Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EATING &
drinking
There are now more than 100 restau-
rants in England with one Michelin star.
There are another dozen-plus with two
stars, and four with that ultimate acco-
lade of three stars. One of them is the
home of Gordon Ramsay, who seems to
be on American TV more than President
Obama; another, the Fat Duck at Bray,
is the masterwork of another TV star,
Heston Blumenthal and his molecular
cooking style. Oh, and a handful of
restaurants in Wales also have stars.
It says a lot about British cuisine,
once so derided, where an emphasis
on locally sourced produce is now king.
Even high-street chain restaurants are
largely of a decent standard (you can
never go wrong with a Pizza Express),
and you'd have to be extremely unlucky
not to stumble on a good curry house.
Add to that the plethora of Chinese,
Thai, and Italian places, plus growing
numbers of French and Spanish tapas
restaurants, as well as all those fish-
and-chips shops and coffee shops
(a Starbucks is as much an English
institution now as a chippie), and
you'll never want for food.
There are few things visitors won't
be familiar with these days, as even the
most remote U.S. brewpub, Canadian
bar, or New Zealand eatery sometimes
features a menu heavy in Englishness
(cottage pie, bangers and mash). What
you will find is increasingly good pub
grub, with gastropubs offering fare that
would outstrip that of many restaurants.
There are seafood delights around the
country (Morecambe Bay prawns, Whit-
stable oysters, Cromer crabs, jellied eels
in London's East End, kippers and other
smoked fish around the land). Local
lamb, estate-raised beef and venison,
eclectic gourmet sausages and pies are
all increasingly on the menu. Wales has
all these, too, plus its own treats… flat,
sugary Welsh cakes, and (more of an
acquired taste) laverbread, a type of
seaweed.
In the 1960s and 1970s real ale was
being replaced with trouble-free gassy
kegs of Watney's Red Barrel; a people's
revolution followed with small brewers
popping up, traditional methods being
praised, and something that was
declared dead reborn, better than ever
before. The revolution even swept Amer-
ica, brewpubs appearing in every town
offering dark beers instead of the pale
yellow fizz that was the norm.
Nowadays in Britain there's a regional
variety of beers, from the divine Hop
Back from Salisbury, Wiltshire, with its
award-winning White Lightning to the
Whitstable Brewery, making Oyster
Stout, in a shed in the Kent seaside
town. But England has wine, too, with
a number of vineyards in southern
England, including the Adgestone
on the Isle of Wight.
2
Stage plays are also another British success story, with a wealth of erudite offerings,
often dealing with difficult subjects, from Alan Bennett, David Hare, Harold Pinter,
Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, and others.
British movies are still taking on the world, such as
The King's Speech
, which won
four 2011 Oscars, including best film, and
Archipelago
(2010), a gripping tale of fam-
ily breakdown and isolation. Yet it is not just the arty films that are crossing the
Atlantic successfully; Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are now U.S. stars with their films
Shaun of the Dead
,
Hot Fuzz
, and
Paul
. British directors (who are often also writers)
are also big business: Paul Greengrass (
Green Zone
,
The Bourne Ultimatum
), Chris-
topher Nolan (
Batman Begins
,
The Dark Knight
, plus 2012's
The Dark Knight Rises
,
