Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite. Joanna Blythman

Harden’s London Restaurants guide: ‘As the capital of a country which, for at least two centuries, has had no particular reputation for gastronomy, London’s attractions are rarely indigenous. By and large, only tourists look for “English” restaurants.’ Traditionally, Britain has a pub culture, rather than a restaurant culture, which is why, according to Harden’s, there are ‘very few traditional restaurants of note and even fewer which can be recommended’.

      The nearest you might get to most people’s idea of traditional British food would be Rules in London’s Covent Garden, a venerable establishment commended by the Tatler restaurant guide in 2005 as the place ‘to impress visiting American friends’ with its ‘age-old but not old-fashioned dishes in an atmosphere of Edwardian exuberance’. Diners at Rules can savour dishes such as dressed crab, smoked venison with juniper, roast Lincolnshire rabbit with bacon and black pudding, leeks Mornay, steak, kidney and oyster pudding, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. Rules, remarked Field magazine, ‘fills a vital role in educating an increasingly ignorant public who have lost touch with what their countryside can provide’.

      Otherwise, apart from brewery-owned chains of provincial hotels which serve up something approximating to the traditional Sunday lunch ‘roast dinner’, most serious and ambitious chefs prefer to describe their cookery as ‘modern British’. The ‘modern’ delineates what they serve from the negative connotations attached to ‘British’ and leaves ample room for manoeuvre when it comes to using foreign cooking techniques and ingredients. Fergus Henderson, chef-owner of St John restaurant in London, who serves dishes that might reasonably be construed as British, such as nettle soup, ox heart and chips, and marrow bones with parsley salad, avoids any ‘British’ tag. ‘I prefer to see myself as a modernist who happens to be cooking good, indigenous food,’ he has said. Gary Rhodes, the chef widely credited with promoting the joys of traditional British food, called his television series and book New British Classics – surely a contradiction in terms – but the ‘new’ in the title distances it from unreconstructed ‘British’ cookery.

      Just how British are the most highly-rated ‘modern British’ restaurants? Many could just as easily be categorized as French. Naturally, they use the finest British ingredients, but their cooking techniques and kitchen organization pay homage to Escoffier. Chef Tom Aikens was reportedly ‘quite miffed’ when the Independent on Sunday’s food writer, Sybil Kapoor, said that she considered his Michelin-starred food British. He himself saw his food as ‘more French than anything’. In the top British kitchens, a Franco-British patois is frequently the order of the day with diligent ‘sous’ and ‘commis’ chefs barking out ‘Oui, chef!’ countless times in one service. Their menus are dotted with French words such as ‘nage’, ‘jus’, ‘velouté’, ‘tranche’ and ‘confit’ for which British chefs can find no suitable simple English translation.

      The Good Food Guide 2006 awarded its top rating to four restaurants – Gordon Ramsay, the Fat Duck, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Winteringham Fields – all of which are essentially French in approach. But it also acclaimed the emergence of ‘Food Britannia’, which it characterized as more chefs using local and seasonal produce and boasting about it. The guide commended restaurants such as the Three Fishes, at Mitton in Lancashire, for serving dishes such as heather-reared Bowland lamb, and Lancashire hotpot with pickled red cabbage, and the Buttery in Glasgow for its Isle of Mull mussels with Finnan haddock and bacon. This encouraging trend was instantly seized on by The Times as more evidence of Britain’s new, reformed food culture. ‘No longer will the maitre d’ at Maxi be able to curl his lip in quite such supercilious disdain at the mention of British cuisine … The Good Food Guide has made it official: British food, like British art, music and sport, is now at Europe’s cutting edge.’ A more circumspect conclusion, against the larger backdrop of Britain’s restaurant and catering industry, would be that native food is still a rarefied minority experience amongst British catering establishments. A quick head count of British restaurant menus will reveal thousands of establishments that continue to serve ‘roasted Mediterranean vegetables’ made using Dutch hydroponic vegetables as a winter staple, or seared, imported Sri Lankan tuna as the fish of the day, in preference to the local foods on their doorstep.

      Britain’s accommodating, some might say globalized, attitude to food is reflected in the capital’s restaurant scene which is rich in flavours and techniques that are not indigenous. London is one the world’s most diverse and cosmopolitan cities with an array of eating-out possibilities – everything from Peruvian, Ethiopian and Indonesian through to Korean, Ghanaian and Afghani – that reflects its lively, multicultural personality. ‘Where London does score – and score magnificently – is the range and quality it offers of other national styles of cooking. Always an entrepot, London is now a culinary melting pot too: in terms of scale and variety, its only obvious competitor is New York,’ says Harden’s London Restaurants. Outside the metropolis, Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants throw a much-needed lifeline to the cause of restauration on every small shopping parade and obscure outpost throughout the British Isles, where otherwise there would be little else in the air apart from the distinctively British odour of deep-fat frying.

      Just how good or representative of their parent cuisines many British ‘ethnic’ restaurants are is a moot point, but we love to talk them up anyway. ‘I would argue that in London you will find better Thai, Indian, Chinese, Italian and French cooking than you would in the indigenous countries,’ proclaimed Rod Liddle. This is a ludicrous proposition but it exemplifies the new-found British ability to pontificate confidently on matters gastronomic from a basis of colonial-style ignorance. It is true that many Indian restaurants have now ditched their flock wallpaper 1960s curry-house image and adopted classier names that evoke tourist board images of India. Some are excellent, but many more continue to serve little more than pre-cooked cubes of meat in a ‘variety’ of chameleon sauces derived from a small number of bought-in, factory-made spice pastes, served with chemically-coloured rice. Many of these meals are cooked by the children of first generation immigrants who consider themselves British first and foremost. Their appreciation of mother-country cooking is often limited. In the biggest British cities, where there is a local population of Chinese extraction, one can find restaurants serving quite authentic Chinese food. Commonly, these restaurants operate two distinct menus. One is written in English and offers Westernized ‘Chinese’ staples designed to please the British market. The hallmarks here are super-real flavours based on megadoses of salt, sugar and vinegar, and lots of deep-frying. Another, written in Chinese, offers an authentic, healthy repertoire of traditional Chinese dishes considered to be too real and too daunting for the British: everything from fish-head soup through braised chicken feet to rice congee. British diners are rarely able to eat from a true Chinese menu unless they are fortunate enough to speak a Chinese dialect fluently or are in the same party as a Chinese friend. Generally, the Chinese community likes to keep real Chinese food to itself. Staff will positively steer non-Chinese customers away from more authentic dishes because they worry that they will not go down well. Timothy Mo’s novel, Sour Sweet, which follows two first generation Chinese immigrants, Chen and Lily, who set up a takeaway restaurant in Greater London, gave an insight into the thinking behind it.

      ‘The food they sold, certainly wholesome, nutritious, colourful, even tasty in its way, had been researched by Chen. It bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine. They served from a stereotyped menu, similar to countless other establishments in the UK. The food was, if nothing else, thought Lily, provenly successful: English tastebuds must be as degraded as their care of their parents; it could, of course, be part of a scheme of cosmic repercussion. “Sweet and sour pork” was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the consumer the next day. Chen knew because