Clueless No More: A Guide for Americans Eating in London
Getting important things wrong doesn’t need to be a national characteristic. We’re here to help. Words by Gavin Cleaver.
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This week, Gavin Cleaver, a British man who for longer than he ever thought possible, was paid to eat barbecue across the state of Texas, is here again with some important public service journalism: on home turf, this is his bold bid to help citizens of his former home nation avoid making mistakes when eating around London.
Clueless No More
Getting important things wrong doesn’t need to be a national characteristic, so here is a guide for Americans eating in London, by Gavin Cleaver
Well that was a rough week, wasn’t it? Maybe you’re thinking of emigrating, or at least spending some of your five days of holiday time away from the US. Perhaps London? Although, judging by my experience of Americans, you’re probably thinking about visiting a more culinary destination. When I was living in Texas and visiting one of Dallas’s many outstanding Vietnamese or Korean restaurants, Americans would often say to me that it must be so exciting getting to try all these new cultures of food! A real break from British cuisine, they suggested, imagining it to be exclusively comprised of some neon orange beans on top of a bedraggled piece of bread.
This is obviously the wrong way to think about London’s food. I want to put it to you, the standardised unit of American I’m imagining while writing this, that London is one of the best food cities in the world, but it is constantly assailed by Americans posting online about getting terrible food there. The very slim intersection of ‘places in London where you will hear American accents’ and ‘places that are actually good’ consists mainly of Duke’s Bar. This is not our fault, but neither, given what you’re working with, is it yours. Guides for Americans on where to spend your money in London do actually make your life difficult, sometimes purposely so – we have a vested interest in gatekeeping and sending you to visit the same mediocre tourist spots, to buy our most evil football clubs and our most hyped steak sandwiches, leading to content like this, rage-bait which compares a Toby Carvery to a Brazilian steakhouse and started an internet pile-on.
It’s a shame because getting mad at things on the internet has replaced what could be a cross-cultural collaboration and a deeper understanding of the outstanding food in both countries. While I have seen food crimes growing up in the UK, it is similarly true that I’ve seen queues out the door at a branch of buffet chain Golden Corral, where they serve food in open buckets. I have eaten a ‘green bean casserole’ made from mushroom soup, cornflakes and mozzarella. I have enjoyed a ‘green bean casserole’ made from mushroom soup, cornflakes and mozzarella. I have seen a Virginian make a salad with five different colours of jelly and no other ingredients. There is an equivalence here that I don’t think has been explored: a shared heritage of right-wing governments and questionable food decisions. Here is my guide on how to avoid falling victim to the latter.
But first…
Bad decisions Americans make in London
Afternoon tea, fish and chips, Borough Market, American food and more
1. Afternoon tea
Because I live in London, this is not something I’ve ever done. It's a special occasion thing done by tourists which has so much marketing heft behind it (because it makes so much money for the restaurants) that it perpetuates itself as a London Thing. The quality of the food at afternoon tea is moot, really, because you’re doing tea at Fortnum & Mason/The Ritz/Claridge’s so that you can tell everyone you did tea at Fortnum & Mason/The Ritz/Claridge’s. It’s an experiential bragging right. No one is going because afternoon tea is doing boundary-pushing things with sandwiches.
The consensus from friends who have done it was that they liked Fortnum & Mason and The Ritz. The Ritz is booked up six months in advance and has a strict dress code (not even I have the right clothes to be allowed into The Ritz), so I went to Fortnum & Mason, on Piccadilly, for your benefit. It was £180 for two people, it’s a nice room, the food is fine, the tea very good, and they will indeed bring you unlimited sandwiches. However, if you walk a few minutes and go to Brasserie Zedel instead, you won’t get afternoon tea but you will get excellent food (a 1-2-3 punch of pig’s head terrine, coq au vin and île flottante will set you back just over half of one afternoon tea elsewhere) in one of the grandest rooms in London. The problem is that if you told grandma you went to Brasserie Zedel instead of Fortnum & Mason she wouldn’t be very impressed. Make peace with yourself on that front.
2. Fish and chips
If you find yourself in London in a sit-down restaurant (especially a pub!) and one of the items on the menu is fish and chips, it would be a grievous mistake to follow through with your tourist inclinations. It will be expensive and bad, and you will feel confused about why the British like this and then post about it online, contributing to yet more tired online food discourse. If you feel you must, make sure the chippy is off-white and shambolic, and only serves fish wrapped in paper for takeaway. I like Elite Fish Bar in Bermondsey because it’s next to my house, and that is as much thought as the average Londoner puts into fish and chips. That is unless you want to make an hour detour to find the last three London chippies who fry traditionally in beef dripping – all of which are Cypriot-owned, naturally.
Or you could take a train to the seaside! Whitstable comes with the added bonus of Wheeler’s Oyster Bar, which would instantly be one of central London’s best restaurants if it was in central London.
3. Going to a pub for roast dinner
On a Sunday, you’ll see that every pub has a sign outside saying they have a roast on. Almost universally, from the fanciest gastropub to the transport terminus-adjacent chain pub, these will feature dry, overcooked meat with vegetables, cooked to wildly different consistencies on the same plate, and under-seasoned lumps of roast potato. There are a lot of operational reasons for why it’s difficult for a pub to make a good roast dinner – it’s like choosing to casually get a Thanksgiving dinner out. Make friends with a Brit and ask to go to their mum’s house.
4. Pie and mash
Despite the deluge of insufferable American YouTube videos claiming that every Londoner eats pie and mash, I had not been to a pie and mash shop in a very long time before writing this guide. There is a reason for this: eaten plain, the food is exactly as bland as the internet warns (the mash is actively bad). But!