It should tell you something that our three favorite restaurants in London are Russian-Thai (Novikov), Indian (Veeraswamy), and a tiny Italian Trattoria in King’s Cross (Casa Tua). So on a recent trip, we set out to find the very best of true English cuisine—and it wasn’t easy.
Several days of searching took us to Spitalfields Market (Pork Pies), Hammersmith (Fish & Chips), Belgravia (Shepherd’s Pie), and off Fleet Street (Steak & Ale Pie). We could have saved ourselves a little effort by consulting Fry Magazine, but then we would have learned that the overwhelming majority of classic British chip shops are to be found these days in the hinterlands outside the city.
That culinary disconnect set us to thinking about our relationship with the British capital and how it—and we—had evolved over the course of 60-plus years.
The first time either of us saw London, TWA had somehow screwed up the flight from Idlewild. In compensation, they put up the family for the night in Manhattan, then moved us all into First Class. So after turtle soup, filet mignon, and a long, luxurious nap, we glanced out the windows the next morning to find thousands of identical black-gray roofs with tiny chimneys spewing uniformly gray plumes of smoke into the already dirty atmosphere.
Talk about a mood killer—but that was the color of foggy, coal-heated London in the 1960s—palaces, statues, museums, slums, and ultra-pale, underfed Britons, all impregnated with the same gloomy soot.
As it happened, we’d arrived in Great Britain near the end of the longest, deepest funk in its history. The British Empire, long on its last legs, had finally been killed off by the Suez Crisis of 1956. The Beatles, Carnaby Street, and Swinging London still lay in the future. The hotels were tired, the food was awful. The smug Conservatives were about to implode in the Profumo Affair, and the hyper-taxed sunset of Harold Wilson’s Labor Party was just arriving. The tatters of the Empire consisted of ugly leftovers like the white Rhodesian revolt, the Biafran horror, and of course South African Apartheid.
As for us children, we had no idea that we were permanently emigrating, or we might have refused to exit the plane. Coming from America at the very top of its Kennedy-Camelot game, anyplace would have constituted a small slide. But London had tumbled from the very center of the universe into an ill-fed, ill-housed, and grumpy pit of irrelevance.
Fast forward to today, of course, and the city is once again one of the most exciting and colorful capitals on earth. The food is sensational, the people are endlessly fascinating, the monuments even sparkle at times, and everyone rushes about their multi-hued business. Fortunately, London’s airports are also among the least expensive, so in every iteration from the USA to almost anywhere, we find ourselves spending a week or so in transit.
But it does make you wonder at the history of the city, how many times it has survived and even prospered from disasters that would have sunk any normal community. And if you look closely, as we have, you can still find relics and reminders of those plagues, fires, revolts, and natural catastrophes in the hidden nooks and crannies of the metropolis.
But that’s not what we’re about here. Here, we’re thinking about the trip where we rode random double-decker buses all over the city, from Richmond and Hammersmith in the west to Whitechapel and Spitalfields on the eastern fringe, from Lambeth and Southwark south of the river north to Highgate and Hampstead Heath. Few of those oddly named hamlets will register with foreigners, but that’s where the Londoners eat, work, and live.
Having mastered the buses, we then piled into the Underground and rode the legendary lines—the Circle, Bakerloo, Waterloo and City, Piccadilly, Metropolitan and so on—surfacing at any stop that caught our fancy. After weeks of such rambling, we finally decided that we knew our way around well enough to start seriously exploring.
You can forget about driving in this town—the city fathers have done everything but outlaw private motor vehicles in the center. And everyone should take a London Cab at least once in their life, especially now, with their exacting standards and way of life under attack in this Age of Mediocrity. But that’s not where the best people-watching opportunities are to be found. For all its monuments and grand houses, a trip to London is all about walking its streets, alleys, benches, parks, and avenues, and gawking at the 9,640,000 individual souls crammed into its 600 square miles.
There was a time when those souls were overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, when any errant Catholic, Frenchman, Jamaican—or Yank—would immediately catch your eye. Today, 21% of the city hails from the Indian sub-continent alone. In total, there are something like 52 ethnic groups, speaking more than 300 of the world’s languages.
Which brings us back around to our favorite subject, food. You can find literally every cuisine of the world in London, all of them represented by at least a few superb examples. The British National Restaurant Awards Top 100 list reads like Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days—the most honored establishment in London proper, Da Terra, being a Brazilian-Italian project with a tasting menu of 10 electric courses.
And best of all, with so many excellent eateries in town, you won’t have to endure the excruciating British snoot that used to be a near-universal feature of dining out. The mostly immigrant restaurant populations have brought their mostly Mediterranean friendliness to the once frosty capital—and it shows. But if you still hanker after the old aristocratic pretend-disdain, there’s always the Ritz for Afternoon Tea.
Ultimately, the Thing About London is that the city is just too overwhelming and complicated a puzzle to describe with just one Thing—or post. At the moment, we have 4 projects in mind for future adventures:
Two meals a day for 5 days at the NRA’s list of London eateries, starting at the top and working downward. We’d do more, but our stomachs and wallets might be provoked into open revolt by the time number 11 rolled around.
A photo-tour of London’s 8 great Royal Parks, with a handful of the fascinating stories hidden there—Hyde Park with its corner, Regent’s Park, Kensington Gardens, Green, Richmond, Bushy, and Greenwich Royal Parks. As for the best place to take a springtime-day nap, we’ll try them all and let you know.
A list of our 8-10 favorite London travel books and movies, to set the stage for your first (or next) conquest of the legendary metropolis.
A photo-tour of the major disasters from London’s history, along with any physical artifacts left behind:
The Plague (1665)
The Great Fire (1666)
The Gordon Riots (1780)
The Whitechapel Murders (1888)
The Great War (1914)
The Blitz (1940)
The Great Smog (1952)
The Profumo Affair (1963)
The Pandemic (2020)?
And that’s just the start! Stay tuned…