Reacting to Atkins

Never has a diet had such an impact on our lives. I'm talking, of course, about the Atkins diet, the controversial low-carb regime pioneered by American Dr Robert Atkins. He made a fortune by telling millions of overweight people how to lose weight without cutting out their bacon and eggs. Then he died of, er, a heart attack, and, it has recently come to light, he was allegedly clinically obese at the time of his death.

The diet has divided the medical community like nothing else in recent years. Hardly a day goes by without an Atkins-related story in the press, not least highlighting the plight of the beleaguered bread and potato producers, who hold endless crisis talks, such is the demise of sales.

For those who have bought into it - and it is estimated that up to three million in this country are experimenting with the diet, with 30 million people around the world on Atkins and other low-carb diets - it has become a quasi-religion, fuelled by the many celebrities who credit their newly streamlined bods to the concept.

Has it had an impact on our eating habits in restaurants, too? Of course it has. Restaurants around the country are reporting plates returned to the kitchen with potatoes untouched, desserts overlooked (in favour of cheese) and bread rolls abandoned.

Though we haven't quite reached the state of Atkins frenzy that is happening in the USA, restaurants here have begun to respond to the craze. Yates's Wine Lodge, the 132-strong pub chain, launched its Atkins-friendly menu earlier this year and, after a month of trading, revealed extra sales of £10,500 - "which is not bad, considering food makes up only 15% of our business", says Yates Group chief executive Mark Jones.

He had been noticing how focus groups were always complaining about pub food being too stodgy. "And I kept reading about restaurants serving burgers with no buns or chips. Then I talked to people here in the office - half of them were on Atkins. I've seen no other diet change eating habits so rapidly."

Cue Yates's Atkins Menu, printed on a tent card displayed on each table. The piŠce de r‚sistance is the Yates's Atkins Burger (£5.85), a scary-sounding combination with chargrilled chicken breast sandwiched between two 6oz beef burgers. "It's our most popular item," reveals Jones, proudly.

Actually, Jones is shortly set to drop the Atkins tag in favour of the words "low-carb". "We want to broaden the menu," he says. "And we don't want to be known as the place that offers an Atkins menu when everybody else has moved on to the South Beach diet or whatever. We're not doing this to be fashionable, we have genuinely responded to research from customers. I think low-carb eating is here to stay."

Henry Harris thinks so, too. The chef-patron of Racine in London's Knightsbridge is positively evangelical about the Atkins diet. Not his menu, you understand, just the man - though he gets plenty of Atkins dieters eating in his restaurant.

Harris watched his wife shed pounds through the diet, "And I thought, gosh, she's looking rather good - I need to lose some weight. So I read the book," he says. "When I started doing it, I found I had more energy, my concentration levels were better and I didn't need to sleep so much. I really believe that the sugar and fat combo is toxic - it's like pouring petrol on a fire."

In fact, Harris lost two-and-a-half stone in six months. You might have caught his efforts chronicled in the Sunday Telegraph last year, where he devised some Atkins-friendly recipes.

Uninspiring recipes
For those who haven't picked up a copy of The New Diet Revolution, the recipes are uninspiring, to say the least. Harris rightly thought he could do a lot better. In fact, his recipes went down so well that publishers Quadrille signed him up to do the very same in a book, which comes out in April.

Racine is not particularly known for its Atkins-friendly menu - but they come anyway. "I'd say about 10 diners a day will request extra salad or green vegetables instead of carbohydrates," says Harris.

An increasing number of restaurants, though, are eschewing carbohydrates in favour of a "lighter" way of eating. And if that means attracting customers who follow the Atkins diet, then great stuff, reckon the folks at new London restaurant, Shumi.

Just to confuse things, Shumi is actually an Italian restaurant - Italian food being the sworn enemy of Atkins, with its belly-swelling polenta, pasta and pizzas - though they do things a little differently here. It offers Italian cuisine with a Japanese twist (read small portions) and pasta made with rice, not wheat, flour. "It's much lighter," explains chef Lee Purcell.

"It's not that customers are dictating what we cook; we deliberately set out to create a menu that was light. We didn't want customers to leave here feeling stuffed. Best-selling dishes include four different tartares and five different carpaccios. And no, bread isn't offered."

Chefs such as Aussie newcomers Christine Manfield at East@West and Scott Webster at Osia have never used many carbs in their cooking. "I don't like stodgy food; I like clean, elegant food," declares Manfield.

Her food is an Atkins-dieter's dream: black pepper chicken tea with watercress and enoki mushrooms; tea-smoked barbary duck, duck sausage and foie gras; grilled diver scallop salad, sweet tamarind and basil with salmon roe - offered in two set-menu combinations, one named Wicked, the other Delicious.

Like Purcell and Manfield, Webster likes to keep it light and doesn't offer bread, either. "It's an Aussie thing, not a deliberately Atkins thing," declares Webster. "Though if people really want bread or potatoes, they can order them as a side dish."

So, for followers of Atkins, keeping to the regime while eating out isn't such a minefield. Restaurants certainly don't flinch and are even gearing up their systems for bun- and chip-less orders. Even sandwich chains, a traditional Atkins no-go area, are beginning to respond.

London-based Benjys, with 60 shops, declared itself the first major high-street sandwich retailer to label a selection of its products "Atkins-friendly" last autumn. "This is not about endorsing Atkins or any other no- or low-carb diet. As a retailer we are very close to our customer; the feedback is that people want to know what they can and can't eat when they are following a certain diet, and they should expect to know that from a retailer," justifies Ian Rickwood, Benjys' chief executive, who reports a 30% increase in sales of their special Low Carb Low Cost related products (various cuts of cooked chicken, meatballs and the like) compared with the final trading quarter of 2003.

So what's next? Will any other diet regime ever have a similar impact? Hillary Clinton swears by the South Beach diet, which limits carbs but is more flexible than Atkins; and Metabolic Typing - also known as MT, a diet tailor-made for your own metabolism - is fast gaining ground.

Then, of course there's the no-food kind of diet. Yup, fasting. Americans, apparently, are shelling out a fortune for a detox plan that prescribes a daily diet of, well, nothing. Can't see that one catching on in restaurants, somehow. n