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Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is with one of the UK’s most talented and idiosyncratic chefs. If you haven’t heard of Will Gleave, then your favourite chef will have. Through his early cooking at the wine bar P. Franco, and then at the restaurants Bright and Peg, Will has exercised an immense influence over the modern London restaurant industry – its focus on natural wine, borderless cuisine, high-level cooking in relaxed environments, and a type of effortlessness that many aspire to.

In a rare public appearance, Will spends an hour talking to Adam about his early years cooking in London restaurants, setting the small plate-natural wine bar template in the city at P. Franco, looking outside of Europe for inspiration, what he likes to eat himself and why, ultimately, he decided to leave the capital and set up home on the Kent coast with his young family, and cook at Sargasso in Margate.

Will traces his journey from the kitchens of Harvey Nichols, The Square, and Arbutus in London to Tasmania, where he found himself at Garagistes, one of Australia’s most celebrated restaurants. When returned to the UK, he co-founded P. Franco, which was named Eater London’s restaurant of the year in 2017. Bright and Peg followed, before all three abruptly closed in 2022 and 2023 to the shock of the London restaurant industry. This was followed by a year-long residency at Hill & Szrok on Broadway Market - which was our own restaurant of the year in 2024 - where he revived the British steak and chop house with his signature elan.

During the episode, we discuss what it was really like taking over two induction hobs inside a wine shop with no extraction (or licence to trade as a restaurant), the relentless misery of working in London’s most renowned Michelin-starred kitchens, the influence of Australia and Japan on his cooking, the greatness of 40 Maltby Street and its chef Steve Williams, the story behind the closure of Bright and Peg, tradition and innovation, cooking steak, who the best pasta chef in the city is right now, and whether we have really yet to have THE ‘Will Gleave restaurant’.

We hope you enjoy it.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub, the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and immediately went viral on social media.

In the episode, we discuss creating something that people really want in a moment when so many hospitality businesses are feeling the pain; about the meaning and importance of community and authenticity; about navigating virality and hype online; and about how, despite all their early success, neither are trained chefs.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney.

When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients.

Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast!

Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group.

As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording.

Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.

Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving.

In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged.

In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits:

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June.

One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or embellished by PR – to pull back the curtain and give a true insight into what’s actually going on with workers, customers and finances. She’s remained faithful to that approach with Gina, publicly disclosing that it cost more than £500,000 to open the restaurant and we wanted to know more about the parts of that sum. And to ask – when knowing all she does about the many challenges facing restaurateurs and chefs in the current economic climate – why she would open her own restaurant?

Elsewhere in the episode, we cover how Rav and Mattie ended up opening in Chingford, her food backstory in Southampton and Leyton, dream customers, nightmare customers, her mentors and the ‘pastry idol’ who taught her that you should never work for your heroes.

Finally, we discuss the beauty of the invert puff pastry that she used in the two galettes she brought for us to taste at the recording.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ravneet Gill Taiano is the author of Pastry Chef's Guide, a judge on Junior Bake Off, founder of hospitality platform Countertalk and the owner of restaurant Gina in Chingford.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with some making it a matter of pride to never use or engage with it. Whatever your opinion, PR remains a significant and integral part of London’s restaurant scene. Almost every new restaurant hoping to get press uses PR... and it seems that the more they do, the more the rest of them need to as well.

So it felt like the right time to invite a titan of the restaurant PR industry on this podcast. Gemma Bell is one of the most influential restaurant PRs in the country today, heading up her own agency Gemma Bell & Company, whose clients over the last 15 years have included St. JOHN, Dishoom, Yotam Ottolenghi, The River Café, Koya, Padella, The Clove Club and many more.

Adam Coghlan has known Gemma for about 15 years and in that time, the industries of public relations and restaurants have changed dramatically, particularly due to the influence of social media. In this podcast we talk about those huge changes, about what clients want from PR, what she feels her role in the industry is, the influence of her mentors (including Elizabeth Crompton-Batt and hotelier Ian Schrager), parting ways with Yotam Ottolenghi and the biggest lesson she’s learnt from the last two to three decades of working in the restaurant world.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Gemma Bell is the founder of the agency Gemma Bell & Company.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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This month’s episode is an interview with someone you might already know — a restaurant owner who embodies many of the critical themes of the London restaurant industry, not just in 2025, but over the course of the last 20-plus years: community, trends, family, uncertainty, hype and more. Ferhat Dirik is the lifelong front-of-house, founder’s son, and now owner of Dalston’s Mangal 2, the family-run Turkish restaurant he’s been working in since he was 11 in the late 1990s.

Mangal 2 is one of the most well-known and cult-followed ocakbaşıs in north London. Opening in 1994, it was the follow-up restaurant to the U.K.’s first ocakbaşı (Mangal 1) which Ferhat’s father Ali Dirik opened 1991, and has been at the centre of that community ever since. Catering first to the Turkish community of Stoke Newington High street, then through the hipster era of Dalston in the 2010s, to serving Action Bronson, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and so many others over the course of the last half decade. But during the course of the last 15 years and increasingly under the stewardship of Ferhat, the restaurant has gone from the community fringes of neighbourhood restaurant territory and into the mainstream. A fully fledged member of the London restaurant industry.

So it felt like the right time, as the sun sets on another challenging year for London restaurants and in light of a series of illuminating blog posts authored by Ferhat in recent months, for Adam Coghlan to talk Ferhat about his journey, about the history of his family’s restaurant, what it means to serve people in London, about change, about speaking out, and about whether the end might well be nigh for one of the city’s most well-known and beloved places to eat.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ferhat Dirik is the owner of Mangal II in Dalston.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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We are living through an age of online extremes: hype machines, queues, hidden gems, while at the same time, for some of those embedded in the London restaurant industry itself, there’s a fundamental sense of malaise, of boredom, with a creeping homogenisation of restaurants and food culture. This is ‘the mid’: a term that is now common parlance for those who feel adrift of a discourse in which everything is either ‘absolutely incredible’ or ‘totally garbage’.

In this month’s hour-long episode, we go deep into some of the forces shaping what we deem to be good, bad and, critically, mid in food right now, with not one, but two heavyweight London influencers: Feroz Gajia, food Instagram chief and chef-owner of Bake Street in Clapton, and Montague Ashley-Craig, author of the Everything’s Toasted newsletter and founder of luxury-small-plate-wine-bar-friendly soap brand, Montamonta.

We discuss distinctions between London and other big cities in the world, the role of influencers, a recent New York Times list of 25 essential London restaurant dishes, delivery apps, PR and the subjectivity around ideas of quality. At the end, and in a bid to animate some of our theories, we debut the Vittles Podcast show-and-tell, as our host and guests reveal, eat and discuss a food stuff they feel represents the best of the middle ground.

Like our previous two podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer, and to the whole team at Young Space, the beautiful location where we record. We’ll see you again next month, when Adam will be speaking with Mangal 2 owner Ferhat Dirik.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Montague Ashley-Craig is the creator of the ‘fancy restaurant handwash’, montamonta. She is also a Glaswegian, begrudging London Fields resident, cosmetic scientist, and annoying over-sharer with strong opinions loosely held.

Feroz Gajia is the founder of Bake Street in London. Sometime food writer, Instagrammer and consultant, he is always obsessed with something, mostly food. He makes what you want to eat.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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In this special episode, Adam Coghlan is joined by Ruby Tandoh, the author, journalist (and Vittles contributor) who has just published the book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. The book is an attempt to explain the growing power and absurdity of food culture via the mediums it is transmitted through, whether supermarkets, newspaper supplements or Instagram reels (Tandoh’s ‘15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything,’ which was published on Vittles earlier this year, was loosely based on chapter on cookbooks).

As a sprint through the terrain of contemporary food culture, All Consuming covers everything from the rise of bubble tea, restaurant critics in the US and in the UK, food influencers, supermarket battles, the dominance of the queue, TikTok, wellness elixirs, trad wives, the invention of Viennetta and modern ice cream culture, Mob Kitchen, recipe development, and the impact America has had on British food (via Wimpy). We talk about the process of writing the book, the speed at which food culture is changing, and the democratisation (and regression) of food media.

Later on in the podcast, Adam checks in with Vittles founder and editor Jonathan Nunn, who has some thoughts about the current state of fine dining, including reviews of Row on 5 in London, and Wilson’s and Upstairs at Landrace in the West Country.

