Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite

For decades, British consumers have been exhorted by numerous food industry marketing bodies such as the Meat and Livestock Commission and the National Farmers Union to support British farmers, but this has fallen mainly on deaf ears. In countries with a thriving food culture, consumers feel connected to those who produce food, not least because many of them have a producer in their extended family or circle of friends. In Britain, on the other hand, few consumers have any connection with farming or primary food production, largely because it has now become so intensive, industrial and factory-based, that fewer and fewer people are engaged in it. The vast majority of Britons are divorced from the countryside and know little or nothing about what it can produce. Indeed, the urban masses tend to see farmers in an unsympathetic light as potential chisellers and fiddlers of European Union subsidies, people who are not to be trusted. Consequently, they do not get a sympathetic hearing.

In recent years, a slight but significant resurgence of interest in smaller-scale, less industrialized food amongst opinion formers has opened up a more positive dialogue between producers and consumers. In 2002, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, Richard Burge (#litres_trial_promo), launched an initiative called British Food Fort-night (#litres_trial_promo) and took the opportunity to appeal to consumers, using the term ‘producers’ rather than ‘farmers’, and emphasizing pleasure rather than patriotic duty: ‘The time has come to stand up for British food and its producers! We have to remind consumers of the great pleasure which comes from eating locally-grown, high-quality foods, and just how important it is to the British countryside at this time that we eat its produce.’

Now an annual event each October, British Food Fortnight aims to make everyone in the UK more aware of the diversity and quality of home-grown, locally-sourced British produce. Consumers are urged to seek out seasonal produce, cook a British meal for friends and explore British regional cooking. This may be a surprisingly tall order: according to a survey carried out by the Institute of Grocery Distribution (#litres_trial_promo) just before British Food Fortnight 2005, only one in five Britons will go out of their way to buy British food if it means paying more for it, while over half of all shoppers polled said that they didn’t care where their food came from. The Institute pointed out that while 87 per cent of respondents considered farming to be an important part of British heritage, the challenge was to translate this patriotism into purchasing British food because Britons did not generally ‘see the connection with food production and the countryside’.

By 2005, British Food Fortnight was still being run as a cottage industry. Despite pressure on the government from both Houses of Parliament, the media at large and the farming press, the government’s contribution was actually reduced in 2005 from some £46,000 to £45,000. The event went ahead on a paltry budget of £108,000, cobbled together from sponsorship from the Nationwide building society, retailers Booths and Budgens, and other supportive organizations. ‘The sad reality,’ commented organizer Alexia Robinson, (#litres_trial_promo) ‘is that there is no overall body representing British food producers and, therefore, there is no consensus, no unified marketing and no easy mechanism for raising funding on behalf of the industry as a whole … Asking the public to buy British food because they feel sorry for farmers will not cut it.’

As always in Britain, any attempt to have small food businesses – or anything that smacks of the artisan – taken seriously turns out to be a lonely battle. The relevant government departments in successive government administrations have put their efforts into pleasing the captains of the processed food industry, and have continued to dismiss small-scale food producers as marginal – and therefore irrelevant – to the country’s food effort. There is a persistent strand in British regulatory thinking that views the existence of anything akin to peasant farming as retrograde because it might be taken as an indicator of economic backwardness.

More recently, small food projects have begun to attract a little support from government and local authority departments charged with regeneration and tourism. Some city centre management teams are beginning to wake up to the fact that independent shops and farmers’ markets can increase the number of people who use the town centre by making them more interesting and lively places to visit. In British cities dominated by supermarket monoculture, a thriving business has sprung up in ‘Continental markets’ – imported, highly stereotyped, usually French-themed markets – because they appear to inject some gastronomic life. Tourism authorities have latched on to the idea of culinary tourism and have begun to promote small food operations, such as farm shops, that help create a new, more favourable image of Britain in the visitor’s mind. But, again, this new-found enthusiasm does not stem from a belief in good food for good food’s own sake, but derives from the realization that it can bring other social and economic benefits.

