“Absolute carnage”: Inside the restaurant Reddit put on trial

“I have a niece whose friend hates it there”, writes Queasy_Cat_3890. "Say 'planned closure' three times in the mirror and I hear she appears", reads another comment. "This is so, so bad, absolutely foul behaviour. How does Laura sleep at night!", Rude-Horse-4356 writes. Big-Ambassador-8280 would “picket it like the Westboro Baptist Church”. It’s hard not to be influenced when reading Reddit posts like these. After sifting through a few of the threads, an image forms before me — a dark, uneasy destination ruled over by someone who’s either incompetent or actively malicious.

So what is this place — a criminal lair or a sweatshop, perhaps? Arguably it’s something far worse: a small plates restaurant-slash florist on Smithdown Place, called Twenty. The bigger they are, the harder they fall: a phrase that applies as neatly to buzzy eateries as to boxers. In just over a month, Twenty tumbled from the heights of launch-day Instagram acclaim to several threads’ worth of rage on Reddit. So why’s everyone so riled up? And what really went on inside Twenty?

From Florence to Liverpool

Anna Forster and Laura McCumiskey knew each other well, but they weren’t exactly friends. They were both in their late thirties and both ran businesses at the helm of Liverpool’s young and richly Instagrammable retail scene. 

They liked what each other had to offer: Anna bought natural wines and fancy crisps at Laura’s Deli on Dovedale Road. Laura bought her flowers at Anna’s florist in the Baltic Quarter. Even now, after a tumultuous fallout, Laura describes her as an “incredible florist.”

In January last year, Laura invited Anna to join her in setting up a shop that would draw inspiration from the plush retailers of continental Europe. They travelled abroad to get ideas. In a medieval stone palazzo in the narrow cobbled streets of Florence's historic centre, they found La Ménagère — part florist, part wine bar, part shop, with such an elusive commercial identity that it’s simply called a concept store.

On May 16th this year, after 12 months of planning and construction, they opened Twenty – a bar-cum-florist concept store of their own in an old bank at 20 Smithdown Place, off Penny Lane. Social media promotions proclaimed a new chapter in the story of a venue immortalised in a Beatles lyric (though this is contestable); a new jewel in the crown of the tote-bagged, oat milk end of Allerton. 

And people loved it. “The staff were super friendly and helpful ... The place looks unreal”, said one review. “The menu is well chosen and interesting”, from another. “Just what the area needs”, a third asserted.

Some misjudged the small plate offering – “I wasn’t expecting such small portions” – but, by most accounts Twenty was going down well. The food was good, the staff were helpful, and the place looked fantastic. It was booked out across three services a day, breakfast to dinner, with two chefs in the kitchen. There were delays in service, but this was a teething problem.

Behind the scenes, things weren’t as graceful as they seemed on the shop floor. “It was absolute carnage”, one former staff member tells me. After just a week, they put it to Laura bluntly: "We literally can't keep going like this.” They didn’t have to. On the 14th June, Twenty closed its doors. Guests with reservations were told there had been a leak in the building. An insider says otherwise.