Like our previous two podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you normally listen to your podcasts. The restaurant focus of The Vittles Podcast will continue later this month with an episode in which we speak with two ~tastemakers~ about some of the undercurrents affecting the London restaurant industry and their own competing versions of what’s good and what’s… mid.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove who produced it, and to the Young Space who provided the beautiful recording space.

Everything must go

We are on the verge of announcing the line up for Issue 2, but in the meantime, we have about 40 copies of Issue 1 left. Our distributor is out of copies too, and so are most shops, so we would recommend ordering directly from our web shop if you’d like to read it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ruby Tandoh is a writer and hater on food and culture whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vice, Taste, Eater, Vittles and more.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Good morning and welcome to The Vittles Podcast. You may have noticed that we’re not calling this the Vittles Quarterly anymore, mainly because we’ve not done one since Christmas and the word ‘quarterly’ is starting to lose its meaning. But also, we’re hoping to make podcasts a more regular feature at Vittles Restaurants from September, so we’re hedging our bets with a non-committal name.

In this month’s episode, we have a special guest: writer, critic and part-time Vittles reviewer Simran Hans, who joins Adam and Jonathan to talk about the summer in London restaurant news. Our main topics are two eccentric London food spaces: Singburi and Leila’s Shop. We discuss what didn’t make into Jonathan’s review of Singburi, our thoughts on the new one, and what the restaurant’s evolution says about the state of the London industry more generally. We also talk about Leila’s Shop and its current fight for survival on Calvert Avenue in the context of Simran’s March review, It’s Time to Talk About Leila’s (the alternate name for this episode was ‘I would just like to state for the record that I have signed the petition’). Plus! Stupid summer beverages, what we’ve enjoyed and not enjoyed in London restaurants this year, and a short look back at five years of Vittles.

Like our previous special podcast on The Lost Food of Soho, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you normally listen to your podcasts. A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove who produced it, and to the Young Space who provided the beautiful recording space.

Also: a small note on magazines

Many of you have been in touch to ask if we are going to restock the magazine, which has been out of stock on our website for the last two weeks. The good news is that we do have a few more left and they are now online. We have sold 95% of the print run and we will not reprint, so these are the last copies available. We’d recommend ordering now if you’d like to get one before we move onto Issue 2 later this year.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Adam Coghlan.

Simran Hans is a writer in London. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, GQ, VICE and many others. You can read some of it at simranhans.com or find her on Instagram @simranhans.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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The Lost Food of Soho is a one-episode podcast by Lucy Dearlove. You can listen to it for free on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, which are now hosting all back-issues of the Vittles podcast.

You can buy prints of today’s map, created by the artists Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby exclusively for Vittles.

A reminder, too, that we’ve released prints ahead of the publication of issue 1 of Vittles magazine, which you can shop here.

Cast of The Lost Food of Soho

Hilary Armstrong – writer, worked in Andrew Edmunds Marcus Harris – DJ/promoterRussell Davies – creator of eggbaconchipsandbeansJeremy Lee – chef proprietor of Quo VadisChristine Yau – former owner of Y MingDarren Coffield – artist and author of Tales From The Colony Room: Soho’s Lost BohemiaIain Sinclair – authorPolly – sex work and organiser with SWARMMegan Macedo – writer and former Sister Ray employee

There are many versions of Soho. ‘Italian caffs and delis Soho’. ‘Private members club Soho’. ‘Jazz bar Soho’. ‘Blitz Club Soho’. ‘Terence Conran Soho’. ‘Film industry Soho’. ‘Music industry Soho’. ‘Paul Raymond Soho’. All existing separately but simultaneously: sometimes overlapping, sometimes built on the rubble of each other.

We often talk about an ‘Old Soho’ of the mind – sometimes entirely of the imagination. Usually the qualification for a person or an establishment being worthy of the description ‘Old Soho’ is for it to be no longer with us, but there are some exceptions: Trisha’s, Bruno’s, The Admiral Duncan, Ronnie Scott’s, Algerian Coffee Stores, Bar Italia, Andrew Edmunds. Then there is a ‘New Soho’, mainly made up of restaurants. These two places, taking up the same physical space, are often pitted against each other, but I have little nostalgia for Old Soho. As the historian Dan Cruickshank puts it in his book Soho: A Street Guide to Soho's History, Architecture and People: ‘from the debris of death and destruction has sprung new life, often strange and exotic.’

But even allowing for nostalgia, you can’t avoid that Soho has experienced huge, irredeemable losses. Many of them restaurants. Many of them since 2000. The Stockpot, Alastair Little, Ed’s Easy Diner, Dionysus, the New Piccadilly, Y Ming. Then there are the many unheralded takeaways and late night restaurants serving the area around Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street and the northern streets of Soho during the early 2000s before various factors, Crossrail included, physically decimated the night time economy.

These are the places I want to celebrate in The Lost Food of Soho. Soho is constantly shifting and evolving, and I wanted to draw a line in the sand for the period during the 2000s in which I got to know it, which often feels overlooked. ‘My’ Soho now feels like it qualifies as Old Soho too. Millennial Soho — just like its patrons — had one foot in the past and one eye on the future, whether it liked it or not. In a strange way, it has changed the way Londoners eat. Lucy Dearlove

Places named in The Lost Food of Soho, in order of mention:

Dionysus, The Astoria, The French House, Metro Cinema, The Palomar, Burger King, The Stockpot, Ed’s Easy Diner, Wimpy, Presto, Zed Cafe, Burger and Beyond, Patty and Bun, The Breakfast Club, Cheat Meals, The Admiral Duncan, Comptons, Joe and the Juice, Andrew Edmunds, Maison Berteaux, Patisserie Valerie, Quo Vadis, Bifulco, Debono, I Camisa, Cheung Dam, Y Ming, Bar Italia, Ronnie Scott’s, Garlic and Shots, Alastair Little, Koya, Hoppers, Ciccone’s Pizza Bar, Wheeler’s, The Colony Room, Duck Soup, Bar Pollo, Soho House, Zilli’s, Cafe Boheme, The Gay Hussar, Bob Bob Ricard, Pizza Express, Sister Ray, Vital Ingredient, Tossed, Soderbergh, The Blue Posts, Berwick Street Market, Pizza Pilgrims, Bone Daddy, Supreme, Bar Bruno, The Intrepid Fox, Byron, Madame Jojos, Raymond Revue Bar, The Box, Rooms by the Hour, The New Piccadilly, The Devonshire.

Credits

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St. Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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Vittles Quarterly: The Peasant Food Remontada

Good morning and welcome back to our series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here and the second episode here.

On this episode, for our end of year review, we’re joined by Hester van He…

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com

Good morning and welcome to the second in a series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here.

This month we discuss the biggest story in food media in 2024 - the resignation of Pete Wells from the most powerful job in restaurant criticism for health reasons - and h…

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All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including all previous episodes of The Full English podcast.

A Vittles subscription costs £4/month or £40/year, and this will soon increase ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below.

Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

Episode Six: The Fish Finger Bhorta

[Knocking on the door. Door opens].

Ash Sarkar: Hi! So nice to see you!

Bhorta is just like mashed, like anything mashed it. Do you have mustard involved in some capacity? Is there ginger? Is there chilli? And so that's like the traditional bit and then I guess the like fusion cuisine element is like, fish fingers!

And originally it's your mum's invention?

AS: Yeah, or like, it's kind of like drawn from like the collective Bangla unconscious. You can bhorta anything. The thing is that, like, if you can mash it, it can be a bhorta. All you need is belief!

Forest DLG – the man behind the music in this show – and myself are at writer and commentator Ash Sarkar’s house to learn how to make a fish finger bhorta. The recipe is one that Ash learnt from her mum. When she shared it on Twitter, Nigella Lawson picked it up and featured it as the first dish she made in her show Cook, Eat, Repeat. And with that, the fish finger bhorta blew up.

AS: I'd either been at home and got the recipe off my mum or I'd been at home and eaten it. And I just tweeted about it, saying that it was the equivalent of like Proust’s tea dipped Madeleine. Like it was just so connected to memory and being a kid. And then people were like, “oh, what are you talking about”? So I just posted a bare bones version of the recipe. And then Nigella was like, “I'm gonna cook it” and I was like, “lol, okay”, and then she was like, “I cooked it”. And I was like, “Oh, f**k!”