Indeed, small-scale British food is in danger of turning into a heritage industry. Stately homes, garden centres, museum and farm shops are filling their shelves with edible souvenirs made to an antique recipe – real or imagined – loading their shelves with jars of jams, jellies, chutneys, sweets and endless cakes and biscuits, masquerading as something you might pick up at a Women’s Institute market. Most such enterprises are run by well-intentioned people who are naive enough to believe that by buying local and British, this is automatically some guarantee of quality. In fact, there is a danger that purchasing home-produced food is being transformed into a quaint, nostalgic Sunday afternoon leisure activity instead of a viable everyday alternative to the tedium and uniformity of the supermarket. The local food shops that actually improve shopping choice are the small minority that take risks with really fresh meat, fish, and seasonal fruit and vegetables; these are places where you can buy the raw ingredients for a meal, not just a jar of redcurrant and rose petal jelly for your elderly auntie.

Medium-sized food companies, struggling to make ends meet because of the crippling low returns they receive from their supermarket masters, are keen as English mustard to come up with new ‘British’ products that cash in on the vogue for British food. Large industrial creameries are inventing more profitable ‘speciality’ cheeses, basically the same old push-button cheese, tarted up in gimmicky forms with stripes and swirls of colour. Take your pick from white Stilton with a raspberry and strawberry ripple, added ‘orange crumble’, apricots or cranberries, or rubbery cheddar with pizza, ‘Mexican’, or even tandoori flavour.

At the same time, the ‘Big Food’ interests that are inimical to the development of any genuine grass roots British food culture based on diversity in retailing and food production are also getting in on the ‘Fly the Flag for British Food’ act as a self-promotional tool. In the autumn of 2005, a government quango, the Sustainable Farming and Food Implementation Group, organized a conference to discuss what might be done to reconnect British consumers with British food. The event was chaired by Tesco’s director of corporate affairs. Many farmers blame this retailer for the downturn in their fortunes because it demands such low prices from its suppliers that it makes food production unsustainable for all but the very largest farmers and growers. The Tenant Farmers’ Association refused to attend the event because of Tesco’s involvement. ‘Tesco is simply not interested in allowing farmers to communicate with consumers,’ said the Association’s chief executive, George Dunn. (#litres_trial_promo)

Shortly after this event, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s ran a ‘Taste of Britain’ (#litres_trial_promo) competition in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph to find the best suppliers of British food and drink. This provided another platform for exaggerated claims about the UK’s food revival. ‘British food and drink has gone through somewhat of a renaissance in recent years, after decades of ridicule from our European contemporaries,’ read Sainsbury’s advertorial, ‘so much so that we can now compete with the best of them within the gastronomic world.’ It also gave Sainsbury’s a chance to associate itself with Britain’s struggling small producers. All British supermarket chains now seize every opportunity to be seen hand in hand with these ‘food heroes’ because they occupy the moral high ground in the eyes of British consumers – even if few of us actively support them with our purchases. At the same time as this competition was running, farmers across the UK – led by the campaign group Farmers For Action (#litres_trial_promo) – were either throwing out or giving away their produce in protest against the unfair trading practices that had led to hundreds of farms going out of business while supermarket profits soared.

On paper, it is possible to mount a reasonably convincing argument that in the last few years, we have moved towards a clearer, saner definition of what British food should mean; a vision of a new, modern British food culture. The buzz words are now ‘local’ and ‘small-scale’; farmers’ markets go from strength to strength; more towns have a specialist food shop selling some handmade, regional food; organic box schemes have waiting lists; increasing numbers of artisans are scraping a living by dealing direct with the public using mail order. But these are little green shoots in an otherwise bleak and homogenous British food landscape where globalized industrial food and supermarket monoculture is the order of the day.

A tiny, dedicated band of Britons actively seeks out and encourages high-quality, independent, locally-produced food. Such people are probably even more committed to their cause than food-loving citizens in other countries who tend to take the availability of good food for granted. A slightly bigger fringe in Britain sees such food as an interesting and desirable minor accessory to the main business of shopping in supermarkets and living on a mass-produced, industrial diet. As the food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis (#litres_trial_promo) put it:

‘We’re in a very different place in this country, food-wise, from where we were 20 years ago. And it’s mostly disadvantageous. Industrialization of food production, the supermarkets persuading us that it’s OK to eat things that have been imported thousands of miles with no regard to seasonality … we’re totally losing our heritage. There’s a dwindling band of people growing rare apple breeds or planting traditional tomatoes, but they’re regarded as rather eccentric.’

