‘Was your dream displacing cultures and communities?’, asked a now-deleted TikTok comment. I’d posted a video in January announcing the closure of my restaurant, Café Britaly in Peckham, and the trolls were having a day out. ‘I’m sure you can find another area to gentrify xx’, said another. Were they happy that I’d failed? Did they think that the area is not for people like me? ‘Aunties need the space’, said one commenter, employing a term for older black women.

I’d spent four years building my dream: a small fusion restaurant in a young, diverse and – crucially for my budget – affordable part of London. The idea was to celebrate the crossover between British and Italian food, and I knew from the start that dishes like carbonara with cream and a fried egg would irritate purists. I was proud of that. Critics liked it, too, and for a while the place thrived.

But like countless other restaurants across the UK, the combination of higher business rates, increased national insurance, rising energy and staff costs proved to be insurmountable. The numbers no longer added up and the 90-hour weeks were no longer worth it. So I closed, paying every bill I owed. Yet somehow I became a morality tale about vampiric gentrification.

My pain, now mostly resolved 11 months later, makes me curious when stories of gentrification in London are told in the media. Two recent furores stick out – one in Lewisham and the other in Elephant and Castle.

In both cases, the restaurants were painted as the victims. And on the face of it, it sounded like they were. In October, the London Standard reported that Meze Mangal, a ‘family-run’ Turkish restaurant in Lewisham, had been fined £2.5million because it took the initiative to fix a long-running complaint over cooking smells. They did this by installing a construction fan in 2014, but without the permission of the council. After a long-running dispute the council took the owners – brothers Ahmet and Gok Sahin – to court, which issued the huge penalty. The Sahins have set up a GoFundMe campaign to fight their case in a higher court.

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Yet there was more to this story than meets the eye. The council might have been pedantic, but it was entirely within its rights to ask the owners to remove an illegally installed construction fan. Furthermore, the fine itself was issued under the Proceeds of Crime Act, on the basis that they might have profited from illegally installed equipment. Indeed, so seriously was the case being taken that the brothers, who had missed court proceedings, were deemed a flight risk and had their passports seized.

But it seems the apparent ingredients of this story were irresistible to the media. A case of a small immigrant-run restaurant being suffocated by officialdom fits neatly into the media script about gentrification and the ruination of local communities – certainly more so than the messy reality of a pair of business owners repeatedly ignoring council orders and missing court appearances.

Closer to the centre of London, in Elephant and Castle, there was a similar story playing out. In October, the owners of four restaurants – two South American ones, a Caribbean one and an African one – were locked out of their premises by the landlord. The story indicated a cruel and rapacious landlord who kicked out migrant-run businesses for not paying energy bills which it had never actually sent to them. Cue widespread community outrage.

Once again, the facts suggest something else. It turns out that the leasing agent, Savills, had been negotiating with the tenants over their unpaid bills for ‘18 months’. After ‘intensive engagement’, a spokesperson for the agent said the restaurants ‘have not been able to clear their arrears or agree to reasonable payment plans’.

Thanks to public pressure, the restaurants now have a 12-month payment plan in place. Thankfully, they can stay open.

People are right to feel uneasy about what’s happening to London. The city is changing fast, and much of what is new feels like an insult to local communities. Most developments are indeed sterile and new commercial properties amount to unattractive boxes. Often, the apartments are bought by foreign investors and rented to international students. In any event, they hardly add to the character of an area.

But this shouldn’t lead to different sets of rules for different people, which seems to be happening a lot in London. I paid every bill I owed (including my energy bills), and shut because I ran out of money. And yet somehow I got grouped in with the baddies, the gentrifiers, the destroyers of local communities. It was as though I had allegedly profited from the proceeds of crime.

Fairness shouldn’t be selective – it either applies to everyone, or it isn’t fairness at all. The outpouring of sympathy for the immigrant-owned restaurants above show those restaurants are loved, and we should support small businesses in the face of real or imagined gentrification. They should survive, but only if they pay their bills like the rest of us have to.

I lived in Bermondsey, owned a restaurant just down the road, and still somehow ended up the villain. I’m not asking anyone to feel special sympathy for me – after all, why should anyone care about me in particular? What matters is that we all share this city together according to a set of common rules.

Society starts to break down when someone born and raised here, who has never left, and has no plans to leave, is treated like he doesn’t belong. This city will only remain liveable if we treat everyone equally, from the Michelin Star to the Mangal.

Richard Crampton-Platt is a food writer and former restaurateur.