From pub grub to posh nosh, London’s chefs are rewriting the recipe book
Earlier this year we wrote about the emergence of Celtic food in London, with the opening of Welsh cafe Bara and the rising popularity of spice bags and Irish deli food. In that piece, we mentioned that it’s not difficult to find traditional British food, like Sunday roasts, fish & chips, pie & mash, fry ups and curry, in London. The city is home to old-school institutions like Rules, Wiltons and Sweetings and contemporary icons like Quality Chop House, St. JOHN and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, doing their take on long-established dishes (like steak & kidney pudding and treacle tart) and even adding new ones (roast bone marrow and parsley salad and meat fruit) to the city’s culinary pantheon.
Heston may be closing his two star restaurant, which is famously influenced by historical British recipes, next year but we’ve got a new crop of openings taking inspo from these isles. And we’re talking about more than simply using local and seasonal British produce, something that a swathe of London restaurants do irrespective of cuisine. These restaurants are offering their interpretation of British dining traditions.
Sally Abé, who’s had plenty of experience with British food having led kitchens at The Harwood Arms, The Pem and The Bull in Charlbury, is taking a leaf out of Heston’s book for the menu at her new British bistro Teal. She’s rolling back the years with her version of a Victorian classic, the penny lick ice cream, with dishes like lockets savoury (watercress, stilton and pear on toast), angels and devils on horseback (oysters and prunes wrapped in bacon), brawn Scotch egg, onion & seaweed broth with barley brioche and Marmite butter, and rhubarb jubilee also on offer.
Another new British bistro is opening in East London – on Old Street, so not that far from Abé London Fields spot – as Nest is being flipped into Tavern. The Nest and Restaurant St Barts team has long had great relationships with British suppliers like Keltic Seafare and David Lowrie for seafood; Swaledale, Udale, and Alternative Meats for meat; and Shrub for seasonal vegetables, but now it’s preparing to showcase the produce in a more distinctly British way. The menu at Tavern will feature bar snacks like hogget scrumpets with mint and Tavern sausage with curry sauce, plus Chunion puffs (that’s a cheese and onion filled gougère), nose-to-tail Tamworth pork with cider mustard sauce, and Welsh wagyu rib of beef with marrow and Dorset snails. With Abé also cooking a bone marrow and snails dish at Teal, are London chefs reclaiming snails from the French?
The headline British opening of the year so far has to be Jeremy King’s revival of Simpson’s in the Strand. One of London’s most storied institutions, Simpson’s first opened as a coffee shop and chess club in 1828 before becoming known for classic British food and tableside carving. It was one of the first UK restaurants to win a Michelin star in 1974 and welcomed everyone from Charles Dickens to Winston Churchill to Audrey Hepburn through its doors. Closed during the pandemic, it struggled to find a way to operate under the ever-changing lockdown restrictions, and auctioned off a load of assets, including the famous silver carving trolleys, in 2023.
Thankfully that wasn’t the end of a near 200-year story as King stepped in to breathe new life into the old dog. He’s created two dining rooms, the grand cafe-style Romano’s and the Grand Divan, doing traditional English fare – we’re talking half pint of prawns, bubble and squeak, boiled ham and parsley sauce, pies & puddings of the day (the beef & snail combo makes yet another appearance), roast rib of beef carved from the trolley, and rhubarb & apple crumble – and it’s been a big hit.
With the Cloth crew taking over Simpson’s Tavern, another of London’s legendary restaurants, and turning it into a chophouse later this year, and nostalgic puds like Arctic roll and jelly & ice cream hitting the menu of the Papi team’s new pub, British grub is getting all the love.
