Authentic british cuisine
 

Any suggestions about restaurants in London where to taste authentic british cuisine?

Thanks so much in advance!!!

I believe that when I asked the same question here I was advised to travel outside London in order to sample so-called authentic British cuisine.

The Ivy offers wonderful quality food... you can book a late table at very short notice.

Then again, budget/requirements?

We are not looking for luxury or fancy restaurants. We would like to try the British cuisine without incurring in excessive prices.
Thanks again!

Hello mk2...I was wondering if you were still out there somewhere. Fall fashions arriving?

Fall fashions have arrived...

Have been very busy with so many things lately that sadly I haven't found enough time to share my thoughts on all matters travel related.

Back to British cuisine.. It's so hard to define it, fish and chips or a bacon sandwich from a "greasy spoon" (lower class café) is just as british as a Roast at Simpson's. There are so few basic British restaurants left other than the cafés or something "luxury" like The Ivy which is not what you're after.

Simpson's-in-the-Strand does fine roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and so on Many years ago we were taken to a restaurant called Bumbles, over near Victoria, and featured traditional English food, including sticky toffee pudding and bangers and mash.

BEWARE of tourist pubs in crowded, touristic areas - places to avoid are any on any main streets such as near Cvent Garden, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Tower of London. The food will be crap and the prices enormous as, well, its not like theyre counting on return customers. Also the place will be dark and dingy.

Head for a pub with locals in, preferably a 'gastropub'. Fish n chip shops are rare in the centre and if youre heading for a curry (yeah I know its not 'authentic' but its the national dish) don't do Brick Lane anymore but head to Commercial St round the corner.

Canteen in Spitalfields http://www.canteen.co.uk/
has had good reviews.

There's also Roast in Borough Market
http://www.roast-restaurant.com/
The reviews have been mixed for that one, but the menu looks very nice.
Both claim to serve traditional British food with British ingredients.
Another place that serves traditional British food is Inn the Park in St James's Park. The setting is great and I have enjoyed lunch there.
Again, reviews have been mixed. People seem to like the food but criticise the service. By now they may have got their act together.
If you go to Spitalfields, don't forget to visit A Gold http://www.agold.co.uk/
It is a delightful little shop and sells traditional British goodies.
I recommend the plum bread and the Yorkshire brack.

Maggie Jones, in Kensington, also has British fare.

"Authentic British cuisine" is an oxymoron. In fact authenticity in anything is a pretty unBritish concept.

We don't have "authentic" food here. The chips in fish and chips are newcomers (first observed in 1863), a concept imported from France, and first described as "potatoes in the French manner" (yet another example of Americans preserving old-fashioned usages we've moved on from). Utter johnny come latelies compared to curry (widely served in the 18th century, and in dedicated restaurants since 1809)

London's own contribution to awful food - the saveloy that chip shops sell to people who don't like fish - is, like the chips, a French import (the word comes from 'cervelas'). The fast food Londoners really see as their signature local dish - jellied eels, liquor and mash - is mostly sold in shops called Manzi's: not a chain, but restaurants owned by feuding branches of the Manzi clan. And their ancestors certainly weren't fighting to defend our Danish king Harold from his French rival William.

True, England - as distinct from the rest of Britain - had some reputation for eating good beef in the 18th century. But Britain's best known breed, the Aberdeen Angus, dates only to 1835. That's 250 years after the first recorded usage of macaroni in English food.

You can get good, properly aged, roast meat at Simpsons. You can get a decent range of high-quality meat and fish prepared - excellently - in what many people think of as a characteristically English way at St John in Smithfield. But, being authentically British, neither restaurant will care a farthing about the origin of the food or the recipes. A rather less authenhtically British restaurant, Boisdale's in Ecclestone St, has a most foreign obsession with nationality, decorated in ghastlily dowdy tartan and featuring a Scotland-themed menu. But it does sell good haggis.

Many pubs, of course, sell stuff we assemble at home, like shepherd's pie or sausages and mash. But beware anywhere that pretends to specialise in these things.

You'll fare no better in this quest for the nonexistent outside London. You'll find occasional regional specialities, though rarely. Few restaurants in Lancashire sell Lancashire cheese for, though good restaurants throughout the country often sell this, the greatest of all cheese. And some regional specialities aren't in restaurants: the best black pudding is available, hot, in Bury market for example.

The most authentic British recommendation you've had so far is The Ivy. Unpretentious, pleasant food of the sort we make at home. Tempura. Foie gras. Roast poulet des landes. But British only in the sense that it's origin-blind.

If, OTOH, you want to eat what we all do, just find a decent Indian or Chinese.

Not really a restaurant, but you might want to try cornish pasties. West Cornwall Pasty has outlets esp near train stations.

Smiths of Smithfield near Smithfield Market serves good traditional British food, not cheap but quite reasonable by London standard. Try kedgeree (rice and fish dish for breakfast) if you see it on the menu. They also serve british breakfast all-day.
There is a pie shop in Borough Market.

Some of my friends visiting from the US enjoyed Welsh Rarebit at Fortnum & Mason tearoom. (Though IMO, I don't know what's the fuss with cheese toasts).
For fish and chips, two of my favourite places are Seashells and Golden Hind both near Marylebone.
Dover sole is great, if you can get to good fish restaurants (Greens and Sweetings are my fav).
Definitely try traditional puddings (ie desserts), anything sticky, ...or Spotted Dick. Places Below nr St. Paul's does great puds.

I recommend eating a roast dinner one Sunday lunchtime in a good pub. I suggest you buy a good restaurant guide for recommended pubs, as quality can vary dramatically.

