Dear USA, London Has Had Good Restaurants For Ages, Kind Regards, Britain

You can leave your thinly veiled compliments about London having nice restaurants now, thank you very much.

It is with a heavy heart that we must report that the New York Times has been writing about the UK again and this time they've come for our restaurants.

New York Times

In a dispatch from the UK capital, writer Robert Draper is shocked to discover that London has real restaurants, serving proper food, despite previously "inclining its palate to devotees of porridge and boiled mutton".

Yui Mok / PA Archive/PA Images

Wait, what...?

ABC

"No longer can it be said that London is only a great city between meals," Draper writes.

"What was once a sallow and predictable dining experience is now salubrious and full of surprises, befitting a metropolis of such diversity and ingenuity."

"At long last in London’s restaurant scene, there’s something for everyone," Draper squeals, before recommending many a Londoner's favourite restaurants, including Gymkhana, Brat, and Sager + Wilde.

Even, he says, EVEN in "less commercialized districts to the east, such as Shoreditch".

Jeff Spicer / PA Wire/PA Images

For the unacquainted, Shoreditch has been more commercialised than an influencer's Instagram feed for over a decade. It is our Williamsburg.

Needless to say, Brits who have been enjoying London's bounty of culinary gems for decades were all a bit "Nah, piss off, mate."

Tony Jackson @JacksonT0ny

@jamesofwalsh Having dined out in London for over 30 years now I think the only response to the @nytimes is “what a load of prairie oysters”

10:38 AM - 20 Aug 2018

"I wish space-filler hacks would make a bit more effort," restaurateur Oisín Rogers, who runs The Guinea Grill in Mayfair*, told BuzzFeed News.

Instagram: @guineagrill

*The New York Times issued a correction after originally calling this area "Mayfield".

The Guinea, Rogers said, has had the same menu since 1952, is always packed, and has not a bit of mutton in sight.

"How can someone who has just popped over for the weekend to London possibly get under the skin of the character?" he continued.

instagram.com

"The competition, the camaraderie, the diversity, and the pure brilliance of the restaurant scene as it is now.

"Nobody has ever had porridge for lunch or dinner in the UK, and as for boiled mutton? It's bland — nobody ever ate it.

"In the article, he doesn't appear to have spoken to anyone who knows. He just looked at some list, randomly picked a few and thought, Oh this is good."

London-based food writer Helen Graves, whose blog Food Stories has been documenting the city's culinary wonders for more than a decade, told BuzzFeed News the NYT piece was "beyond parody".

Instagram: @foodstories

"It reads like an attempt at trolling from a supposedly serious publication," she said.

"It’s certainly true that London’s dining scene is better than it’s ever been, but to imply we were eating a medieval diet of porridge and boiled mutton not too long ago ... seems deliberately offensive and quite strange.

"London’s dining scene is, and has been for quite some time, a reflection of its diversity. Sure, you can find bad food but this is true of any city."

Leah Hyslop, food journalist and author of Made in London, which documents over a century of food in the city, was pleased to see London restaurants get the attention they deserve, "but it’s a shame they didn’t ask someone with a bit more local knowledge to explore it," she told BuzzFeed News.

Instagram: @leah.hyslop

She agreed that the food scene had thrived over the past decade, but felt NYT might have gone back a little too far with their appraisal of the British diet.

"I think if you’d tried to offer a Londoner in 2008 boiled mutton and porridge for their lunch they’d have laughed you out of Hyde Park," she said. "At that point we were all obsessed with sushi."

Hyslop told us she was generally dismayed by American attitudes to British food.

"I find that ‘traditional British food — it’s so bad! And it’s all got funny names like spotted dick!’ attitude infuriating," she continued.

"One of our best restaurants, open for well over a decade, is St John’s, where chef-owner Fergus Henderson serves the ultimate British comfort food — his bubbling bone marrow with piquant parsley salad is rightly world famous."

Instagram: @st.john.restaurant

Food blogger Chris Pople, whose Cheese and Biscuits blog did much to highlight the many food joys in London, pointed to Tayyabs and the River Cafe as examples of London restaurants that have been thriving for far longer than Americans have been aware of London having a food scene.

"I don't think I've ever even seen boiled mutton on a menu," he told BuzzFeed News.

But Pople was willing to throw Draper a bone: "He is right that eating out in London, and the country as a whole, is a lot better in 2018 than in 1998."