Our attitude to food in Britain has certainly moved on, but it has not improved.

4 RENAISSANCE RESTAURANTS (#ulink_8259fc79-79c3-5f43-a1ff-f3dcb7c42afe)

A loose coalition of interest groups in Britain likes to suggest that British cuisine has been so thoroughly overhauled and improved that it can now be considered as one of the most dynamic and exciting in the world. This is a rainbow alliance, composed of Fly the Flag patriots, perpetual optimists who believe that our tendency to self-deprecation is more worrying than our cooking, Little Englanders who resent the mere suggestion that Johnny Foreigner might eat better than we do, and food processors, restaurateurs, hoteliers and assorted tourism experts who have spent too much time reading their own marketing propaganda. People attempting to mount a convincing case for Britain’s supposedly rehabilitated food culture have become adept at drawing a veil over the cooking (or lack of it) that goes on in the domestic sphere. They prefer not to focus on the nation’s growing daily dependence on push-button industrial food and quickly skip to what appears to be firmer ground – Britain’s Great Restaurant Renaissance. Where Britain once had to cringe when its food was under discussion, nowadays its restaurants have allowed it to assume a cocky swagger.

At some point in the 1990s, London began to be hailed (#litres_trial_promo) – in Britain at least – as ‘the restaurant capital of the world’, a grandiose claim attributed to design guru and restaurateur, Sir Terence Conran. It is a theme to which many people, some with vested interests, others without, have since warmed. The small, London-based Restaurant magazine (#litres_trial_promo) picked up the ball and ran with it in 2002 when it took it upon itself to run a competition to judge nothing less ambitious than ‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’. (#litres_trial_promo) Now held on an annual basis, it habitually locates British restaurants at the forefront of global gastronomy, thereby generating fulsome media coverage. In 2005, the Fat Duck, run by the much-lauded chef Heston Blumenthal, scooped both the ‘Best in the World’ and ‘Best in Europe’ awards. British restaurants in general were awarded 14 of the 50 illustrious slots, with 11 of these in the capital. England had four restaurants in the top ten, France just one and Italy none. According to its editor the awards represented a combination of ‘commonsense’ and the considered, informed opinions of ‘our contacts in the industry’, some 500 judges in all – chefs, food journalists, people from cook schools and academies and top companies. Their precise identity and nationality, however, remains confidential to Restaurant magazine.

Not everyone was convinced by this top 50. Irish chef Richard Corrigan (#litres_trial_promo) dared to suggest that Britain did not deserve to be judged any better than France, Italy or Spain. ‘There is a slight bias in the list,’ he said. ‘You have to take it with a very big pinch of salt.’ Yet this vision of Britain as being in the vanguard of world restaurant culture has become firmly embedded. It feeds our almost pathological need to shake off our Bad Food Britain image and display some good food credentials on a world stage while simultaneously rubbing our rivals’ noses in it. ‘The world has had enough of red-checked table-cloths and fat cheerful men called Carlo ladling gloops of choleric ragout atop plates of overcooked pasta,’ wrote Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times. (#litres_trial_promo) ‘It has wearied very quickly too of the rough‘n’ready Piedmont and Tuscan peasant cuisines that kept our increasingly capricious palates briefly engaged in the 1990s. And meanwhile, classic French cooking with its epic hauteur has become about as fashionable as Marshal Pétain or Johnny Halliday, which is why the French are desperately trying to reinvent their whole cuisine.’

Britain is now convinced that London is firmly ensconced as the planet’s restaurant capital. ‘The city fizzes with gastronomic challenge and enthusiastic, knowledgeable customers,’ wrote the London Evening Standard’s highly respected restaurant critic, Fay Maschler. (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, London does have some exceptionally fine restaurants with serious, accomplished chefs who would attract recognition anywhere, but any suggestion that they constitute the glittering pinnacle of a solid, broad-based restaurant culture, rather than beacons of hope in a predominantly bleak British food landscape, amounts to wishful thinking.

