Just a quick follow up on your post 'The British are better chefs' I would like to illustrate my comment on this with a quick review of a 'classic British sunday roast' I had recently at a pub in a fashionable-ish area of London - The Defectors Weld in Sheperds Bush - packed most nights its a blend of traditional looking wood flooring comfy booths and open fire thats undergone a successful refit with modern furnishings - a decent pint and good tunes can be found along with a 'traditional' pub menu boasting organic this, handmade that and locally sourced environmentally friendly yadda yadda. Just because its written doesn't make it so - 3 choices of sunday roast were available - one beef one pork and one vege option - we opted for the delicious sounding pork belly, only to be told they had run out, so to the beef option. What arrived was an abomination. While the roast potatoes and carrots were acceptable enough, the addition of curly cale sounded cool but was uninspiring, the cubes of swede were uniformally undercooked and the meagre offering of gravy was thin and insipid. The meat however was spectacularly bad, apart from the fact what we received were actually steaks and not cut from a roast at all - it was grey, grisly, tasteless and tough, bad cuts of meat cooked badly. At least they were consistent in that all 3 plates for the group were identical. Awful!
Now I would normally reserve such vitriol for bad food served in a venue with loftier pretensions, (at least in bothering to write about it) but the point here is that that this is standard fare served in a popular venue in trendy central London, and the place is packed with 20-30 somethings with clean plates. Contrast this to my meal at the kitsch little eatery of Restaurant Pirate in Champagnole which is loosely comparable, simple food of beef chips and mushroom sauce in a cheap setting but cooked really well and we see an essential difference between mainstream food in the 2 countries. If that rubbish was served in France they would be throwing it around the room - here? no complaints. Though its funny to see anything that winds the French up concerning their superiority in the food world, I think we've still got a long way to go before we can get too smug
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