The Misadventures of an Unlikely Texas Barbecue Aficionado in London
The worst and best American BBQ in London. Words by Gavin Cleaver. Photos by Michaël Protin.
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This week, Gavin Cleaver guides us through what is, arguably, pound for pound, the most cynical cuisine in London right now: American barbecue.
The Misadventures of an Unlikely Texas Barbecue Aficionado in London, by Gavin Cleaver
The worst (and five best) American barbecue restaurants in London
When I lived in Texas, I knew someone who taught people how to do stand-up comedy. Once, he was hired to go and teach in Moscow – it was, I believe, part of an official government programme to introduce stand-up to Russia. Through a translator, the Russians could understand the building blocks of classic Western joke construction, but there was a problem. Every single time someone got up to tell their jokes, they were compelled to justify why they were on the stage – listing their cars, apartments, academic achievements. No matter how often he told them to drop the justification, his pupils simply would not. If anything, the list got longer. The justification for their authenticity became more important than the act itself.
I tell this anecdote because we are largely here today to talk about authenticity. Here is my pre-joke justification for you reading this: I spent, through a series of frankly unbelievable happenings, several years writing about barbecue for the Dallas Observer (basically the Texas version of the Village Voice). This is despite being from Watford. It originally came about because, while living in Dallas, I wrote one blog about Texas barbecue, posted it to r/dallas and the next day the web editor at the newspaper phoned me to ask me if I’d like a column. Pitching myself as a sort of idiot who liked all barbecue, in what can be quite a fraught local shouting match, I spent the next three years travelling across Texas and writing in all caps about how extremely good everything is. I covered thousands of miles and wrote off thousands of dollars of barbecue on my taxes as “research materials”. Therefore, I would like to think I understand, to some extent, Texas barbecue.
“Friend, let me tell you, American barbecue in London is a fucking shambles”
Friend, let me tell you, American barbecue in London is a fucking shambles. A confused mishmash of words and meats that seemingly no one at any point of the process understands; a multi-million-pound industry trading off consumers’ familiarity with certain terms while offering them bad food in return, a shared cultural language that is pervasive but, shorn of context, completely meaningless to the product you’re eating. It’s all self-aggrandisement and no jokes.
For this article, I was (un)kindly bankrolled to eat across 23 American barbecue restaurants in London1. Initially, I wanted to understand if London tastes were changing barbecue to a cuisine that’s specific to a place in a way it’s done to any number of Asian, Caribbean or African examples. The final pillar of this optimism tumbled recently after I ordered “brisket smoked over hickory and mesquite” (£22) and was served a plate of oven-cooked beef, underlay-esque in texture, covered in beef gravy. It was pure Toby Carvery fare, and that isn’t to knock Toby Carvery, because that restaurant is at least honest about what it does.
And that’s what’s struck me more than the many disappointing meals as the most depressing element of this journey: dishonesty and opportunism. In the last few months, I’ve eaten “smoked ribs” that were oven-cooked. I’ve had lamb that tasted like lighter fluid because they’d used liquid smoke in the rub. I’ve had beef ribs where the rib meat has clearly been detached from the bone, oven-cooked and then put back onto the bone. I’ve eaten brisket that was somehow both smoked and rare in the middle, a balancing act I am completely unable to comprehend. I’ve been served what the menu claimed was “barbecue sauce” on the side but turned out to be Bisto. I’ve had “award-winning smoked chicken wings” that were deep-fried. I’ve picked through enough cloyingly sweet sauce, deployed to cover low-quality meat, to fill a bathtub. I’ve even been to Waltham Cross.
Before Americans start to get smug: Dickey’s, a chain of barbecue restaurants in Texas, is worse than everything I’ve mentioned. But the bait-and-switch at play in so many of London’s “American barbecue restaurants” perfectly illustrates how any old cooked protein is being passed off as the real deal for £20+ a dish and it should, honestly, make you angry.
What has gone wrong?
The fundamentals of what’s wrong with London’s American barbecue are two-fold. The first thing is the cooking. But secondly, there’s the issue of language and, by extension, a misinterpretation which results in a loss of meaning.