British Food Is Here
There is an art to a proper meat pie, according to the Seattle chef and butcher Kevin Smith. The American pot pie frustrates him because it lets the pot do the heavy lifting. “The real way of doing it, for me, is to make a freestanding pie,” Smith says. The pastry should hold itself up, a technique cooks in England have honed over centuries. “That is so much more theatrical.”
Those meat pies — densely packed with beef shank in Guinness gravy, or chile tinged-lamb korma — anchor the menu at Little Beast, Smith’s new English pub. For Smith, who also runs the butcher shop Beast and Cleaver and the restaurants the Peasant and the Beastro inside it, the venture marks a return to his South London upbringing. “It’s very, very classic English food,” he says. Both London and Seattle can be cold, gray, and gloomy. In both cities, one needs food that “warms the bones,” he says, and coziness is the impulse of the moment.
Smith’s goal is to truly recreate a quintessential English pub. This, to him, meant rustic, a little dark, not at all fancy — just the kind of place where people can “come in and sling their coat over the back of a chair,” Smith says. So far, his homey pub has been a hit: Eater Seattle named Little Beast its Restaurant of the Year in 2025.
It’s no longer time to speculate whether the British are coming; they’re very much here. Like Little Beast, British-style pubs and country restaurants are cropping up across the United States, with hotspots including Wilde’s in Los Angeles, Dingles Public House in San Francisco, the Bell in New Orleans (“an easygoing neighborhood joint with an English accent”), and the Chumley House in Fort Worth, Texas. In Chicago, the new Piccadilly Pub fashions itself as a “neighborhood chippy,” and in Philadelphia, the chef Ange Branca, whose Malaysian restaurant Kampar has been closed since last February due to a fire, recently ran Mod Spuds, a pop-up that served loaded English “jacket potatoes.”
In New York City, chef Ed Szymanski has built some of the city’s most solid new restaurants around his own homesickness, including the English seafood restaurant Dame and the meatier “English bistro” Lord’s; chef Jess Shadbolt will soon unveil Dean’s, a British seafood restaurant inspired by her seaside hometown. And recently, sticky toffee pudding, one of England’s most popular desserts, has also served as a major source of inspiration for pastry chefs across the country.
It’s natural for any cuisine that’s been maligned in the global sphere to want a redemption arc, and for so long, British food has been the butt of jokes: mushy, beige, brown, bland — the kind of sadness that writer Aisling McCrea once ascribed to British people being “too repressed to cook food correctly.” For rising star NYC pastry chef Lilli Maren, who grew up in London, the goal of her work is updating British pastry classics “so that they’re actually good,” as she puts it on her Substack publication The Buttery. “I think the [bad] reputation comes from the pure fact that British food has to be tasted: It’s food that’s meant to be eaten, not to be looked at,” Maren says. Beige and brown mush is “bad PR” for its “beautiful flavors.”
Now, young chefs like herself, Maren says, are having a “similar journey” of realizing the “trove” of delicious food in their history and wanting to show it off with personality, a sense of humor, and, yes, better visuals, too.
Follow a few young British chefs on social media and you’ll quickly start to wonder why the cuisine has a bad name. Through short-form videos, places like Manchester’s Onda Pasta Bar (of viral “tiramisu drawer” fame) and London’s Fallow have become as much media brands as they are restaurants. From chefs-turned-creators, you’ll find bangers and mash that look undeniably delicious, roasted chickens swimming in luxurious drippings, and gravy-filled meat pies laden with so much butter that there’s no way they could be bad — lest we forget that butter formed the foundation of London chef Thomas Straker’s global ascent.
“These people are generally broadcasting to a British audience,” says the London-based restaurant critic Jonathan Nunn, who runs the publication Vittles. Particularly, that’s “an East London, South London audience who are very plugged into what is going on in food culture internationally and what is going on in London restaurants, and wants to replicate those things in their homes in a way that doesn’t really look like dishes their parents made but are still recognizably British dishes.”
According to Nunn, this social media moment is British people hyping up British food for British people. That this might influence the perception of British food to non-British people “is just a byproduct of that.” As “strange” as it is to think of British food as “exotic,” he says, “I think Americans are fascinated by [British food] in the same way anyone would be fascinated by anything ‘exotic.’”
Perhaps part of the appeal of British food in the U.S. right now is simply that it’s just different enough to be newly compelling. Fish sticks aren’t particularly en vogue, but good fish and chips? That pulls in an “overwhelming” demand, as Szymanski learned during his pandemic pop-up. Lending an air of intrigue, it’s on the menu at Wilde’s as “battered skate & mint.”
In recent years, American dining culture has largely been filtered through the lens of the French bistro, so maybe the rising English pub moment is an indicator that we’ve become bistro-ed out. The “new American” restaurant, the French bistro, and the modern English pub — these don’t offer wildly different food so much as they offer a sense of a change of environs. As concepts, they’re familiar enough to be easy, different enough to be destinations. “I think it’s very relatable [food],” Smith says, adding that “the food that people think is bad over here, as in English food, is actually what a lot of American food is based on.” Making British food for American audiences requires some concessions though: That’s why Lord’s also serves a Welsh rarebit burger and sticky toffee pudding pancakes.
All this recent Anglophilia has yet to even touch on the incoming British imports. Straker, who runs the London restaurants Straker’s and Acre, is set to open a spot in NYC soon, where London chefs keep hosting residencies (recently, Jeremy King and Emily Dobbs).
Iranian restaurant Berenjak came to the U.S. via LA this fall, and Indian restaurant Dishoom is planning a NYC expansion, following a wildly successful pop-up at Pastis last summer. Gymkhana, which is inspired by the “elite clubs” of India, opened in Las Vegas late last year, and the lavish Punjabi restaurant Ambassadors Clubhouse is set to open soon in NYC. “These are not small, quirky British restaurants coming in,” Szymanski notes. “This is like Coke and Pepsi.”
It’s promising, though, that these specific establishments make up London’s new big-name exports, according to Nunn, as they help create a more well-rounded image of the British food scene. While London’s contributions to the U.S. have historically centered around the kind of St. John-inflected nose-to-tail gastropub, as reflected in stateside openings Little Beast and Lord’s, Dishoom and Gymkhana represent the essential nature of British Indian food.
“That’s as part of modern British food culture as anything else,” Nunn says. “That kind of hybridity being accepted as part of British cuisine on a global level, and being recognized as such, is a good thing.”
from Eater https://ift.tt/kgHIS8a
