On days such as this one, I find it infantile to speak of socialism. Like a game children play to pass the time on a long train journey. Worthwhile, but never serious. I was asked to imagine, for this publication, what a socialist restaurant might look like, or what a restaurant might look like in a socialist state. I can give some answers, but most of them are given with the energy that one gives a game of ‘I spy’.

I suppose the simple answer is that a lot less of them would need to exist than exist now. In England, a country which I have only lived in for a year or so, it’s noticeable that every town and high street is littered with low-quality food businesses. Compared with France or Spain, where I have been for the last decade, which seem to appreciate food a great deal more, but which have high streets much more varied than this country.

There are less and less businesses of any other kind, particularly in the poorest neighbourhoods, which seem to be anywhere outside of West London these days. Where are the ironmongers? The newsagents, bookshops, fishmongers, greengrocers, and cobblers? The only businesses financially viable in an economy driven by high rents and consumers with little money or time for anything other than immediate and cheap pleasure are food businesses. Of course, restaurants did exist under socialism. In East Germany, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba there were, or are, varying versions with varying degrees of success. The jazz clubs of Czechoslovakia and the rum bars of Cuba reflect different historical, economic, and cultural moments for those countries. As entities, they are also a reflection of what socialism was able to produce, both culturally and materially. It is easier to have good restaurants if you have an abundance of good local produce. If you do not, an abundance of rum might have to do. The People’s Republic of China, of course, does not call itself a socialist country. It is a people’s republic, they say, which strives to create the conditions for socialism. I cannot say that China represents socialist restaurant culture, but I can say that it has some of the world’s best food culture, consumed by an ever-wealthier population which can support restaurant culture. That country, however, is equally plagued by generic places void of soul and a culture of surveillance which sucks the life out of any social space.

I would imagine that in an ideal — or at least far more just — society in England, people would have the time and space to cook and eat at home, and the culture and education to know how to cook. But that does not mean that the function of a restaurant would be totally defunct. Restaurants could perhaps provide much more than sad burgers on the high street or be more than ugly coffee shops selling packaged sandwiches to busy workers and weary tourists. They could be centres of community and intellectual or artistic stimulation. They can be convivial places where one exchanges ideas and meets those who live near to you.

Crucially, they can be places to defeat the loneliness that plagues England today. Yes, a restaurant under socialism is a community centre — be it cultural, intellectual, or physical. The state could allocate premises to restauranteurs who apply to create something of communal or cultural benefit. Low rents (both commercially and at home!) would allow people to experiment and invest in quality food, equipment, and staff training, something completely absent from English high streets today.

But why imagine? Why play this game to pass the time as we watch our communities and towns crumble? Perhaps because to imagine is sometimes to create. At least to create the possibility, in our minds, of something else.

I have often used the past to imagine the future. Walter Benjamin wrote once of the difference between bourgeois nostalgia and revolutionary nostalgia. Benjamin had a profound ability to differentiate, and explain the nuances, between similar concepts (a talent sadly lacking in much left-leaning journalism in Britain today, I have noticed). The push to label everything and place it neatly into boxes for easy consumption by the market means that nuance is lost and concepts outside of consumer interest are misunderstood. History, language, or political culture are not examined as closely as the current trends within the metropolis.

I have imagined and I have built a room now. One to be alone in and one to be in company. To eat and drink and talk. It is a room built from our imaginations, a misremembering of the past. A memory of a time when conversation flowed and the friendless were taken into the company and the vices of drink and smoke were nothing but pleasures, and a far worse vice was to be vain or pretentious or a goody two-shoes. Our restaurant does not have a computer till, or an online booking system, a credit card payment system, interactive menus, or a social media presence. The food cooked is simple, and there is only wine or water to drink. It is a fantasy of course, just like those games we play with our children. But it is a fantasy which exists in that room and which portrays to us an idea of a different world.

Many journalists in England came out to denounce this room as conservatism, as an indulgence in role-play, as being pseudo-leftist, and whatever you’re having yourself. But is a return to the old always a conservative stand? What is progressive hospitality? Is it when waiters wear headphones and menus are presented on iPads? When you must order your meal by scanning a QR code? When an impressive list of ingredients fills the kitchen and a large number of mocktails and fizzy drinks are available to purchase? Perhaps the multinational companies running airport-lounge restaurants are the vanguard of progressive dining then?

Of course not. Progressive dining culture must seek to make restaurants more human, from the perspectives of the worker and the consumer. It must reimagine a world where the production of food is different, where human life and the natural environment are put before the whims of consumer drive, and above all where those who work in the restaurant make decisions about the running of the restaurant, in spite of consumer demands.

The ghost of Wolfe Tone still haunts the streets of Belfast today; 1798 is imagined again and again on hilltops and by the fireside in the old bars. We imagine how they might have plotted and planned and organised, and we do so with renewed vigour. The example of the past is only an idea of our own for inventing the future.

The premise of opening our restaurant was not to make a successful business model — far from it. It was to poetically imagine a place where the lonely had company, friends could meet, ideas could be shared, and conversations had; where thinkers could be introduced; where art could be given a platform and political ideology interwoven into the everyday. Hence, on our walls Lenin shares the space with Behan and Doig. Life is everything. It is the ideas of Lenin, but it is also the brush strokes of Doig. It is the plays of Behan, but it is also the Grenache of Tom Lubbe and the leeks of my garden.

We have imagined a world before everything was digitised and monetised and where conversation and conviviality were primary; where people sang and drank and smoked; where the painter, the playwright, the poet, the cook, and train driver all had lunch together. It is true that this is still a fantasy. It is not socialism, and we are far in this country from socialism. To speak of socialism is to pass the time it seems. But perhaps to play, to create, to imagine a future and reinvent the past is to create the aesthetic basis for what socialism could be.