Second the recommendation for Smiths of Smithfields - it's a great bar/bistro/restaurant and cocktail lounge arranged over 4 floors and serves great British food from breakfast onwards (even though the chef-owner is an aussie). They source all their meat from the famous meat market opposite. It's also in a great area, untouched by tourism but beloved of design agencies.

http://www.smithsofsmithfield.co.uk/groundA.htm

In that general area the ultimate genuine british cuisine experience is a full english breakfast at the fox and anchor pub in Smithfields meat market. All the meaty bits come from the market, and you can wash it down with a pint of Guiness to put hair on your chest and set you up for the day.

If you fancy a trip to Barnes
The Idle Hour http://www.theidlehour.co.uk/
does a traditional English Sunday lunch.
The meat comes in a roasting tin with all the trimmings, roast spuds and other veg and you carve it yourself.
You can walk it all off with a nice stroll along the Thames path.

>Unpretentious, pleasant food of the sort we make at home. Tempura. Foie gras. Roast poulet des landes.<

Blimey!

((I))

interesting food anthropology...
thought provoking side references as well...
Thanks Flanner.

Is the ploughman's lunch considered "authentic"?

Suzie - got to say that the traditional ploughmans is harder to get now that we're all quaffing foccacia and buffalo mozarella...!

The term "ploughman's lunch" was, I believe, invented in the 1950s when ploughmen had become rare. I'm sure many workmen, including ploughmen, dustmen, rat-catchers, road menders, tram drivers, etc, ate bread and cheese as a simple picnic lunch, but modern versions served with coleslaw and other gunge are certainly not traditional.

Mmm, crumbly Lancashire cheese...

The Harrod's cheese counter's not the same as the Bury market up north (where I get a pastie to eat there and cheese to take home & the GF gets black pudding), but we were able to purchase crumbly Lancashire there. Definitely a favorite.

aaah rats. I thought that if I were a good farmer, doing my good farmer chores, a great piece of cheese, some bread, various pickled things that my "good wife" had set by, would have been as old as history in Britain (and, practically anywhere else in the world...except native americans, as yet, I haven't discovered that they made cheese yet...)

If you want try good British cheese, try either the cheese shop in Neal's Yard (you can smell from half a mile away, esp in summer). They also have a branch in Borough Market, which in itself has several cheese stalls (though some Italian/French) on Fri/Sat.

Thanks so much to all!

Rules Restaurant near Covent Garden

Maggie Jones is good; it's in Kensington.

Two London restaurant sites I use regularly:

http://www.london-eating.co.uk

and

http://www.squaremeal.co.uk

Both are useful in different ways. London-eating gives vox populi views, while SquareMeal is edited/summarised. The latter often gives a link to a restaurant's website, if they have one. I personally find that very useful as you can check sample menus. Both sites allow you to search specifically for British food; keep in mind that "modern British" and "traditional British" meals will be very different experiences.

Since a couple of restaurants recommended in this thread are in my neighbourhood (Clerkenwell/Smithfield/Farringdon), I'm going to stick my restaurant-review hat on and comment:

Smiths of Smithfield is made up of three different restaurants (each with seperate opening hours and menus). The casual cafe on the ground floor serves food in the daytime only (including breakfast and weekendd brunch), the less casual but not formal second floor dining room is lunch and dinner Monday-Saturday, and the top-floor houses the white tablecloth and prime cuts of meat flagship (open for dinner on Sunday nights). Check their website for menus: www.smithsofsmithfield.co.uk

I have to be honest and say that while I periodically visit SOS (especially the ground floor, with jet-lagged visitors in tow) I find the whole place to be style over substance. Food-wise it is mediocre (all floors) and the service is terrible. BUT the aesthetic appeal of the place (exposed brick, hip music) can't be denied. I walk by almost every day the ground floor is always packed.

The oft-heralded St John around the corner is probably the most authentic example you'll find of the (not so) new Brit-food-revival. Not for the culinarily squeamish. They also have a website: http://www.stjohnrestaurant.com/ I've never been to the all-day branch opposite Spitalfields, though I've stopped by and looked at the menu. You have to book well in advance for this one.

Speaking of Spitalfields, I've been to Canteen and I think it was OK. Not at all as good as Giles Coren made it out to be but perfectly good enough for a hungry tourist checking out what E1 has to offer. They seem to run out of things by dinner, so try to go during the day. Another website: http://www.canteen.co.uk/

I'm going to add two more suggestions to the restaurants list that no one has mentioned yet: Richard Corrigan at Lindsay House and The Quality Chop House.

Lindsay House sits in a Georgian townhouse on Romilly Street in Soho. The surrounds are not exactly ye olde (nor is the food) but as a restaurant it's not as stark and relentlessly modern as St John. Both the decor and cuisine are rich, textured, velvety. A meal at the Lindsay House is an (expensive) special treat. Like Rules, they do game in season. Website: http://www.lindsayhouse.co.uk/

Lastly, back in EC1, the Quality Chop House serves up a less formal but reasonably satisfying trad-Brit meal. The menu is mostly what Americans visiting London in search of British cuisine are looking for: fried haddock and chips, a daily meat pie, the full english breakfast, they might even serve eels, I forget. It's my local so I suppose I'm biased but I think the QCH is way way better than Canteen. I didn't always think so, a few years ago the food was heading downhill fast, but they seem to have done a turn-around in the kitchen about a year and a half ago.
Website: http://www.qualitychophouse.co.uk/index.htm

Be aware that gastropubs a) often require reservations, especially the popular ones and b) don't necessarily serve British food. In fact regular old pubs can be serving up Thai food, so make sure you check the board outside. Fancy-a-pint (http://www.fancyapint.com/) is another useful tool, though not as easy to navigate/search as the two restaurant sites I listed above.

Happy hunting (and eating)!

-mef