Ash attributes some of the success of the dish down to the nostalgia that people in England hold toward fish fingers, or beige food in general. But it’s also a dish that tells a story.

AS: It's kind of the story of the immigrant experience in this country, particularly for the ones that came over earlier. So my grandma when she first came to this country was like 1954 or something like that. You didn't have the ingredients. I mean, these people were eating like cavemen here. It was just like, unseasoned pebbles, and that’s it. Just like raw dogging boulders, just nothing! And so even for the basic stuff like garlic, that was hard to get. Or cooking with chopped tomatoes, or talk less of mustard seeds and mustard oil. So you're you're having constantly in your cooking to just integrate what you can find and season it, spicing it, do something with it in a way which tastes like something that you can have at home.

Welcome to The Full English, the podcast that looks at English history and identity through the lens of food. In this episode, we’re going to look at how immigration has led to new dishes being made and eaten in England. Do dishes like the fish finger bhorta count as English? To answer this question, first we need to know what a national cuisine is and, importantly, who gets to decide this? I also want to ask whether nationalism, and English nationalism as it exists in our everyday lives, actually receives enough attention from those on the left of politics who claim to be heavily invested in changing our culture. If not, then why? And can we really avoid talking about Englishness today? This is episode six: the Fish Finger Bhorta.

Jason Edwards: I think you can make a fairly cast iron case that any national food culture is a myth.

This is Jason Edwards who lectures on food and politics at Birkbeck University. He was talking to me about British food, but the same can be said of English food.

JE: There's a famous book on nationalism by Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities. And, and it introduces this term, imagined community. He uses the term imagined communities, nations as imagined communities, and says they are imagined because we will never meet most of the people in that community. But we imagine who they are, their identities, and we imagine it through things like, you know, what newspapers, they read, what literature they read, what kind of sporting events they go to, what food they eat. Okay, so that's the sense in which we imagine our commonality, what we what we share in common with other members of this, this culture. Now, it's a myth that everybody eats the same thing in the same way at the same time, and so on. But myth doesn't necessarily mean false, that it has no basis in reality, right? Myth rather means important ideas, images, narratives about who we are, as as a nation. So it's not the case that English people sit around eating roast beef for dinner every night, or fish and chips or whatever. But it is the case that there are these important dishes and practices of food, which we imagined in our narratives and images, and so on, which do form a sense of, of national food identity

A national food is an image, or myth, that a community of people share in common. That doesn’t mean they actually all do the thing that the myth suggests, only that they consider a certain trait belongs to a certain group of people, who in turn constitute a nation.

JE: But what's very important is that it's a contested myth. So not everybody agrees about what constitutes British food, what constitutes British foodways, and so on. This is something that's open to contestation, and actually open to a lot of public contestation, and certainly has been in recent times.

People fight over the myths that denote national identity because these myths say something about who the national community are and how such a community should behave. This is particularly important in contexts in which those with power, such as politicians, want to seek legitimacy or endorsement. Think of the cringey relationship between Hillary Clinton and hot sauce.

CLIP

Do all black people in America carry hot sauce in their bag? No. But is hot sauce synonymous with being black? Often yes. It’s culinary myth, or idea, that Clinton sought to mobilise in order to win support from black voters. And that’s why Jason Edwards explains that who creates the myth matters.

JE: If you think of gastronomical knowledge of what fine food is, or authentic, national food, it was, you know, it was always the gastronome and formalised gastronomic expertise that dictated or said, what authentic food was. France is the leading example of this. Which is interesting because the British state, so to speak, has never been involved in really in promoting an idea of British national cuisine. But of course, in France it was, from the period after the revolution, and really getting going, probably quite a bit later than that, from the late 19th century onwards, you have the French state sponsoring these ideas of what you know, classic French cooking is and how it symbolises France. And you have before that of course, the appellation system in France, which is first really set up system of legal protections for food items and food culture. It's that perhaps supported by official institutional knowledge that determines what authentic national cuisine is.

But when we get to the end of the last century, there's a shift. So, gastronomy is no longer seen in those terms. What tends to be elevated is what was traditionally seen as the peasant and the low, you know, it's the, it's ordinary rustic food, which gets to be seen as, you know, symbolic of a nation’s food. So, you know, you think of lardo as one of the, the typical examples. You know, lardo, is pig fat, back fat. That's, you know, salted. Who would want to eat that in a fine dining restaurant 30 years ago? But now, of course, everybody's putting it on toast with anchovies, and it's, you know, and it's, it's the thing, thing to have, and it becomes elevated into this almost fine item of gastronomy. Even though it's very rustic and very ordinary. So you have this shift, gear down, if you like, towards the more demotic, the more ordinary. And it's the rediscovering that authentic, sort of rustic ordinariness of natural food that that is important. In certain circles, if you turn your nose up at a plate of intestines now, then people look down at you. How's that? How's that happened?

While our ideas of what constitutes authentic or refined cuisine may have focused downward, exactly how and why the restaurant St John has gained widespread praise and recognition for the practice of eating the whole animal – from nose to tail, as they put it – rather than West African or Pakistani migrants in England who never stopped eating in this way tells us something about the relative power of different voices to determine dominant myths about food. If English, or British, food is now about eating from nose to tail, one question we should ask is: ‘according to who’? While it might be easy to see how our dominant myths or fashions around food fashions can change, who has influence and who doesn’t in that meaning making is often far less visible.

To explore these issues I’ve come to Accra Palace, a restaurant in Hackney, London, where offal is on the menu without much fanfare. I’m here to meet Riaz Philips. Riaz is the author Belly Full, a book which documents Caribbean food in the UK. I started by asking Riaz why he wrote the book.

Riaz Phillips: I noticed at the time that there wasn't much literature about Caribbean food in the UK, there wasn't much media about it. For me, that's where my family are from. And the history of that community is like an everyday part of my life. And it just occurred to me how little the mainstream knew about that community. So I wanted to do a project that celebrated the community in a fun way. That was like engaging.

I think, for the major part, if a restaurant or a takeaway spot doesn't tick those, those kind of new forms of media, if it doesn't appeal to certain aesthetic, or a crowd that it kind of just lives outside that genre of food, almost to the fact where it doesn't exist. So that's the issue I had with a lot of these Caribbean, and West African restaurants that I think are amazing. Some of them have been around for about, some of them, nearly 40 years, 30 years, 20 years, and never given a review. Never been celebrated. Never had a picture taken in a local newspaper. Certainly not in the national newspapers. And, yeah, I just thought that was ironic, especially given the fact that, you know, when these new restaurants open with trendy names, and trendy celebrity, Instagram names attached, they get all the reviews out, and all the newspaper editors and reviewers and bloggers go there. But for me, the super ironic thing is that a lot of these places are like literally on the same road as some of the places I featured in Belly Full, like across the road or a few doors down. I'm not one to complain. So I thought instead of like complaining and moaning about it, I'll just do something myself.

Open the restaurant review section of any national newspaper and its unlikely you will find anywhere similar to the places that Riaz documents. This tells us something about who has a voice in the making of our national myths, and who is marginalised. This kind of problem is also ridiculous, because ultimately we all lose out on eating good food with good people.

Waitress: You should try fufu.

RP: You can.

Ok. I’m scared to use my hands though!

That’s not to say there aren’t any barriers to embracing unfamiliar food. I’m clearly not used to eating with my fingers. In the same way, I remember how my grandparents found it difficult to eat using chopsticks.

RP: If that's the case, then you just got to make mistakes and learn. Like, a Ghanian immigrant to England, if they’re eating Sunday roast for the first time. You know, it's the same, it's no different. It's exactly the same thing. Just an alien food and you just you approach it how you think you might. That person might pick up the Yorkshire pudding with their hand and just try to jump it and other people will be like, “what are you doing, you have to use a knife and fork!” You just watch other people how they eat.

The reason why people get that familiarity to other cuisines is for the things I spoke about before. So they've been shown it so many times that before they even go there, they feel a familiarity with it, even though they might not have actually ever had it before. Take something like tacos, for instance, loads of people have never eaten it before. But they've heard of it. And they're familiar with the culture, because it's been illustrated to them so many times through soft media that when it’s time to eat, or when they get presented with it, they have that kind of openness to it.

