other national styles of cooking. Always an entrepot, London is now a culinary melting pot too: in terms of scale and variety, its only obvious competitor is New York,’ says Harden’s London Restaurants. Outside the metropolis, Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants throw a much-needed lifeline to the cause of restauration on every small shopping parade and obscure outpost throughout the British Isles, where otherwise there would be little else in the air apart from the distinctively British odour of deep-fat frying.
Just how good or representative of their parent cuisines many British ‘ethnic’ restaurants are is a moot point, but we love to talk them up anyway. ‘I would argue that in London you will find better Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian and French cooking than you would in the indigenous countries,’ proclaimed Rod Liddle. This is a ludicrous proposition but it exemplifies the new-found British ability to pontificate confidently on matters gastronomic from a basis of colonial-style ignorance. It is true that many Indian restaurants have now ditched their flock wallpaper 1960s curry-house image and adopted classier names that evoke tourist board images of India. Some are excellent, but many more continue to serve little more than pre-cooked cubes of meat in a ‘variety’ of chameleon sauces derived from a small number of bought-in, factory-made spice pastes, served with chemically-coloured rice. Many of these meals are cooked by the children of first generation immigrants who consider themselves British first and foremost. Their appreciation of mother-country cooking is often limited. In the biggest British cities, where there is a local population of Chinese extraction, one can find restaurants serving quite authentic Chinese food. Commonly, these restaurants operate two distinct menus. One is written in English and offers Westernized ‘Chinese’ staples designed to please the British market. The hallmarks here are super-real flavours based on megadoses of salt, sugar and vinegar, and lots of deep-frying. Another, written in Chinese, offers an authentic, healthy repertoire of traditional Chinese dishes considered to be too real and too daunting for the British: everything from fish-head soup through braised chicken feet to rice congee. British diners are rarely able to eat from a true Chinese menu unless they are fortunate enough to speak a Chinese dialect fluently or are in the same party as a Chinese friend. Generally, the Chinese community likes to keep real Chinese food to itself. Staff will positively steer non-Chinese customers away from more authentic dishes because they worry that they will not go down well. Timothy Mo’s novel, Sour Sweet, which follows two first generation Chinese immigrants, Chen and Lily, who set up a takeaway restaurant in Greater London, gave an insight into the thinking behind it.
‘The food they sold, certainly wholesome, nutritious, colourful, even tasty in its way, had been researched by Chen. It bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine. They served from a stereotyped menu, similar to countless other establishments in the UK. The food was, if nothing else, thought Lily, provenly successful: English tastebuds must be as degraded as their care of their parents; it could, of course, be part of a scheme of cosmic repercussion. “Sweet and sour pork” was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the consumer the next day. Chen knew because he tried some and almost fainted with shock the morning after, fearing some frightful internal haemorrhaging … “Spare ribs” (whatever they were) also seemed popular. So were spring rolls, basically a Northerner’s snack, which Lily parsimoniously filled mostly with beansprouts. All to be packed in the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to be removed and consumed statutorily off-premises. The only authentic dish they served was rice, the boiled kind; the fried rice they sold with peas and ham bore no resemblance to the chowfaan Lily cooked for themselves …’
Although Britain’s willingness to embrace world cuisine – albeit in bogus forms – is admirable, the huge success of non-British restaurants in the UK reflects the relative weakness of our indigenous cuisine. The natives of Bremen, Bruges, Bratislava, Bologna, Barcelona and Bordeaux feel less need to eat foreign food and remain largely immune to its charms quite simply because they are more content with their own home-grown offering. For them, a restaurant specializing in a foreign cuisine represents a potentially interesting novel addition to native cuisine, but it is not a substitute for it.
Because there is nothing much to defend in the way of a British restaurant tradition, our new-found claim to gastronomic distinction lies in our eclecticism, our willingness to break rules and invent new traditions. We have no baby to throw out with the bath water. We start with a clean sheet of ideas and a healthy openness to ingredients and culinary approaches from all over the world. But the pitfalls are obvious – a mongrel mish-mash of misunderstood foreign cuisine, cooked by amateur chefs and served to naive and inexperienced diners. As Jonathan Meades, the most authoritative of all recent British restaurant critics, pointed out, this is not a recipe for success, but a culinary Tower of Babel:
‘Instead of repairing or reinventing its own cooking, it has crazes: French, Thai, Swedish, Cantonese … There is no kitchen in the world that is safe from the depredations of the British cook exhibiting both a denial of confidence in national identity and the dumb conviction that the grass is always greener.’
Britain’s globetrotting culinary tastes reach their nadir in the country’s secondary cities, where restaurants strive to show sophistication by their bold synthesis of diverse ingredients and cooking styles. Here is a typical menu from a ‘modern British’ brasserie in one of Britain’s largest cities:
STARTERS
Thai fishcakes with sweet chilli sauce French onion soup and toasted cheese Blackened Cajun chicken Caesar salad Chicken liver parfait, toast and spiced fig chutney Seared scallops, sunblush tomato, potato and rocket salad Moules marinières King prawn tempura and ponzu sauce Roast field mushroom bruschetta, pesto and parmesan Seared squid with rocket, chilli and lime Crispy duck, beansprouts and watercress with soy and
sesame dressing Tiger prawn salad with mango
MAIN COURSES
Shepherd’s pie and peas Calves liver and bacon, mash and onion gravy Tuna burger with wasabi mayonnaise and chilli fries Braised lamb shank with mint, garlic and root
vegetable couscous Five-spiced duck with sweet potatoes, pak choi and
shitake mushrooms Steak frites Nasi Goreng with roast chicken supreme Salmon fishcake with spinach, lemon and parsley
sauce Fish and chips with mushy peas Seabass fillet with hot and sweet sour vegetable
noodles Smoked haddock, mash, poached egg and Mornay
sauce Risotto with sweetcorn, peas and mushrooms Roasted shellfish spaghetti with lemon, garlic and
parsley Jumbo macaroni three cheeses, roast tomato and toast Rigatoni, tomato, spicy sausage and mozzarella bake Red onion and mulled cheddar tart Coq au vin
DESSERTS
Tarte Tatin and vanilla ice cream Sticky toffee pudding and custard
