White-On-White-Crime In the London Food Scene

Throughout my week in London, one phrase stuck out to me. Anytime I’d ask for pub recommendations, people would share a location accompanied by the assurance that “they take good care of their Guinness.” It seemed silly to me at first, but as I drank my way through the city’s finest pubs; I understood.

Guinness requires nitrogen to create its signature creamy texture. Standard lines run at a lower pressure and thus affect the ability of the nitrogen to create the perfect Guinness. It’s also important to serve Guinness around 42 degrees Fahrenheit or 6 degrees Celsius, which is slightly warmer than what you’d keep a traditional lager at.

As the cyclospora outbreak began to rage, I wondered if America was this meticulous with anything much less taking care of its Guinness.

At lunch, I couldn’t help noticing how delightful it was to dine in another country without a Chase Bank or Duane Reade casting a shadow across the patio.

As I bit into a tuna melt without a modern amenity building harboring a Sephora on the ground floor with a sign above it screaming, “1 bedroom, 2 bedroom, and 3 bedrooms available!”, I felt true bliss.

In London it isn’t a big deal that a building has retained its original signage. People don’t seem to fetishize “original bones” as much of the city is well preserved and attended to. Walking around the city for a week, it felt like their developers didn’t immediately assume that buildings needed to be demolished to evolve as many of their businesses and organizations are still housed in centuries-old buildings like The Hawksmoore in the St Pancras, where they’ve taken excellent care of the staircase from The Spice Girls Movie.

Besides the beautiful old bones and wonderful pints, another feature of their restaurant scene that I envied were the charcoal grills. Many restaurants ranging from a Turkish Mangal to this grill at Straker’s in Notting Hill were powered by solid burning fuel like charcoal and it took every thing to another level.

The best bite of the entire trip was a tie between the mussel flat bread at Straker’s and the slow roasted Turbot over charcoal served with the chef’s obligatory butter infused with stock.

But many of the people I encountered in London are not fans of Chef Thomas Straker.

Anytime Straker’s became a topic of conversation, there were two camps. There was the one group that loved his mussel flatbread and the other group that had effectively canceled him in their minds, which surprised me.

I was lightly aware of Straker, who posts reel recipes with a lad-ish tone, but solid technique and his food seemed very nice. Also who the fuck am I to judge after receiving TWO zero-star reviews from The New York Times? lol.

We happen to share a publicist, Savannah Engel, so I asked her to help me make a reservation which she did.

It was hands down the best meal we had and exceeded all expectations, but when we shared this enthusiasm with people around town there was a lot of negativity around him due to a photograph he posted with an all-white kitchen.