Welcome back. The Tuesday and Wednesday installments of this week were written while I was on the train traveling from Bath to London or when I was on the plane, flying from Heathrow to Dulles after Pro Tour: London. Minus the sledgehammer to the face that was the conversion rate from dollars to pounds, I really enjoyed my time in England. If I had infinite dollars, I’d gladly go visit there again, provided I could find a hotel with air conditioning and a decent mattress (apparently there’s a law there against giving hotel guests good mattresses unless they are paying more than $200 a night or something. Average hotels in the States are f***ing posh by comparison).
Rude About Food
Just before London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic games, French president Jacques Chirac was allegedly overheard commenting that the English have the worst cuisine in the world as he was leaving a press conference. This supposedly caused outrage among the English and was given partial credit for pushing London’s bid past that of Paris. After all, who wants to hold Olympics in a country once governed by some obnoxious toad who doesn’t like English cuisine? Then again, it could just be that the voting members of the International Olympic Committee are decidedly homophobic and the whole “Gay Paree” thing threw them. (This would also explain choosing to hold an Olympics in Utah of all places, though Atlanta in 1996 causes some confusion.)
While you are busy pondering those lines of nonsense, I’ll hastily segue to my real point, which is this: Chirac was right. With startlingly few exceptions, English food is sh**.
Now I can already see some of you shifting uncomfortably in your seats. You think I am using an overwrought generalization here on the same level as when one claims that gamers are fat and unwashed, or that cows go “Moo.” I assure you I am not. During my time in London, I actively sought out “English Food” and where I could find it, it was almost universally bad.
Now, I’m not sure what constitutes an objective measure for assessing the sh** or not sh**ness (overall sh**itude?) of food, but I think the dissemination of a particular cuisine across international boundaries counts for a lot. What the hell am I talking about? Allow me to explain.
Look around a whatever place you are visiting or happen to live in. How many restaurants of a specific country’s cuisine do you see? In the United States, you can find Chinese and Mexican food on the corner of every strip mall. Japanese, Thai, and Indian food are also rapidly filtering throughout the nation (or at least to the more civilized areas anyway), and obviously Italian cuisine and its fast food offshoots is largely responsible for the obesity epidemic.* Next, look around and tell me what English eateries you see. No, not places where you can get American food that may or may not have once been made in the UK, or Irish pubs, or places that simply serve bland food (those are for old people, who may or may not be English). No, I want to know if you have local restaurants with food served by the actual freakin’ English folk and made just like mom made it at home in jolly old.
Found any? I didn’t think so. This isn’t because you are bad at this sort of thing, it’s because they don’t exist.
This isn’t strictly an American trend either. I’ve been to various and sundry places around the world and have yet to see an English eatery that was really hopping except for maybe the local fish and chips place on a Friday night in a Catholic town. In spite of being an island nation, one of the world’s great naval powers, having created one of the great colonial empires, and essentially delivering language and culture to the entire world, you can’t find English food anywhere. In the eyes of the world, English food may as well not exist. In fact, many places might actually prefer it didn’t exist because it’s bad.
Thankfully, the fine folk of the United Kingdom recognized this some time ago and took strides to correct the problem. According to people who tabulate such things, the national dish of England is now Chicken Tikka Masala – an excellent foodstuff, but one that originated in the land of Ghandi and the absurdly attractive Indira Varma, not in the land of Chaucer and Posh Spice. This is clearly a conscious choice by the native populace to imbibe tasty food as opposed to awful food. (It is only vaguely related to the fact that there are also vast quantities of Indian people living in the U.K., I swear.) I mean, the English could say, “Dammit, we’re English. Screw the foreigners, I want blood pudding!” and presumably be justified in doing so. Thankfully for tourists, they chose taste instead. This is why London is absolutely rife with stellar curry shops, Mediterranean fusion, enough great Turkish food to choke a large horse, and solid samplings of just about every type of food imaginable. Even the French haven’t completely turned their noses up at the English when it comes to food, since plenty of Frenchies cross the channel each year to pour their money into England’s tourism industry and they presumably enjoy something other than sack lunches from home while they are there.
So yes, Jacques Chirac was right – English food is sh**. However, what he neglected to point out is that the English are ever a sensible people. They don’t eat their food either, and if you ever find yourself visiting England, neither should you.
Beer Snobs
While most Brits will admit to you that their food is crap, dear God do they bag on American beer when the opportunity arises. American beer is frequently derided as tasteless crap (that’s the polite description) and it’s true that the macro brews are almost inexcusably bad (this includes Bud, Coors, Miller Light, and all of their bastardized offshoots). However, once you learn to avoid those, there’s surprising depth and quality to the beer America produces. The microbrewery phenomenon that took place in the mid-to-late 90’s was a glorious thing and dramatically improved the quality of life for yuppies and alcoholics with taste. When questioned about the quality of English brew, friends from Britain have frequently said things like, “We are Britannia, blessed among nations. Our rivers flow brown with Newcastle, Guinness, and Samuel Smith’s. God himself pisses nectar filled with malt, barley, and hops onto our countryside and our people get skunk drunk at pubs every Friday night at the very least. Life is f***ing brilliant.” **
Sadly, I am here to inform you that beer in the U.K. is not, in fact, all that.
Don’t get me wrong, there are great British beers out there. In fact, I’ve had enough of them that I was really excited to go pub crawling, just to sample the goods. I mean, if their rivers are flowing with good beer, they should at least have some decent stuff on tap, right? Not so, sayeth the disappointed American. What’s available at the Hart and Rose, The Dragon’s Breath, Pollock’s Bollocks, or any of the ten pubs I checked out while in London varies from Guinness Extra Cold (always good, but widely available in the U.S.) to a series of bland bitters and mediocre lagers. I came to the country prepared to have my fragile tastebuds asploded by the bevy of beers that had taken on a mystic significance with whispered tales from snobby Brits who simply came to our country to enjoy the sun and woo our women with their damned sexy accents, regardless of their overall physical attractiveness. Unfortunately what I found was that your average pub in London is just that – pretty freaking average.*** I can get the best of English wares bottled back home (it costs an arm and a leg, but that’s an exchange rate thing and it ain’t exactly cheap to drink it in London either), and the worst of it is best left untouched by discerning palates. Sure, it’s certainly better than the state of malted affairs in Japan, but beer in that country is f***ing terrible. In fact, saying the beer in your country is better than Japanese beer is the equivalent of saying food in your country is better than English food.
So yeah, food in England is better than the French think it is, and beer in England is worse than the English think it is. You may now exult in your newfound edification.
Tomorrow: Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Ted Knutson
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* I’m lying. Unless you count pizza as Italian food, in which case I’m not.
** I might be paraphrasing. A little.
*** And what the hell is up with having last call at 11PM? That alone makes New York City an infinitely superior place to live. Goddamn hooligans ruin everything.