Food Matters takes a closer look at what we eat and how it defines us.
It’s hard to describe classic British dishes without reinforcing the stereotype that English food is bland, beige and soggy. Fish pie: a monochromatic pairing of milky cod and mashed potato. Mushy peas: boiled legumes puréed into pulp. Even summer pudding, filled with vibrant fresh berries, is encased in wet white bread. The English relationship to food is “ambivalent, highly discordant and often superficial,” writes the British anthropologist Kate Fox in her 2004 book, “Watching the English.” Maybe it was the Puritans’ self-deprivation, or the Industrial Revolution, which separated working-class people from the land, or the rationing of World War II, but the English have rarely approached food with the full-bodied passion of the French or the Italians. Caring too much about what we eat has historically been embarrassing for us.
In the mid-20th century, immigrants from former colonies, including India, Pakistan and parts of the Caribbean, began to arrive in Britain in larger numbers, enriching the country’s food with new flavors. And over the past two decades, London’s restaurant scene has risen to a world-class level, with celebrated spots for Thai soup, Trinidadian roti and Nigerian barbecue. Now, finally, traditional British fare is improving too — and at the peak of a globalized high-end food culture that favors small plates and garnishes placed with tweezers, the unabashed plainness of it feels increasingly refreshing. A British man known as Old Dry Keith went viral on Chinese social media a couple of years ago with his austere lunches of buttered toast and boiled eggs. And in 2023, the British fashion house Burberry partnered with Norman’s Cafe, a reboot of a classic English greasy spoon that opened in London in 2020, promoting its new collection with the help of starchy comfort food like chip butties (a carb-on-carb sandwich of thick fries in a bun).
If some of this attention can be attributed to a perverse fascination with British grimness — particularly of the type captured in the photographer Martin Parr’s starkly lit images of sausages and baked beans — and even a kind of working-class cosplay, it also corresponds to a deeper reappraisal by a new generation of chefs. Last year, the London culinary institution St. John, run by the chef Fergus Henderson and known for its nose-to-tail British cooking, celebrated its 30th anniversary. Now the younger chefs who’ve passed through its kitchen and that of the similarly influential Rochelle Canteen, founded in 2004 by the chef Margot Henderson, Fergus’s wife, have begun to open their own restaurants, offering fresh takes on the canon. “Everyone criticized [us] because our food was so brown,” says Margot, 60, of the response to her and Fergus’s early dishes. “But we love brown food. It’s about letting it be.” She’s become known for remastering English standards like boiled ham with parsley sauce and Lancashire hot pot, a stew of lamb, potatoes and onion. “British food is gentle and so simply [made],” she says. But “simple is not easy.”
“It’s the care for ingredients that’s really coming into play now,” says Will Lewis, 32, a chef who has worked at both St. John Bread and Wine (another Henderson restaurant) and Rochelle Canteen. In 2020, he founded Willy’s Pies in an attempt to revive the meat pie, a centuries-old staple that has been neglected in recent decades. “People have found short cuts and so everyone has the expectation it should be cheap,” he says. Lewis sells versions with familiar fillings like chicken and beef — but made using prime cuts from grass-fed animals — and on occasion less common ones like oxtail with oyster, a specialty of London’s once-ubiquitous pie and mash shops that takes him three days to make. A similar mix of nostalgia and ambition animates the offerings at the British Iberian Tollington’s Fish Bar in Finsbury Park, which cooks its fish in vintage fryers at the 1980s-era fish and chips shop that Tollington’s owner and chef, Ed McIlroy, 33, took over last year. The fish is served with curry sauce, according to British tradition, but one made with top-quality Japanese curry powder. The chips are chunky like those of my British childhood; these, however, are fried in beef fat and drizzled with paprika-rich salsa brava and aioli. “It’s probably because I’m English and I love potatoes,” says McIlroy, “but I thought, ‘This dish could be elevated into something completely different.’”
Nicknamed the Root of Misery in 19th-century England, after it replaced bread as the primary sustenance of the working-class poor, the potato is also a foundation of perhaps the only cuisine considered less colorful than England’s: Ireland’s. And that, too, is experiencing a revival in London. At Café Cecilia in Hackney, the chef Max Rocha serves nods to Irish home cooking that have included colcannon, a creamy blend of mashed potatoes and cabbage, and Guinness became so popular in Britain last year that pubs experienced shortages. Then there’s the Yellow Bittern, the chef Hugh Corcoran’s recently opened shrine to Irish, English and French food near King’s Cross. The critic Jay Rayner compared its mellow, pared-back dishes — including a version of Dublin coddle, a brothy stew of onions, carrots, smoked bacon, sausages and potatoes — to “school dinners,” but the small, butter-colored dining room is always full and lively. For Corcoran, 35, the restaurant is partly about reminding diners that a meal should be fun. While the English have typically felt, in his words, that “a long lunch is too indulgent and you should be eating a sandwich in your car on the way to work,” he maintains that a little joy and generosity can transform even the simplest food into something worth savoring. At a recent midday service, he even played his accordion.
