Jacket potatoes are back. They should never have fallen out of fashion
The humble spud has been elevated to Michelin-starred status – but there’s nothing wrong with a simple, cheesy take on it
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One could be forgiven, upon reading that jacket potatoes are in vogue, for paraphrasing a scathing Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada: “Jacket potatoes? For winter? Groundbreaking.” Baked potatoes have been a mainstay of British lunches for some 200 years and are as much a staple of canteens as cheap plastic trays. So why herald its return?
Because for reasons both surprising and self-evident, jacket potatoes are having a comeback. In its annual Food and Drink Report, Waitrose reported that baking potato sales have risen by a third in comparison to this time last year; jacket potato recipe searches are up by some 170 per cent. Their renewed popularity has given rise to dedicated takeaway joints such as Potato Dogs in London’s Olympic Park, Fat Jackets in Edinburgh and the viral SpudBros, which has sprung up in multiple British cities.
Dedicated takeaway joints across the UK, like Spudbros, now specialise in loaded jacket potatoes
Luxurious versions can be found on some of the most feted and expensive restaurant menus. At her three-Michelin-starred restaurant Core, in Notting Hill, Clare Smyth adorns them with herring roe and dulse beurre blanc; Shoreditch barbecue restaurant Smokestak serves baked potatoes smoked over hot coals and filled with Welsh-rarebit sauce. In 2025, Caviar Kaspia’s cream- and caviar-crowned tatty in Mayfair made headlines for its £96 price tag.
At Mayfair’s Caviar Kaspia, a baked potato topped with cream and caviar comes in at £96 - Instagram
The revival “is a terrific revolution against endlessly overcomplicated food,” says the Telegraph’s restaurant critic, William Sitwell. Granted, Caviar Kaspia’s £96 hot take and Smyth’s Michelin-minded spud are a far cry from those showered in grated Cathedral City. Yet, at their heart, is the humble vegetable adorned with something, in Sitwell’s words, “buttery and salty”.
“It’s amusing to have the humble with the sublime, the cheap with the expensive,” Sitwell continues. We’ve seen it in recent trends for posh pies and boujee burgers; it was only a matter of time before we started pimping potatoes.
“They’re the perfect canvas,” says Charles Banks, the co-founder and director of food trends agency The Food People. With “the safe, familiar potato” as a base “you can go on culinary explorations”. He’s had jackets stuffed with Korean short ribs and sriracha mayonnaise, and topped with a Mexican-influenced beef birria.
“Anything you can put on pasta, you can put on a jacket potato,” argues Stephen Harris, the chef of Michelin-starred Sportsman in Whitstable, and the dish exchange doesn’t stop there: his fish pie baked potato stars a creamy, vermouth-laced, prawn-studded fish-pie mix. Creative cooks are experimenting with the skins, too: “painting them with beef or lamb fat, almost to fry the outside, or wood-firing them on a tandoor or grill,” notes Banks. “I like to brush the skin with sesame oil and a smoked salt,” says food writer and author of Flavour Heroes, Gurdeep Loyal. “Then, when the potato is fully baked, I brush it with sesame or nigella seeds for flavour and texture.”
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Such delicacies are a far cry from those flogged on the streets of Victorian London, when jacket potatoes first became part of our culinary oeuvre. “Street hawkers modified metal cans into ovens and they became a popular street food,” explains Neil Buttery, the aptly-named food historian. They were filling, cheap and if you transported them in jacket pockets they kept your hands warm, which is one theory as to how jacket potatoes got their name.
In Victorian London, jacket potatoes weren’t just a popular food, but were also kept in your front pockets to keep your hands warm - The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photov
“It took a couple of hundred years for us to get our heads around potatoes, after they first came across the Atlantic in the Colombian Exchange. Then we went crazy,” Buttery continues. Potatoes fast became the UK’s most popular crop; at one point there were so many sold, Kings Cross Station had a potato depot. Then, as now, jacket potatoes offered exceptional value. “They provide more energy per hectare than any other crop,” says Buttery, and unlike any other staple crop, they need no processing prior to being cooked.
For centuries, potatoes have provided exceptional nutritional and economic value - Heritage Images
Food processing is the issue du jour, with added ingredients making regular headline news. “A baked potato is a big FU to all of that health noise. You cannot health-wash a spud,” says Loyal. “So much of the last 10 years has been about vilifying particular food groups. Now everyone is realising the key [to good gut health] is diversity.”
Baked potatoes are, then, surprisingly on-trend. “The skin provides fibre – and it’s a delicious format for fibre-rich foods like beans and dal,” Banks points out. Yet there’s an even bigger picture at play here, says Loyal, which captures the nation’s mood even more than its concerns around health: “We are seeing a wonderful return to satiety,” he believes. “For years, people have been filling themselves up yet never feeling full because they’ve avoided carbs. Now carbs are back with a vengeance.”
As Sitwell enticingly puts it, “a steaming baked potato fills your heart as well as your tummy”, delivering comfort as well as a powerful sense of nostalgia. “Most people will have a jacket-potato memory,” Banks says. Trendier takes may come and go, but the joy of a baked spud lies in its humble demeanour and its affinity with equally humble ingredients (beans, coleslaw, leftover curry) – and the fact that anyone with an oven or (whisper it) air fryer at home can make one.
Jacket potatoes can be combined with a variety of healthy toppings like baked beans that are high in fibre - LauriPatterson/E+
“I wouldn’t swerve it,” says Sitwell of baked potato and caviar, “but the appeal of jacket potatoes is that they can make otherwise boring ingredients shine: lashings of butter, cheese, anything you can find in the fridge”. In fact, they are not suddenly fashionable, says Loyal; they are “trusted staples… getting the respect they deserve”. That might take the form of smoked salt and sesame seeds; it might be as simple as cheese and beans.
“I don’t think the jacket is back,” Banks concludes simply. “We’ve just realised we need it more.”
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