever one thinks of that description, the intention is clear: this is not a dessert counter designed to get you back onto the pavement as efficiently as possible. It wants to be somewhere you spend time.
That complicates the familiar argument that screens are hollowing out physical life. In hospitality, at least, they can do precisely the opposite. A digital encounter produces a very analogue response: travel across London, arrange to meet friends, stand in line, occupy a room, eat together. The phone has not substituted the experience; it has supplied the reason to have one. Berry asked what screens show — and what they hide; the Yo-Chi queue shows both at once.
Perhaps that is why the queue matters. Not because a long line is proof of a durable business — hospitality history is full of queues that disappeared long before the rent did — but because of what it reveals about where a high street can now begin.
Retailers and restaurateurs have traditionally understood demand through geography. A serious site appraisal looks at who lives nearby, who works there, how they move, what they earn, where they already spend and which competitors occupy the same catchment. There is decades of expertise behind those calculations, and none of it has become less important. A restaurant remains stubbornly attached to its address. It has rent, labour, deliveries, neighbours, weather and Tuesday afternoons to contend with, however many views its launch video accumulates.
But alongside that physical catchment is now a cultural one that is much harder to draw on a map.
Somewhere in London today there are thousands of people repeatedly watching foods that they cannot yet buy here. They may be watching Seoul, Copenhagen, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Sydney. Most of those images will disappear without consequence. Some will become a passing enthusiasm. A handful may represent something more interesting: a preference forming in advance of supply.
The signals are imperfect but they are no longer invisible. Comments, saves, shares, searches and messages leave traces of a market thinking about something before the conventional market knows it exists. In Yo-Chi's case those traces became sufficiently loud for a company in Australia to hear Britain calling.
That turns the usual idea of restaurant expansion slightly inside out. International brands once exported themselves into a new territory and spent heavily establishing what they stood for. Now culture can do some of the travelling first. The product arrives behind its own reputation.
There are obvious reasons to be cautious. Attention is not the same thing as affection and neither guarantees a second purchase. The feed is very good at compressing the rise of things and just as capable of accelerating their exhaustion. A business designed entirely around being seen risks discovering, sooner rather than later, that the camera has turned around. Frozen yoghurt will still have to survive winter, rising costs, competition and the less photogenic business of making the same shop work on a wet Monday in February.
That test is important. Restaurants have always existed at the awkward meeting point between culture and arithmetic. The screen can alter the former; it cannot repeal the latter.
Still, something has shifted in the journey towards the front door. The Yo-Chi queue began forming before Notting Hill had a Yo-Chi, among people who had watched the product, learned its rituals and incorporated a small piece of Australian food culture into their idea of what they might like to eat next. By the time the hoarding came down, the shop was new but the desire was not.
For a book about the new culture of appetite, that is the part worth keeping an eye on. Not whether frozen yoghurt is back, or which topping will become the next pistachio, but the changing geography of wanting something in the first place.
A food used to travel with people, recipes and restaurants. Now the image can go ahead.
And sometimes, by the time the food catches up, there is already a queue.
Illustrations are original artwork made for Eat Your Screen.