While most people know what a taco is, even if they haven’t tried one, the same isn’t the case for Caribbean and African food. As Riaz says, that’s a product of our media environment. It’s a product of who gets the loudest say when it comes to creating shared images – or myths – about food.

RP: I think especially now, that social media and YouTube, when you can go into a restaurants page before you even go there. I think those kind of excuses are dwindling. Because you can know everything about, well, not everything, but you can have a good deal of knowledge about cuisine and how to approach it before you even go to eat.

We’re nearing the end of season one of the Full English and this is the part in the show where I ask you to give us a small regular donation so we can make more episodes. If you want to see a second season of this podcast, go to patreon.com/thefullenglish. You can sign up for as little as £3 per month and with that you’ll get access to loads of exclusive content including recipes related to this show. Go to patreon.com/thefullenglish.

One myth concerning English food is that we’re great culinary borrowers. We might not know, or perhaps don’t like, traditional English dishes but that’s ok, because we are happy to eat other national foods, from pizza to pakora. In England, this idea is linked to the sense that the country wiped out its own culinary traditions through its rapid industrialisation, or otherwise that, at least since empire, we’ve embraced and adapted culinary traditions beyond our own shores. Yet attempting to define English food in this way can make it appear to be everything and so also nothing. But there’s another problem with this idea of England having a clean culinary slate. This is Riaz again.

RP: If you look through some of these books that come up by your top chefs, you flick through them. It's just a pick and mix of different cultures. One page is kimchi, the next page is tacos. They've got plantain in there. So they're happy to promote that. But then when it comes to promoting the people of those originating cultures then suddenly it's an issue: like we don't know if we can sell enough books on Nigerian food, or yeah, it's a huge problem.

I would never say that people who aren't directly Caribbean can't cook Caribbean food. But it's plainly obvious to see when people from that background are struggling to get their work published or noticed but another chef can use those same recipes in their books. And there's no issue of that. The publishers don't have any problem with publishing that. So the issue is not that certain people can or can't cook food. It's the fact that people who are directly from those heritages aren't getting those same exposure opportunities as the other people. That's the major issue.

This point helps us think about who has the authority to determine dominant food myths and who doesn’t. About who gets the credit for cultural exchanges, and who is left relatively silent. What Riaz is saying is not an argument against cultural exchange as such. Because English food – like any national cuisine – is the product of interaction between different cultures. Because there is no such thing as a pure, untouched national cuisine. Ackee and saltfish, typically considered the national dish of Jamaica, is the fusion of the West African ackee fruit with North Atlantic salted cod, an ingredient that was often given to slaves by European slave owners and traders. The same is true of what we think of as Chinese food.

Andrew Wong: I'm Andrew Wong and I'm chef at restaurant A Wong

You can pick out random facts, you can say that, you know, Sichuanese food is based around chillis, predominantly Sichuan peppercorns, but, you know, chilies didn't arrive in China until the Columbian Exchange in the 1600s. You know, at the same time, you can, you could say that, you know, China has 14 international borders, it borders 14 countries ranging from Mongolia to Russia to, you know, to India to Turkmenistan, you cannot expect the cuisine to be the same when it has that type of transfer of culture along those borders. But I think the truth of the matter is China is the original sponge of other people's cultures, yet somehow because there's only been 100 and so odd years of Chinese cuisine outside of China in international countries I think that people have lost that message along the way. China through the various Silk Roads over the past several thousand years, has borrowed and adapted and – I don't want to use the word stolen – but absorbed more cultural gastronomy than any other cuisine. You know, whether it be from Persia through the south Silk Road or you're talking about the Ottoman influence from the kind of the sin Jang route into China, or taking stuff from the Middle East and India and bringing it back again. You know, China has taken all these ingredients and all these cultural gastronomies and made it part of what we perceive to be a lot of times just Chinese cuisine now in a generic form. But actually they're all very much integrated into being from other cultures. And I think sometimes people forget this, you know, they, they just assume that what they've experienced since their childhood is Chinese cuisine, but that is the very product of fusion over several thousand years.

Of course, a similarly global picture can be painted of England and the traditions we call English.

Catherine Hall: We've never been an island story. It’s always been a history of interconnection, with continental Europe, with Empire, with other empires.

This is the historian Catherine Hall

CH: The more you understand how the idea that globalisation is a 20th century phenomenon is I mean, it's simply, it's absolutely not true. Mobility around the globe started almost as soon as there was human settlement. And this has been, you know, the waves of different peoples that have come into the United Kingdom, and people from here who've gone out, you know, in very, very significant numbers. So the history of migration, of emigration and immigration, is actually integral to our history.

As dated and contradictory as it might sound, it’s probably better to think of any national cuisine as a kind of fusion food. But not all fusions are created equal. The chicken tikka masala is a dish that is often seen as the peak of this way of thinking about national food but this fusion food was invented for a white British audience. What Riaz has said should make us question why fusion food made for and by immigrant communities in England haven’t achieved the same national status. That is, at least until the fish finger bhorta.

AS: So fish fingers in the oven is the first bit

Nigella is clear that the fish fingers need to be cooked longer than the packet says

AS: Oh, yeah, they've got to be crunchy. But that's the thing, it’s that when I shared the recipe, I think I just had cook the fish fingers but I didn't specify that my mum always fried them. 1) it wants to get crunchy and then 2) growing up when my mum was making this you'd like be putting it on like kitchen towel or whatever and so you'd have this like fish finger pyramid so that if you were quick you could dart in and get a sneaky pre-bhorta fish finger and so that's kind of the way to do it. But then since Nigella was oven cook them I was like, yeah, what kind of obscene freak would fry them!

While our fish fingers were in the oven, and the onions were sweating in a pan, I wanted to know from Ash whether she thinks the fish finger bhorta would count as an English dish?

AS: Yeah, cos, like, what are the boundaries of Englishness? Like what does it stretch to accommodate? I was born in this country, my mum was born in this country, it's involving fish fingers, which aren't like massive in Dhaka. This is profoundly English and it's shaped by the experience of the Bengali diaspora in this country, in a way which is profoundly English. And I think that this is also why I get really annoyed with the constant litigation, particularly on the left, ‘ouuu but that's patriotism’, because it's like, you know, that people are gonna live their lives outside of this conversation. If you listen to that AJ Tracy song False Nine, where it's like, “in Trinidad fam, I’m the English fob, white Air Ones and England top”. And I just think like, oh, that's just happening. Like, it's not happening, like, because of the left or because of what, so and so's like, written for Novara or what Paul Embery’s tweeted, it's just that's the way in which diaspora exists and makes a life and shapes a place. So you think about the relationship of grime or drill to the British state and British history, it’s deeply antagonistic towards those things, but also doesn't exist without like football chanting, as well as like the culture of dancehall MCing or toasting or jungle MCing, it also needs like football chanting to happen. Then you've got the riff by Big Narstie on like, you know, Bass Defence League. Do you know what I mean? It's in conversation with a racist English nationalism and all this is happening at the same time.

As Ash says, this kind of meaning making around Englishness is happening whether people pay attention to it or not. It’s happening in music and it’s happening in people’s kitchens. The product of this fusion culture stands in stark contrast to the imaginary of people like Paul Embery, who Ash mentioned, and who sees the consumption of commonly imported food items as elitist snobbery. But at the same time, as Ash points out, people on the left of politics are often reluctant to engage with the ideas around national idenity, in particular Englishness, even when these ideas already engage people’s lives and when they help determine the outcome of national elections.

Adam Ramsay: Those of us who don't think of ourselves as nationalists still have our worldviews, you know, shaped by the lenses of nationalism. And there's a particularly Anglo-British arrogance to thinking that you're footloose, that you don't have a national identity

This is Adam Ramsay, a journalist from Scotland and an editor of the website Open Democracy.

AR: Because England was the first sort of modern nation, it had the first Industrial Revolution, every other European nationalism constructed in comparison to it. So in the same way as often men don't think about our gender in the way that women do. English people don't think about being English in the way that the French understand their French and Scots understand they’re Scots and Lithuanians understand they're Lithuanian. And so, once you don't understand that Englishness is a part of you, you don't see it as nationalism, it's very hard to analyse it. But it's absolutely written through all of our political conversations. So an example I often give is the media will often determine that a person is or is not prime ministerial. You know, Boris Johnson and David Cameron are both apparently Prime Ministerial, whereas Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn were apparently not prime ministerial. Now you look at the opinion data and Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn agree much more with most British people than did David Cameron or Boris Johnson. Ed Miliband had much more experience in government than either David Cameron or Boris Johnson.