Tellingly, it is hard to think of any restaurant of note in the UK that willingly brands itself as ‘British’ pure and simple, because of the negative connotations that adjective has when attached to the noun ‘cookery’. In the words of the Harden’s London Restaurants (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), remarked Field (#litres_trial_promo) 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, (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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. (#litres_trial_promo) 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. (#litres_trial_promo) 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, (#litres_trial_promo) 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 he tried some and almost fainted with shock the morning after, fearing some frightful internal haemorrhaging … “Spare ribs” (whatever they were) also seemed popular. So were spring rolls, basically a Northerner’s snack, which Lily parsimoniously filled mostly with beansprouts. All to be packed in the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to be removed and consumed statutorily off-premises. The only authentic dish they served was rice, the boiled kind; the fried rice they sold with peas and ham bore no resemblance to the chowfaan Lily cooked for themselves …’

Although Britain’s willingness to embrace world cuisine – albeit in bogus forms – is admirable, the huge success of non-British restaurants in the UK reflects the relative weakness of our indigenous cuisine. The natives of Bremen, Bruges, Bratislava, Bologna, Barcelona and Bordeaux feel less need to eat foreign food and remain largely immune to its charms quite simply because they are more content with their own home-grown offering. For them, a restaurant specializing in a foreign cuisine represents a potentially interesting novel addition to native cuisine, but it is not a substitute for it.

Because there is nothing much to defend in the way of a British restaurant tradition, our new-found claim to gastronomic distinction lies in our eclecticism, our willingness to break rules and invent new traditions. We have no baby to throw out with the bath water. We start with a clean sheet of ideas and a healthy openness to ingredients and culinary approaches from all over the world. But the pitfalls are obvious – a mongrel mish-mash of misunderstood foreign cuisine, cooked by amateur chefs and served to naive and inexperienced diners. As Jonathan Meades, (#litres_trial_promo) the most authoritative of all recent British restaurant critics, pointed out, this is not a recipe for success, but a culinary Tower of Babel:

‘Instead of repairing or reinventing its own cooking, it has crazes: French, Thai, Swedish, Cantonese … There is no kitchen in the world that is safe from the depredations of the British cook exhibiting both a denial of confidence in national identity and the dumb conviction that the grass is always greener.’

Britain’s globetrotting culinary tastes reach their nadir in the country’s secondary cities, where restaurants strive to show sophistication by their bold synthesis of diverse ingredients and cooking styles. Here is a typical menu from a ‘modern British’ brasserie in one of Britain’s largest cities:

STARTERS

Thai fishcakes with sweet chilli sauceFrench onion soup and toasted cheeseBlackened Cajun chicken Caesar saladChicken liver parfait, toast and spiced fig chutneySeared scallops, sunblush tomato, potato and rocket saladMoules marinièresKing prawn tempura and ponzu sauceRoast field mushroom bruschetta, pesto and parmesanSeared squid with rocket, chilli and limeCrispy duck, beansprouts and watercress with soy and

sesame dressingTiger prawn salad with mango

MAIN COURSES

Shepherd’s pie and peasCalves liver and bacon, mash and onion gravyTuna burger with wasabi mayonnaise and chilli friesBraised lamb shank with mint, garlic and root

vegetable couscousFive-spiced duck with sweet potatoes, pak choi and

shitake mushroomsSteak fritesNasi Goreng with roast chicken supremeSalmon fishcake with spinach, lemon and parsley

sauceFish and chips with mushy peasSeabass fillet with hot and sweet sour vegetable

noodlesSmoked haddock, mash, poached egg and Mornay

sauceRisotto with sweetcorn, peas and mushroomsRoasted shellfish spaghetti with lemon, garlic and

parsleyJumbo macaroni three cheeses, roast tomato and toastRigatoni, tomato, spicy sausage and mozzarella bakeRed onion and mulled cheddar tartCoq au vin

