There may be an artwork to a correct meat pie, in response to the Seattle chef and butcher Kevin Smith. The American pot pie frustrates him as a result of it lets the pot do the heavy lifting. “The true method of doing it, for me, is to make a freestanding pie,” Smith says. The pastry ought to maintain itself up, a method cooks in England have honed over centuries. “That’s a lot extra theatrical.”
These meat pies — densely full of beef shank in Guinness gravy, or chile tinged-lamb korma — anchor the menu at Little Beast, Smith’s new English pub. For Smith, who additionally runs the butcher store Beast and Cleaver and the eating places the Peasant and the Beastro inside it, the enterprise marks a return to his South London upbringing. “It’s very, very traditional English meals,” he says. Each London and Seattle will be chilly, grey, and gloomy. In each cities, one wants meals that “warms the bones,” he says, and coziness is the impulse of the second.
Smith’s objective is to really recreate a quintessential English pub. This, to him, meant rustic, just a little darkish, by no means fancy — simply the form of place the place folks can “are available and sling their coat over the again of a chair,” Smith says. To this point, his homey pub has been a success: Eater Seattle named Little Beast its Restaurant of the Yr in 2025.
It’s not time to take a position whether or not the British are coming; they’re very a lot right here. Like Little Beast, British-style pubs and nation eating places are cropping up throughout the US, with hotspots together with Wilde’s in Los Angeles, Dingles Public Home in San Francisco, the Bell in New Orleans (“an easygoing neighborhood joint with an English accent”), and the Chumley Home in Fort Price, Texas. In Chicago, the brand new Piccadilly Pub fashions itself as a “neighborhood chippy,” and in Philadelphia, the chef Ange Branca, whose Malaysian restaurant Kampar has been closed since final February attributable to a hearth, just lately ran Mod Spuds, a pop-up that served loaded English “jacket potatoes.”
In New York Metropolis, chef Ed Szymanski has constructed among the metropolis’s most stable new eating places round his personal homesickness, together with the English seafood restaurant Dame and the meatier “English bistro” Lord’s; chef Jess Shadbolt will quickly unveil Dean’s, a British seafood restaurant impressed by her seaside hometown. And just lately, sticky toffee pudding, one in all England’s hottest desserts, has additionally served as a significant supply of inspiration for pastry cooks throughout the nation.
It’s pure for any delicacies that’s been maligned within the world sphere to desire a redemption arc, and for thus lengthy, British meals has been the butt of jokes: mushy, beige, brown, bland — the form of disappointment that author Aisling McCrea as soon as ascribed to British folks being “too repressed to prepare dinner meals appropriately.” For rising star NYC pastry chef Lilli Maren Beard, who grew up in London, the objective of her work is updating British pastry classics “in order that they’re really good,” as she places it on her Substack publication The Buttery. “I believe the [bad] repute comes from the pure undeniable fact that British meals must be tasted: It’s meals that’s meant to be eaten, to not be checked out,” Beard says. Beige and brown mush is “dangerous PR” for its “lovely flavors.”
Now, younger cooks like herself, Beard says, are having a “related journey” of realizing the “trove” of scrumptious meals of their historical past and wanting to point out it off with character, a humorousness, and, sure, higher visuals, too.
Comply with just a few younger British cooks on social media and also you’ll shortly begin to marvel why the delicacies has a nasty title. By way of short-form movies, locations like Manchester’s Onda Pasta Bar (of viral “tiramisu drawer” fame) and London’s Fallow have grow to be as a lot media manufacturers as they’re eating places. From chefs-turned-creators, you’ll discover bangers and mash that look undeniably scrumptious, roasted chickens swimming in luxurious drippings, and gravy-filled meat pies laden with a lot butter that there’s no method they could possibly be dangerous — lest we neglect that butter shaped the inspiration of London chef Thomas Straker’s world ascent.
“These persons are typically broadcasting to a British viewers,” says the London-based restaurant critic Jonathan Nunn, who runs the publication Vittles. Significantly, that’s “an East London, South London viewers who’re very plugged into what’s going on in meals tradition internationally and what’s going on in London eating places, and needs to copy these issues of their properties in a method that doesn’t actually seem like dishes their mother and father made however are nonetheless recognizably British dishes.”
In accordance with Nunn, this social media second is British folks hyping up British meals for British folks. That this may affect the notion of British meals to non-British folks “is only a byproduct of that.” As “unusual” as it’s to consider British meals as “unique,” he says, “I believe Individuals are fascinated by [British food] in the identical method anybody can be fascinated by something ‘unique.’”
Maybe a part of the enchantment of British meals within the U.S. proper now could be merely that it’s simply totally different sufficient to be newly compelling. Fish sticks aren’t significantly en vogue, however good fish and chips? That pulls in an “overwhelming” demand, as Szymanski realized throughout his pandemic pop-up. Lending an air of intrigue, it’s on the menu at Wilde’s as “battered skate & mint.”
Lately, American eating tradition has largely been filtered by way of the lens of the French bistro, so possibly the rising English pub second is an indicator that we’ve grow to be bistro-ed out. The “new American” restaurant, the French bistro, and the trendy English pub — these don’t supply wildly totally different meals a lot as they provide a way of a change of environs. As ideas, they’re acquainted sufficient to be straightforward, totally different sufficient to be locations. “I believe it’s very relatable [food],” Smith says, including that “the meals that individuals assume is dangerous over right here, as in English meals, is definitely what a number of American meals is predicated on.” Making British meals for American audiences requires some concessions although: That’s why Lord’s additionally serves a Welsh rarebit burger and sticky toffee pudding pancakes.
All this latest Anglophilia has but to even contact on the incoming British imports. Straker, who runs the London eating places Straker’s and Acre, is set to open a spot in NYC quickly, the place London cooks maintain internet hosting residencies (just lately, Jeremy King and Emily Dobbs).
Iranian restaurant Berenjak got here to the U.S. through LA this fall, and Indian restaurant Dishoom is planning a NYC enlargement, following a wildly profitable pop-up at Pastis final summer season. Gymkhana, which is impressed by the “elite golf equipment” of India, opened in Las Vegas late final yr, and the lavish Punjabi restaurant Ambassadors Clubhouse is set to open quickly in NYC. “These will not be small, quirky British eating places coming in,” Szymanski notes. “That is like Coke and Pepsi.”
It’s promising, although, that these particular institutions make up London’s new big-name exports, in response to Nunn, as they assist create a extra well-rounded picture of the British meals scene. Whereas London’s contributions to the U.S. have traditionally centered across the form of St. John-inflected nose-to-tail gastropub, as mirrored in stateside openings Little Beast and Lord’s, Dishoom and Gymkhana symbolize the important nature of British Indian meals.
“That’s as a part of trendy British meals tradition as anything,” Nunn says. “That form of hybridity being accepted as a part of British delicacies on a world degree, and being acknowledged as such, is an effective factor.”