If you meet those people, Boris Johnson and David Cameron are not particularly charismatic people. They're not very impressive in any way. So what does it mean, to say their prime ministerial? You know, this isn't just something the press say. This is something that is widely believed across a large portion of the country. What it means is they're posh, you know, they went to Eton and they have, they exhibit certain kind of personal traits of posh people. And English nationalism tells you posh people should be in charge. And so they're Prime Ministerial, they're like other prime ministers have been, which means they went to Eton. They appear to be posh. This is this is about the class system. It's about the belief that you know, the ruling class ought to be ruling us, they're good at ruling us.

I’ve come to the India Club on the Strand in London to meet Sunder Katwala. Sunder directs the thinktank British Future and I want to know from him whether Englishness is seen by people of different backgrounds as an inclusive identity. Because this might be another reason why people on the left of politics avoid engaging with this idea. But to start, I asked Sunder why he brought me here to the India Club.

SK: This dining room feels very untouched really over five decades it's been here. You could imagine somewhere like this being Bombay or Delhi, as well as in London. So I think we've got a little piece of the jigsaw here.

Sunder explained to me that for his Dad’s generation British identity was more heavily invested in than Englishness, which was associated with being ethnically white and having a long lineage of family from England.

SK: I think when my dad arrives actually, gets the plane, it's the Whitsun bank holiday of 1968 and it's about a week and a half after Enoch Powell has made the Rivers of Blood speech which is the most infamous speech in a way resonating down generations but it really shaped the atmosphere around Britain that that first generation of Commonwealth migrants was arriving into.

CLIP: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to permit the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the future growth of the immigrant descended population”

SK: It's sort of message that says don't come, you might have got your medical degree and want to be a doctor. But no thanks. What, what it's really about, actually, that speech it's a rejection of the idea that out of the British Empire, modern Britain will become multi ethnic because what Enoch Powell is saying is Empire was all a bit of a mistake, the last two centuries, we've gone on a bit of a wander, but we're home now. So kind of go away and stay out. We are, we are the untouched, unchanged, Tudor England, that we, that we have always imagined ourselves to be after all this global wandering. And yet, of course, that, you know, India has been transformed by the British being there for two centuries. Britain is now being transformed by the fact that British Indians have a have a link here. And so there's a, there's a fundamental argument about British identity, who can be British. But by the time I'm a teenager that's going on, but that's kind of being won as well, because the fact actually, of being born in this country is, you know, gives you a sense of standing.

Britishness was also seen as more inclusive than Englishness since people who moved to England from within the Empire had been taught by the empire to see themselves as British.

SK: British identity had broadened, was broadening. I think migrants felt strongly British. They had a British passport. They were told about their Britishness. You look at another group, the British black Caribbean population. The Windrush is their symbolic moment of arrival. They come on a boat back to Britain. A lot of them have been in the RAF, they've got a sense because it's what's been taught in Imperial classrooms about their relationship to this country. And they sort of arrive in a London where, you know, schools in London haven't quite been told the same things as the schools in Jamaica. British identity proved quite easy to pluralise. Those who have a Commonwealth background felt it was their link to why they were here, the story of empire and decolonisation and migration and integration made sense. But we didn't have a conversation about British, English, Scottish and Welsh identity. I think in England, people tend to think of Britain and England as much the same thing until sort of Euro ‘96 and deevolution 25 years ago which makes the English start to realise actually England or Britain was slightly distinct. The Scots and Welsh have always known that. But your father's generation wouldn't have had a conversation about whether you could be English.

Sunder’s thinktank have conducted research into the extent to which people perceive Englishness to be an inclusive identity, and whether this is changing over time.

SK: It was a view of the young and not the old 15 years ago that everyone can identify as English, if they were born in England versus actually it's more ethnically defined thing you'd get from your parents or grandparents. And actually, older people have now adopted the view of younger people. In the last decade, they noticed that the norm has shifted and they've gone, they've gone with it. There's a reciprocal dance going on here. And to some extent, the white English have now moved to say, actually, we need to do the same thing with Englishness as we did with Britishness and the image we see in our football team that's who the flag belongs to. It belongs to people from here who want to belong to it. And match it up with whatever you want to. And ethnic minorities. If you're younger, you believe that as well. And if you're older, you're surprised to hear that, because you had a different set of set of categories. And so what we see in the data is that ethnic minorities think this is very true of the sphere of football in particular, but are less clear that it’s true of the flag, and on St. George's day and a pub in November, as it is of, you know, a football stadium in June. And so that's a work in progress across groups, across generations.

If Sunder is right, then English identity is increasingly being perceived as inclusive of different ethnicities. Sunder is agreeing with Ash who says that investment in Englishness is already happening. In a sense, both Ash and Sunder are saying that those on the political left who claim to be invested in changing culture are actually being left behind by those who are already changing the meanings of Englishness to make it more inclusive. But in the domain of politics, as Adam pointed out, when left wing politicians don’t engage with the ideas of national identity, then right wing ones will find it easier to define it in less inclusive terms and more elitist terms.

SK: You have to be quite secure about the passport in your pocket in order to believe that you don't need a national identity. And I think I think liberal left people who are sort of beyond national identity, who don't have a psychological need for it, don't realise actually the level of their security in doing that. And so you're less likely actually to see migrants and ethnic minorities take that post national view, even though they have post national links. So the argument about you know, do we get internationalism by saying the universal brotherhood man or do we get internationalism by arguing for an inclusive outward looking Britain an inclusive outward looking Sweden, Germany, France. On the whole, if you want to take a society with you, and people are going to run in democratic elections, you actually want the internationalist version of national identity to compete with the other version, otherwise, you give them all of the flags and things and all the stuff of the last few centuries to your opponents.

But there’s another reason why left wing politicians and activists are reluctant to engage with English nationalism. The problem stems from the fact that is England is a nation without a state. There is no English parliament, as there is a parliament for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That means that England doesn’t have political parties that represent England alone. In the non-proportional elections for Westminster, where the party with the most seats takes control of government, political parties like Labour and the Conservatives want to win seats across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; so if they spoke in the language of Englishness alone they couldn’t do that. But this could also be changing.

Mike Kenny: One of the really striking after effects of COVID will be that many people in England but elsewhere too sort of rather wake up to the fact of devolution, during the management of that crisis. And given that a number of the key powers that were important to those governments in relation to public health were held in different parts of the UK Boris Johnson was, in many respects, really managing England and as, you know, developing policy of England. I think that was really put into sharp relief.

This is Mike Kenny, a professor at Cambridge University. Mike is an expert on the history and causes of the devolution of certain powers from Westminster to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In effect, he says, this devolution has caused the British state – represented by the ministries and parliament at Westminster – to become, at times, the representative state for England. That’s been observable in policies relevant to the pandemic and which have impacted our lives dramatically over the last two years. Mike also says that the absence of distinctly English political institutions can lend English nationalism a resentful character.

MK: I mean there are no English institutions, you know, the institutions of UK governance are labelled British and the English are ruled by the institutions of the British state. And this becomes a sort of feeling that Englishness is somehow being denied or forbidden, which I think has become a really important point and has undoubtedly, I think, given Englishness in some context, a sort of, you know, anti cosmopolitan, anti London vibe. I think what complicates that is that I think, particularly since the financial and banking crises, I think Englishness does, in some parts of the country, become a kind of almost a sort of a language, an idiom, that you can use to talk about a sense of feeling really forgotten about and disaffected about the sort of way in which government work. So I think there are different things going on here. But I think a really striking feature of the last 15, 20 years is the way in which the language of Englishness is picked up by those who are championing causes against the political elite if you like.

But how and why people express their Englishness isn’t limited to just that.

