Conran. It is a theme to which many people, some with vested interests, others without, have since warmed. The small, London-based Restaurant magazine picked up the ball and ran with it in 2002 when it took it upon itself to run a competition to judge nothing less ambitious than ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’. Now held on an annual basis, it habitually locates British restaurants at the forefront of global gastronomy, thereby generating fulsome media coverage. In 2005, the Fat Duck, run by the much-lauded chef Heston Blumenthal, scooped both the ‘Best in the World’ and ‘Best in Europe’ awards. British restaurants in general were awarded 14 of the 50 illustrious slots, with 11 of these in the capital. England had four restaurants in the top ten, France just one and Italy none. According to its editor the awards represented a combination of ‘commonsense’ and the considered, informed opinions of ‘our contacts in the industry’, some 500 judges in all – chefs, food journalists, people from cook schools and academies and top companies. Their precise identity and nationality, however, remains confidential to Restaurant magazine.
Not everyone was convinced by this top 50. Irish chef Richard Corrigan dared to suggest that Britain did not deserve to be judged any better than France, Italy or Spain. ‘There is a slight bias in the list,’ he said. ‘You have to take it with a very big pinch of salt.’ Yet this vision of Britain as being in the vanguard of world restaurant culture has become firmly embedded. It feeds our almost pathological need to shake off our Bad Food Britain image and display some good food credentials on a world stage while simultaneously rubbing our rivals’ noses in it. ‘The world has had enough of red-checked table-cloths and fat cheerful men called Carlo ladling gloops of choleric ragout atop plates of overcooked pasta,’ wrote Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times. ‘It has wearied very quickly too of the rough‘n’ready Piedmont and Tuscan peasant cuisines that kept our increasingly capricious palates briefly engaged in the 1990s. And meanwhile, classic French cooking with its epic hauteur has become about as fashionable as Marshal Pétain or Johnny Halliday, which is why the French are desperately trying to reinvent their whole cuisine.’
Britain is now convinced that London is firmly ensconced as the planet’s restaurant capital. ‘The city fizzes with gastronomic challenge and enthusiastic, knowledgeable customers,’ wrote the London Evening Standard’s highly respected restaurant critic, Fay Maschler. Indeed, London does have some exceptionally fine restaurants with serious, accomplished chefs who would attract recognition anywhere, but any suggestion that they constitute the glittering pinnacle of a solid, broad-based restaurant culture, rather than beacons of hope in a predominantly bleak British food landscape, amounts to wishful thinking.
Tellingly, it is hard to think of any restaurant of note in the UK that willingly brands itself as ‘British’ pure and simple, because of the negative connotations that adjective has when attached to the noun ‘cookery’. In the words of the Harden’s London Restaurants guide: ‘As the capital of a country which, for at least two centuries, has had no particular reputation for gastronomy, London’s attractions are rarely indigenous. By and large, only tourists look for “English” restaurants.’ Traditionally, Britain has a pub culture, rather than a restaurant culture, which is why, according to Harden’s, there are ‘very few traditional restaurants of note and even fewer which can be recommended’.
The nearest you might get to most people’s idea of traditional British food would be Rules in London’s Covent Garden, a venerable establishment commended by the Tatler restaurant guide in 2005 as the place ‘to impress visiting American friends’ with its ‘age-old but not old-fashioned dishes in an atmosphere of Edwardian exuberance’. Diners at Rules can savour dishes such as dressed crab, smoked venison with juniper, roast Lincolnshire rabbit with bacon and black pudding, leeks Mornay, steak, kidney and oyster pudding, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. Rules, remarked Field magazine, ‘fills a vital role in educating an increasingly ignorant public who have lost touch with what their countryside can provide’.
Otherwise, apart from brewery-owned chains of provincial hotels which serve up something approximating to the traditional Sunday lunch ‘roast dinner’, most serious and ambitious chefs prefer to describe their cookery as ‘modern British’. The ‘modern’ delineates what they serve from the negative connotations attached to ‘British’ and leaves ample room for manoeuvre when it comes to using foreign cooking techniques and ingredients. Fergus Henderson, chef-owner of St John restaurant in London, who serves dishes that might reasonably be construed as British, such as nettle soup, ox heart and chips, and marrow bones with parsley salad, avoids any ‘British’ tag. ‘I prefer to see myself as a modernist who happens to be cooking good, indigenous food,’ he has said. Gary Rhodes, the chef widely credited with promoting the joys of traditional British food, called his television series and book New British Classics – surely a contradiction in terms – but the ‘new’ in the title distances it from unreconstructed ‘British’ cookery.
Just how British are the most highly-rated ‘modern British’ restaurants? Many could just as easily be categorized as French. Naturally, they use the finest British ingredients, but their cooking techniques and kitchen organization pay homage to Escoffier. Chef Tom Aikens was reportedly ‘quite miffed’ when the Independent on Sunday’s food writer, Sybil Kapoor, said that she considered his Michelin-starred food British. He himself saw his food as ‘more French than anything’. In the top British kitchens, a Franco-British patois is frequently the order of the day with diligent ‘sous’ and ‘commis’ chefs barking out ‘Oui, chef!’ countless times in one service. Their menus are dotted with French words such as ‘nage’, ‘jus’, ‘velouté’, ‘tranche’ and ‘confit’ for which British chefs can find no suitable simple English translation.
The Good Food Guide 2006 awarded its top rating to four restaurants – Gordon Ramsay, the Fat Duck, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Winteringham Fields – all of which are essentially French in approach. But it also acclaimed the emergence of ‘Food Britannia’, which it characterized as more chefs using local and seasonal produce and boasting about it. The guide commended restaurants such as the Three Fishes, at Mitton in Lancashire, for serving dishes such as heather-reared Bowland lamb, and Lancashire hotpot with pickled red cabbage, and the Buttery in Glasgow for its Isle of Mull mussels with Finnan haddock and bacon. This encouraging trend was instantly seized on by The Times as more evidence of Britain’s new, reformed food culture. ‘No longer will the maitre d’ at Maxi be able to curl his lip in quite such supercilious disdain at the mention of British cuisine … The Good Food Guide has made it official: British food, like British art, music and sport, is now at Europe’s cutting edge.’ A more circumspect conclusion, against the larger backdrop of Britain’s restaurant and catering industry, would be that native food is still a rarefied minority experience amongst British catering establishments. A quick head count of British restaurant menus will reveal thousands of establishments that continue to serve ‘roasted Mediterranean vegetables’ made using Dutch hydroponic vegetables as a winter staple, or seared, imported Sri Lankan tuna as the fish of the day, in preference to the local foods on their doorstep.
Britain’s accommodating, some might say globalized, attitude to food is reflected in the capital’s restaurant scene which is rich in flavours and techniques that are not indigenous. London is one the world’s most diverse and cosmopolitan cities with an array of eating-out possibilities – everything from Peruvian, Ethiopian and Indonesian through to Korean, Ghanaian and Afghani – that reflects its lively, multicultural personality. ‘Where London does score
