Does London Finally Have a Legit American Barbecue Restaurant?
Gavin Cleaver travels to Turnham Green to find out. Photography by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Gavin Cleaver.
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Once Upon a Time in the West
Gavin Cleaver visits London’s newest US barbecue restaurant and contemplates an America of fading cultural relevance.
Historian Geir Lundestad once described American influence around the world as an “empire by invitation”. Of course, the US has exerted influence by invasion and all the other vicious ways empires prosper, but it has also conquered hearts and minds by projecting immense amounts of soft power around the world. This has been achieved by making the American way of life seem appealing: the music, the films, the TV, and especially the food. What was the most potent symbol of the Soviets’ ‘opening up’ to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall? The McDonald’s in Pushkin Square. A few years later, Gorbachev was advertising Pizza Hut. So what happens to Western culture when America becomes incredibly unpopular across the West? And what does this mean for the UK’s addiction to American food? Will our love for neon-signed bedecked interiors survive the next four years? And when American cultural imperialism fades, what fills the gap?
If you’re just joining us, it might be worth going back and reading the piece in which, in the name of public service journalism, I ate at every American barbecue restaurant across London. The conclusion was: US barbecue in London is based more around our affinity for American culture than it is reverence for good barbecue (but such is our affinity, we’re still more than happy to pay big money for bad examples). Since then, I’ve been fortunate to eat good barbecue, though sadly it hasn’t been in London. In February, I was back in Texas and lucky enough to visit Goldee’s in Fort Worth in the company of Texas Monthly’s barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn. He was in the midst of writing the new Top 50 BBQ guide, which happens once every four years — like the World Cup but far more intense. When we met, Vaughn had travelled 900 miles around Texas in just a few days to eat barbecue. I wouldn’t travel 900 metres to eat most of the barbecue in London.
Still, one of the better places I visited for the piece was the sadly shuttered Prairie Fire barbecue, which Kansas native Michael Gratz started as a pop-up in 2015 after coming to the UK to work as a chef for the US team at the 2012 London Olympics. Gratz opened a permanent location in early 2020 that couldn’t outperform its curious location in Wood Lane, across the road from the old BBC Television Centre. Gratz has now worked with the newly opened Lil’ Nashville, a themed Nashville-style country bar in Chiswick created by country music obsessives (there’s a lot of live music), on a new menu of smoked meats to sit alongside the restaurant’s other generically American menu items like burgers, nachos, wings and mac and cheese. Gratz isn’t actually there cooking, but has created the recipes, trained the staff, including head chef Allison Vines-Rushing, a Louisiana native, and even installed the kitchen himself. The Kansas City-style barbecue at Prairie Fire was excellent, but it’s an open question whether that can translate to a country music bar in Chiswick without Gratz himself behind the pit.
Behind the paywall
What to order, what every influencer gets wrong about barbecue, banana pudding connoisseurship, and an answer to the million dollar question: is Lil’ Nashville a rare great American barbecue spot in London?