MK: The degree to which people find meaning in their national identity when it comes to politics just varies. I remember, I've always been struck by this, I did a workshop in Leicester, with a bunch of stakeholders, people who were sort of involved in community work or involved with working, doing projects with the council, mostly ethnic minority. I tried to replicate the cultural and ethnic character of the area. Most of the people said, “No, no, I feel British not English. That's not for me.” And then at one point one of them said, “Yeah, but my kids, they talk about being English”, and so on. And the room sort of lit up, because everyone said, “Oh, yeah”, and “I can't understand it”. And I just thought that was so interesting. Now they were partly talking about a cultural thing about football and so on. But it was more than that, because I probed them. And I just think it's really important that we remember that people's feelings of nationhood are not fate, they often are part of the materials that people use to make sense of the social and political world they inhabit. And, above all, I think what the evidence suggests is that there is quite a latent appetite for people to hear more the political world being conducted in a register that speaks to them as people who are English in their sense of national identity, as well as people who live in Leicester, or are members of their local community, it's just like a sort of level of, of identity and community that is sort of pretty much missing, I think, from the political world.

LSo what has any of this got to do with food? Well, if questions around national identity are not settled, if they are constantly evolving in our everyday lives, and if there are tensions in our political system that means our national identities are being mobilised, then how and who defines Englishness matters. As this podcast has sought to show, one way we define ourselves is through food.

Looking at food can reveal both our national history as well as some of the contemporary fault lines in our society: from who can afford to eat out and where, to who struggles to put food on the table. Our ideas around food indicate, rightly or wrongly, what we see to be posh and elitist and what by the same token is seen as more popular. But food also shows us an immensity of collaboration, exchange and the embracing of difference: insofar as national cuisines can be said to exist at all, they are always, like the nation itself, a product of fusion, of exchange across man made boundaries, of cultures whose existence exceeds these boundaries but can, by the labour of our imagination, crystalised into something we call national.

For this show I asked almost all the guests I spoke to what they would consider to be a dish that would represent English food today. Answers included roast beef, the English breakfast, roast mutton and an Indian-English curry, like Chicken Tikka. But if I had to choose, I’d probably suggest the fish finger bhorta. Why? Well, first of all, nations are ideas that bound together a group of people who usually share a language and a patch of land.

But these things are deeply porous. They are in fact made and traversed by the interactions of those who are not always included within the idea of the nation. And that’s especially the case for England. While America is often seen as a nation made by immigrants, England often represses what was a central position within an enormous global empire. I think the fish finger bhorta recognises this history. Second, the dish was created by Bangladeshi women looking for a taste of their previous home. Unlike the chicken tikka, it wasn’t intended for a white English audience, but by working with what was to hand – in this case a popular processed food, the fish finger – the dish has become popular among those with different heritages but who occupy the same spaces as people like Ash Sarkar’s mum: spaces both geographic and linguistic but also spaces like supermarkets and neighbourhood shops, school canteens and the front rooms of homes in England at tea time. The dish speaks of English history but above all the fish finger bhorta is also just delicious.

LB: This is delicious!

Forest DLG: yeah it's f*g good!

AS: I think I overcooked fingers, which you'd think is impossible to do!

This podcast starts from the principle that the meanings of Englishness is a topic that is already a lively conversation in our society and that a key medium through which we talk about the nature of Englishness – just like any other national identity – is food. In a sense, this show is about crafting Englishness as much as it is about finding it. And that’s something that I want to do with you. If you have any ideas or views you’d like to share with me then please get in touch via Twitter and Instagram. You’ll find us there @FullEngPod. And again, if you want this podcast to continue, please show your support over at patreon.com/fullenglish. There’s so many topics we’d love to cover but we need the money to do that.

Thanks as always to our guests. Thanks to Forest DLG for the music and to Jonathan Nunn for all the support in making this show. I’m Lewis Bassett and that’s it for season one. Thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vittles.substack.com/subscribe

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The first thing to say is that this is not a Vittles podcast. I know some of you have been clamouring for one, but I have been strangely reluctant to do it (probably due to fear about my lack of audio nativity.) Plus, do we really need another food podcast when we already have our pick of our favourite restaurant critics interviewing yet another celebrity over lunch about what food they liked growing up?

And yet, and yet…The Full English is also not not a Vittles podcast, in the sense that over its six episodes, it expands and enriches many of the themes Vittles has been covering over the last two years. I’m thrilled and excited that The Full English team has chosen to debut it through Vittles before it launches later this year.

A little background for you: soon after he wrote the storming opener to Season 3 entitled ‘Fk Fine Dining’, writer, chef and researcher Lewis Bassett asked if I would be interested in being involved in a podcast about English food, examining the country’s often unstable national identity through its cuisine (or lack of one). The pitch was ambitious, not just in terms of scope but in the range of voices it needed (I’m not going to lie, I thought there was little chance of getting all of them on one podcast). I said yes, Lewis disappeared, I forgot about it, and then Lewis came back a year later with a transcript that he has whittled down and shaped over the last few months with musician Forest DLG into six episodes that cover Breakfast, Sheep, Tea and Sugar, Factory Food, Modern European in England, and Fish Finger Bhortas. I’m very happy to admit I was proven wrong, and that Lewis’s doggedness over the last year means that The Full English is served by a variety of exceptional voices: academics, farmers, food writers, critics, historians, anthropologists and journalists, all in the service of finding out what English food actually is.

I’m going to leave it to Lewis to explain more in further detail, but I hope you enjoy listening (or reading the transcript, if that’s your thing) to these six episodes over the coming weeks. The first episode is open to all subscribers and the next five will be for paid subscribers only. If you would like to subscribe to Vittles for £4/month or £40/year, please click below — the price of a subscription will be going up soon so I recommend doing so if you have been thinking about it.

Vittles and The Full English would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this podcast:

Episode 1 (Breakfast): David Edgerton, Kaori O'Connor, Ben Rogers, Paul Freedman, Rowley Leigh

Episode 2 (Sheep): Pen Vogler, Maia Pal, George Comninel, Susan Rose, Ben Rogers, Matt Chatfield, Jeremy Chan, Rezaul Haque

Episode 3 (Tea and Sugar): Seren Charington-Hollins, Markman Ellis, Mathew Mauger, Mukta Das, Catherine Hall, Padraic Scanlan, David Edgerton

Episode 4 (Factory Foods): Matt Chatfield, Lucy Williamson, David Edgerton, Liz Bowles, Michael Clark, Aaron Bastani, Elena Walden, Tess Kelly, Pen Vogler, Tom Kerridge

Episode 5 (Modern European): Shaun Hill, Fay Maschler, Rowley Leigh, Jonathan Meades, Dan Lepard, Margot Henderson, Anna Tobias, Jeremy Lee, Ben Highmore, Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver

Episode 6 (Fish Finger Bhorta): Ash Sarkar, Jason Edwards, Riaz Phillips, Andrew Wong, Catherine Hall, Adam Ramsay, Sunder Katwala, Mike Kenny

The Full English, by Lewis Bassett

The idea for a podcast about nationalism first occurred to me during Rebecca Long-Bailey’s campaign to become the leader of the Labour Party in early 2020. During that campaign, Long-Bailey made a pitch for ‘progressive patriotism’. But this appeared to please no one. Conservative nationalists accused Long-Bailey’s patriotism of lacking any substance (it being simply overcompensation for Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent hatred of Britain.) Meanwhile, some left-wing commentators rejected any engagement with patriotism outright, and staunch Remainers saw the more-or-less empty slogan as pandering to swing voters in Labour’s so-called ‘red wall’. In the end, Long-Bailey rowed back on the idea.

The campaign slogan highlighted to me the extent to which Englishness is a relatively mute and sometimes taboo topic, especially on the political left. I’ve often wondered why. In episode six of this first series of the Full English, the Scottish journalist Adam Ramsay suggests that just as men are less likely to think about their gender than women, English people are less likely to think about their Englishness than people of other nations. This, Ramsay claims, is because England developed a modern economy and society ahead of others; when England assumed a prominent position in the world it did not need the stimulus of nationalism. England has also lacked the dynamic through which a nation is born in its struggle for independence from colonial control: witness the far more overt nationalisms of the United States, Ireland, Jamaica and countless other nations. In this sense, the confused and muted nature of English nationalism is a lasting legacy of Britain’s Empire.

