When it was settled that my wife and I were going to London for her work (shameless plug: listen to No Gods No Mayors), I was embarrassed to find myself with absolutely no answers to questions about where I was going to eat. I don’t know why I felt embarrassed, as I don’t live in London and haven’t been there since I was 17. But despite reading Vittles and having gone to the Dishoom pop-up when it visited New York, I had very little idea of London’s culinary geography.
I had my fantasies though. I know London is as diverse and culinarily exciting as the city I live in, but just as any tourist will want to come to New York and get a bagel and cream cheese, I wanted some form of recognizably white British food before I moved on to everything else the city had to offer. At a party one night, I listened to comrade — and Gourmet worker-owner and frequent London visitor —Nozlee Samadzadeh gush about the sausage rolls at the Ginger Pig, a small butchery chain that sells all manner of ready-to-eat meat pies and rolls. As my main association with London is Sweeney Todd, I put it on my list (don’t ask me why a musical about cannibalism should make me want a meat pie, there is no limit to the mysteries of the human heart).
Loopy from our red-eye, we met up with friends and walked over to the location in Borough Market, where they indulged us Americans as we ordered a traditional and a pork and Stilton sausage roll. They were heavy, not the snack I had envisioned, but a fistful of meat in a fluffy pastry, sausage crowning from each end like a birth. We found seats by the river and ate.
About halfway through the pork and Stilton roll — the ideal, everything I had imagined: funky, sweet and so thoroughly meaty; like biting into the rich and fatty earth — I became furious. This seems like the most basic portable foodstuff, and yet in America it is relegated to neo-pubs and the occasional butcher getting cheeky with it. Why should I have to travel all the way to London to have something like this on the regular? Why, in my meat-and-potatoes country, which was at one time colonized by the British and has kept all manner of ridiculous British habits, didn’t this one stick? We’re still measuring things in yards instead of meters but I can’t get a sausage roll at the deli?
We have so many things that are sausage-roll-esque, and it's clear that if 7-Eleven were to just start selling British sausage rolls they would make a killing. Pigs in a blanket abound, Jimmy Dean sells those frozen pancake-wrapped sausage sticks, and what is a corn dog but a sausage roll made with that most American of grains?
We are so close, guys. Just seal the edges of your sausage sandwiches and call it a day, Dunkin'.
Three Other Great Dishes I Had In London
Jollof Rice at Akoko
Most of our dining was planned by my wife’s colleague and fellow restaurant obsessive Riley Quinn, who in the weeks before our trip kindly asked me what I was looking to experience out of London dining. I had a vague sense that London's West African scene was something I needed to see, so he booked us a tasting menu at Chef Aji Akokomi’s Akoko. Multiple dishes stopped the table in our tracks, like squid sliced into melting noodles, or a red mullet served with cubes of moi moi. But two weeks later, the jollof rice is what’s stayed with me. Each grain a meal in itself, smoked and browned and coated with slowly building spice, the kind that makes you feel high the more you eat it. I know the jollof wars are real, and I’m certainly not the arbiter of this, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever taste any better.
Salt Cod XO Labneh at Oma
It was 65 degrees (Fahrenheit) and sunny the entire time I was in London, giving me an unrealistically cheerful idea of what spring there is like. But the broadly Greek-Levantine menu at Oma, where we sat on a patio overlooking Borough Market, fit the weather. We started with a series of spreads, with laffa bread and circles of açma that peeled into steaming layers as we swiped them through ajvar and tarama. The star was absolutely the pile salt cod XO sitting in a pool of labneh, maybe the definition of umami. What a joy to spend the afternoon digging sticky pieces of cod from my back teeth.
Lime Leaf Roasted Chicken with Pineapple Chutney at the Tamil Crown
I maintain that every white British person should be spending most of their time thanking any and all higher powers that South Asians continue to bless them with the concept of flavor even after all that they’ve done. You would be nothing without us, and you should remember that we could yank that garam masala right out of your chicken tikka masala if we wanted to!!!! Anyway, I could probably spend my life exploring the differences in the American and English diasporas, and am profoundly jealous that the concept of the “Desi pub” thrives in London while it appears to just be getting started over here. The Tamil Crown is settled on a corner on a quiet residential block, a flatly adorable space. We started with tangy, blackened roasted chicken thighs and creamy pineapple chutney which were simultaneously so juicy and crispy we immediately ordered another plate. Not because it wasn’t a generous portion, but we just knew we didn’t want to stop eating it.