DESSERTS

Tarte Tatin and vanilla ice creamSticky toffee pudding and custardWhite chocolate chip brownie with chocolate sauceLemon cheesecake with strawberriesWarm chocolate brownie with vanilla ice creamPannacotta with spiced poached pear

If they were so minded, diners in this type of establishment could construct a meal with some territorial integrity – French onion soup, say, followed by steak frites and tarte Tatin. They might head East and feast on tiger prawn salad with mango and five-spiced duck. In an Italophile mood they could tuck into roast field mushroom bruschetta, rigatoni and pannacotta. But more than likely, most British diners will find themselves eating a combination like prawn tempura and ponzu sauce, followed by risotto, followed by chocolate brownie. In other words, it is a mongrel menu that cannibalizes world cuisine and spawns meals that do not gel into a coherent whole because they lack any sound unifying principle.

The existence of such menus might cause the trusting diner to suppose that the kitchen has mastered a repertoire of diverse skills and tastes, when, in reality, these are far beyond the reach of the average second division city bistro or brasserie. Nonetheless, many British people will turn up and pay for this type of package and go away pleased with what they are given because they lack the experience to know whether of its type it is any good or not. Once again, we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage by overlooking what is familiar and on our doorstep, instead dabbling with exotica we rarely understand. Italians have strong ideas about what constitutes a good risotto. Indians recognize a fine masala dosa when they see one. Japanese people know when their sashimi is truly fresh and refuse to settle for less. Back in Britain, any undertrained, ill-equipped outfit can trade on the advantage that if it serves foreign food, then few people – the chefs included – will be equipped to judge it. It is a case of the blind leading the blind. Bill Knott, editor of Caterer and Hotelkeeper, (#litres_trial_promo) likened it to a game of Chinese whispers where the original message gets more and more distorted in the transmission.

‘The average menu [in the UK], even in restaurants proudly describing themselves as “modern British”, is written in a curious mixture of French, Italian, Spanish and just about any other language that doesn’t involve hieroglyphs. Even worse, many of the foreign terms used are thoroughly inaccurate and deeply misleading. Millefeuille of aubergine, cappuccino of white beans, chicory tarte Tatin … the game of gastronomic Chinese whispers, in which a modish, foreign-sounding dish goes through so many incarnations that it becomes completely meaningless, is all the rage.’

Study the restaurant reviews in national newspapers and you will notice that some 80–90 per cent consist of restaurants in central London. Indeed, restaurant critics frequently get it in the neck from readers for overlooking restaurants outside the metropolis. Claims that newspapers are London-centric in this respect do have some basis, but it overlooks the plight of the British restaurant reviewer. Although it is entertaining to read the occasional excoriating review, readers mainly look for recommendations from critics. The minute they travel beyond the M4, however, the critics have a problem because there are simply not enough establishments worth writing about, and those that are have already been reviewed ten times over. So the critic faces an invidious choice: step outside London and face the risk of having to write a negative review of the ‘elitist London critic attacks popular local institution’ variety – certain to incense the locals – or leave well alone and court criticism for lazily ignoring ‘The Regions’.

The Observer’s restaurant reviewer, Jay Rayner, (#litres_trial_promo) attracted a large mail bag, many letters using language ‘ripe enough to make a navvy blush’, amounting to ‘string the bastard up’, when he wrote a scathing review of a Desperate Dan-style pub lunch in the West Midlands wherein he lamented the absence of decent restaurants in the area. ‘I sit down with guidebooks and scan furiously, hoping, with each new study, that somehow, something might have changed since the last time I looked. I scan the net. I beg for recommendations. But nothing.’ In response to the heated post bag, Mr Rayner countered accusations of London-centrism by clarifying that he had in fact reviewed establishments from the Isle of Wight to Edinburgh and from the west of Devon to the easternmost tip of Norfolk, and he remained recalcitrant.

‘London really is the best place in Britain in which to eat out, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. There are so many more restaurants here. The food is better. The variety is better. The inventiveness is greater … I’m not claiming that it is always the best value … Nor am I claiming that there are no good restaurants outside London. Obviously there are. Certain cities – Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh – are serious contenders. But still nothing matches the capital’s range. One virtue of a crowded city like London is that it forces everyone to raise their game.’