The pandemic has also shown us the hidden state of Englishness. As important decisions affecting public health were handled by the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (hence the different policies and outcomes in each region), the British government based in Whitehall became in effect the government of England. Yet England is the only part of the UK which lacks its own political institutions. It appears the English don’t accept that devolution has taken place, or else that despite it, we still don’t recognise ourselves as a distinct polity requiring distinctive institutions. Were we to do so, then the debate over what new institutions we might want could be the source of a truly progressive conversation.

As someone who has spent half of their adult life working in kitchens, as I do now, I’m keenly aware of the extent to which food is a medium for these debates. Many chefs reject traditional English fare, as do many eaters. In popular restaurants in England, the preference is often for food from France, Italy, India and China. Equally puzzling is the matter of whether there is a distinctly English cuisine, rather than, say, British or regional British cuisines. This sentiment – which is examined in the first episode on the English Breakfast (one of the few dishes with ‘English’ in its actual name) – seems to reflect the confused state of opinion around Englishness more broadly. It’s as if there is a lack of language with which we can identify a distinct, national repertoire of habits and traits.

Food is an important key into all of this, and much else besides. Food isn’t just about nourishment; but even when it is – such as in the form of protein shakes – this too can tell us something about the social worlds we inhabit. Considered through the lens of the English nation, food can help us understand the origins of capitalism, the lineages of Empire, the meanings of climate change and the power dynamics, tastes and status of groups and individuals in English society. But the episodes in this show are not solely about England or Englishness because nations are always porous, and this wide remit is also necessary in the context of a hidden nationalism, one submerged within a post-imperial Britain.

There’s an endless number of topics to explore in future episodes of this podcast: from whether high bread prices still make us angry, to what Greggs and Pret can tell us about the North-South divide, to the English’s extreme relationships with drink. But to do that requires your support. Sign up on Patreon to help make future episodes of the podcast happen. And get in touch to let me know what you think of the show via Twitter and Instagram.

If you live in London and would like to attend a live episode and event to launch the podcast, you can buy a ticket (which includes food and drink) here

Episode one: Breakfast

Introduction:

Lewis Bassett: Welcome to the Full English, a podcast about English food and identity. Because: who are the English, where do we come from, why do we eat the things we do and what do our eating habits say about who we are?

My name is Lewis Bassett, I’m a cook and a researcher and I’m fascinated by food.

In this series we’ll be digging into the meanings of England and Englishness by looking at what we eat. From mutton and the birth of capitalism, to cellular agriculture and the proteins of the future.

In this first episode, we’ll begin by looking at the what the English breakfast can tell us about how food in England has changed, and we’ll also be finding answers for why England has such a bad reputation when it comes to food.

Welcome then to episode one of the Full English.

1. Why England

But why England? Why not the United Kingdom or Great Britain? Why not European food? Or how about food in Nottingham, where I was born, or food in London, where I live now?

Well, I have a feeling that England – specifically England – is confused about who it is. It’s been a turbulent time in politics, and I think events like Brexit, particularly in its consequences for Northern Ireland and the rise of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales have shaken up our understandings of national belonging. And I’m not the only one who thinks this:

David Edgerton: In many ways, the place we live in, is a country with no name.

DE: I'm David Edgerton, I'm a historian of Britain and of Science and Technology at King's College London.

DE: I mean, if you look at war memorials, it says things like, “gave their lives for King and Country” without specifying what that country is. And very occasionally, you see a war memorial that specifies England. But I've never ever seen a war memorial that says somebody died for the United Kingdom. I've never seen one that said that, that memorialised for Great Britain. So we have a very strange situation of a country with, with no name.

According to David, it’s only after the second world war that many people saw themselves as belonging to Britain, rather than the Empire. But that relatively brief period of British nationalism has been unravelling.

DE: So we have the rise of Scottish nationalism of, of Welsh nationalism, a new dispensation for Northern Ireland in, in good time. So a whole set of assumptions about what it was to be this thing called Britain come apart. And I think it is important to recognise that we now have a new discussion, I think, about England and Englishness which arises I think because of the limited self government that now exists in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That raises some very important questions about what, what England is, what its place is in the United Kingdom, and what its democratic structures ought to be.

2. Vox pops

But there are other reasons to look at English food as well. And that became clear to me when I went on the streets of London with the artist and producer Forest DLG who makes the music for this show. We wanted to know from people what they thought about English food.

LB: Excuse me, can I ask you a question? We’re making a podcast about English food. Do you have any views on it?

Person 1: Yeah, but I haven’t got time sorry.

LB: But you do like it?

Person 1: Yeah – whatever it is!

Forest DLG: Can we ask you a quick question about food?

Person 2: Yes – have you got any?

LB: We’re making a podcast about English food…

Person 2: English food? Why?! It’s bland most of it. I prefer a bit more spice

Person 3: Indian food, Jamaican food. That’s where all the flavours are.

Person 4: Well there’s a reason why there’s no English food stall here at the market?

LB: What’s the reason

Person 4: Because it’s just not as, erm, diverse a pallet as other cusines

LB: Would you say it’s bland

Person 4: Yes. That’s what I’m alluding too!

Person 5: You occasionally have a nice fish and chips but meat and two veg doesn’t cut it.

Person 6: I hate fish and chips, I have to say. It’s not for me

Person 7: Fruits and veggies, they’re just not as tasty

Person 8: It’s s**t! That’s why we’re queuing for falafel.

Person 9: Yeah it’s not too bad. The English fry up will often go down nicely.

Person 10: I think typically the best English food is the food that’s been borrowed from other cultures. Isn’t the national dish a chicken tika masala? Which actually has nothing to do with Asian culture. It’s an invention to make Asian food more acceptable to an English palate. But even things like pizza, fish and chips, all these things are borrowed. So traditional English food – I don’t even know what that might be. Maybe it’s the home of fusion.

It seems that on the one hand, a lot of people think our food is rubbish and on the other, some people born in England aren’t always confident that we even have a distinctive national cuisine.

3. Breakfast

[Breakfast sounds: kettle boiling, people arriving at the door, chatter in Italian]

Back at my flat, I’m making a traditional English breakfast for my partner, Eve, and three of her friends. My partner and our guests are from Italy and I want to see what they think of what is probably England’s most widely known national dish.

Italian 1: What is this?

Italian 2: Is it tripe?

Italian 3: Spleen? Lungs!

LB: It’s kidney

Italian 1: That’s disgusting. I’m not eating it!

I’m serving an English breakfast, Victorian style. That means kedgeree, a mixture of rice and fish flavoured with curry powder, as well as Bombay toast, which is bread fried in butter with anchovies and cayenne, and a Victorian favourite: devilled Kidneys

[Sound of breakfast being served]

Who is gonna try this, only Zuli?

I'm going to try it

Really?

I'm gonna try

Wow you’re so brave

Um guys. It's good!

No I'm scared

Omg that toast is so delicious

Alissandro are you gonna try a kidney?

Not at all. I mean if I was closer to Bianca I would like sniff it from her plate.

You can still sniff it

You can sniff it.

Can I sniff it?

Sniff? A sniff is okay. Is it chewy?

Hmm. It's okay

It's ok? You should have more. There's a big one there look.

I think that for today that was quite a big achievement

Bombay toast is fantastic

Mama mia this potato thing –

Bombay toast is amazing

So that went down surprisingly well. And it shows, whether you like it or not, England certainly has a strong food tradition. The fact we have an explicitly national meal – an English breakfast – makes that obvious.

4. Kaoiri O’Connor

Okay, one of the ways that we often test the sound is we ask people what they've had for breakfast.

KOC: Oh yeah, yeah black coffee with a Jordan skinny syrup, coconut macaroon. I am a sort of a black coffee no sweet person but with this book two things have hit me. One is the Jordan skinny syrups - thank god otherwise it might have been the real thing – and chocolate, for which there is no substitute. It's all bad for you though and it all ends up on the hips and the jowls, what can I do?

This is Kaoiri O’Connor, a researcher based at University College London who wrote a book on the English breakfast.

KOC: when it burst upon the world, I suppose it was at the beginning of Victoria's reign, there was a huge, a huge promotion of national identity, a huge building up of the image of England, subsuming the other parts. And so that's when you have the promotion of England, and the emergence of this meal coming together, and therefore the English breakfast.

LB: What is so distinct about the English Breakfast compared to others?

