‘People waited 24 hours for a potato!’: how viral queues help – and harm – restaurants

At 9.45am on a warm Saturday in September, a queue snakes down the pavement in Notting Hill, west London. Stretching for 20 yards past office blocks, estate agents and cafes, the line is waiting peacefully for an unusual morning snack: frozen yoghurt. The purveyor is the dessert shop Yo-Chi, which opened only a fortnight ago, one of the many hospitality businesses making queueing an increasingly common part of the British dining experience.

“We wait in line for everything now,” says 23-year-old Hannan Mahamud as she stands midway down the queue with three friends. “I queued for an hour the other week for a cookie, although it wasn’t worth it. We heard about Yo-Chi through a creator on TikTok who works in an office building across the road and posts queue updates. We thought it might be a fun day out.”

A few places ahead of Mahamud is Ewa Hemmerling, with her 14-year-old daughter, Lily, and Lily’s friends Georgia and Niamh. “I’d never usually wait for something like this, but it feels like something all the kids are up to now,” Hemmerling says. “It’s down to TikTok and Instagram and, to be honest, it’s an easy activity for us parents to do with the kids.”

Read the feature in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 10/09/26]