KOC: It is the only breakfast. I mean, there may be imitations now but the distinctive thing about it is it was a cooked breakfast. A meal in itself. Whereas in most other places, let's say the whole of Europe, it's very much a scratch meal, you know, you have your coffee, and then you have croissant, toast, or perhaps nothing at first, then you get perhaps 11 o'clock and you get the pastries and things. And quite a lot of places are like that, you know, it isn't something that you get out of bed and sit down to a big cooked breakfast. And in Scandinavia, you do get more, but that's very much a buffet and you get a lot of pickled things and you get a lot of cold you know, meat sausages, hard boiled eggs, not this great big cooked thing, like we have here. So that's what made it distinctive. I mean, there wasn't anything like it.

And if you want proof that we can understand a nation by what it eats, the invention of the English breakfast is it.

KOC: At the time of Queen Victoria it was felt important to emphasise Englishness in everything. Because you see, the great thing about Victorian life is it's suddenly, lots and lots and lots of people had lots and lots of money or, you know, various amounts. And all over Europe, this is a period of revolution and change. And, you know, governments were rising and falling, and there was a great deal of concern. So what happened in this country is people became wealthy, but it was tamed in the sense that they were told, all right now we should all try and be civilised, and to emulate the upper classes. And so everyone became very refined, and very genteel, each in their own way.

A new rising middle class who had profited from the growth of industry in Victorian England sought the stability and status of the older land-owning upper classes. Members of the newer monied group did this through their dress codes, through their speech, through etiquette manuals, through being able to distinguish a soup spoon from an asparagus fork. But no less, these new middle classes in England sort to project their status by eating the kinds of breakfasts that the older upper classes ate in their country manors. To some extent, toward the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, even factory workers followed suit. And where workers in cities didn’t have access to fresh ingredients, cheaper, processed foods – from tinned baked beans to margarine instead of butter – increasingly filled the gap, giving rise to the fry up style English breakfast that we know today. But the important thing to note, as Kaoiri explains, is that it was the desire to emulate the upper classes, with whatever means available, that helped to popularise the English breakfast.

KOC: It was it was sort of gentility at one or two or three removed, but it was very important. Because it was something about the English that, you know, this idea of bettering yourself is what, what we should aim for.

Kaoiri, as you can probably tell, isn’t from England. She’s from Hawaii. But, she says, not being born in England is one of the reasons she so obsessed with English breakfasts.

KOC: You can only talk about the English Breakfast if you're not English. Because it's famous throughout the world. And particularly, you know, the fringes of the old Empire. And you think of it as the most distinctively English thing. And you have a vision of the sideboard covered with silver dishes and being in a country house and you know sort of working your way along the row and picking it up and you've got kippers, you've got mushrooms, you've got eggs done several ways, several kinds of sausages, bacon, and you make your own combination. And that is the English breakfast, with masses of toast, jam and so on. And this is what you think there is. And of course, if you look at the literature, the English Breakfast dances across the pages, I mean, this is what you expect to find here, which is part of the background to the wallpaper, its culinary wallpaper, you take it for granted, right? So you get here, and you can't find it. I remember my first encounter was, I guess you'd call it a fry up in a chippy. And there was chips and then there was fried egg. And then there was the beans and I thought “oh my god, where's the real thing?” And, and I went for a very long haul for it. And that's how the book came about. But it was, it was a hunt that took a long time.

LB: And did you find it?

KOC: Yes, I did find it. But you do have to pay for it. See that's the thing, it is not an everyday kind of thing. If I have to, you know, if someone asked me right now “I want an English breakfast”. What I would do if it were open is I'd head straight to the Wolseley because that's as close as you can get for a restaurant. You know, of course it's not on the sideboard, but you have a choice. And they do a wonderful dishes there that were part of the old sideboard, which is like kedgeree: wonderful! You know, which is an old Empire dish, which is fish and rice and a curry sauce on the side.

But is a food tradition like the Victorian breakfast still a tradition if few people eat it today? The fact that one of the few places you can get an old school English breakfast is a five-star hotel tells me it’s not really a widespread tradition in England. That also explains why my Italian guests were so surprised by the food I made them. Like Kaori, they had only come across the breakfasts served in greasy spoon cafes, with beans and chips and fried tomatoes. Maybe that, and not the wonders of a Victorian sideboard, are the real traditions of England today. And whether you like these more modern kinds of cooked breakfasts, perhaps it’s these far more everyday foods that England is to be judged upon. And so maybe it’s some of these foods that have given England’s cuisine a bad reputation.

5. Reputation

Rowley Leigh: despite the proliferation of restaurants and the vast improvement in restaurant food over the last 40 years, I'm still slightly sceptical about us having a food culture. And I rather suspect after 10 years of Brexit, we might be back to where we started.

This is the chef Rowley Leigh. His view on the current state of English food is deeply pessimistic.

RL: Because there isn't. There isn't honestly, really, the infrastructure. You know, that places like France and Italy have in terms of production. If you look at the Fens, which is the most fertile soil in Europe. We produce frozen peas, sugar beet and cannabis oil. You go to Brittany and see what they produce there. It's rather different. And you know, yeah, we've got a great cheese industry. But the fact is, when there was the listeria crisis in ‘91, almost every single cheese milk maker in Britain started to pasteurise their milk, sort of kill their cheese. And anybody who didn't got in terrible trouble. And, you know, do you think the French started pasteurising milk? Like f**k they do. I don't know. I just I just, as I say, you know, I mean, real proper food culture comes from the field. It doesn't, you know, come out of a chef's head. And we'll see. You know, without Italian and French produce coming into London every week we'll be eating sea buckthorn and lingonberries.

[Restaurant sounds]

Clearly England’s culinary reputation has changed over time. To explore this further, I’ve come to the Quality Chop House in London to speak to Ben Rogers who wrote a book about food in 18th century England. Like Kaori’s research on the Victorian breakfast, Ben’s book, focused on the century before the Victorians, shows that England once had a very proud food tradition, one that even foreign observers were impressed by.

Ben Rogers: So here is the French traveller Henri Misson writing in 1698. “It is common practice, even among people of good substance to have a huge piece of roast beef on Sundays, of which they start, or they can swallow no more, and eat the rest cold without any victuals, the other six days of the week.” Another 25 years later, the Swiss traveller Mr. Moreat wrote “the pleasure to the table in this happy nation to be put in the same rank as the ordinary everyone is accustomed at good eating. They consist chiefly of a variety of puddings, golden Pippins, which are an excellent kind of Apple, delicious green oysters and roast beef, which is the favourite dish as well as at the Kings table as at the tradesman. It's common to see one of these pieces weigh from 20 to 30 pounds”. This might be said is the emblem of the prosperity of the English.

Food – and above all beef – was for many people in 18th century England a way of displaying your patriotism

BR: France was the arch national enemy, associated with Catholicism you know, and a sort of military rival throughout this period and a more hierarchical society with a very strong tradition of court cooking which was on the English British view ridiculously effeminate, over refined, dishonest. Roast beef was defined in opposition to that

Paul Freedman: So in the 18th century, these beefsteak clubs were formed in England, with the purpose of combating French, I think the implication is, effeminate food with a lot of sauces, as opposed to good old Hardy John Bull, the food that made Britain great. And you get the same kind of things where politicians feel they have to eat mushy peas in the north of England, that famous gaff I forget who it was of the Labour Party politician who was served mushy peas somewhere in the north and thought it was guacamole.

That’s Paul Freedman. He’s a historian at Yale University. We’ll hear more from him later. The politician was Peter Mandelson, a close ally of Tony Blair.

BR: It wasn't just a defined against the French. It was also defined against what was perceived to be a sort of a cosmopolitan upper class, sort of Frenchified upper class, a sort of Metropolitan Remainers of their day, if you like, who dominated government in the Georgian period, and viewed France in particular as a sort of, you know, model of sophistication and looked to France for inspiration when it came to the fashion to art architecture, and food. So, to go against the, against Walpole and against the aristocracy of the day, you were in favour of roast beef and that sort of cooking and this sort of and this culinary patriotism found expression not just in the kitchen, but in arts, in the art of Hogarth above all, the literature and buildings. … it found especially expression in beef steak clubs that I guess were a sort of fore runner of gentleman's clubs today, when people gathered, good English patriots, patriots gathered to eat roast beef and have fun and moan about the French and the Frenchified aristocracy.

Hogarth, by the way, was a famous nationalist painter and satirist of his day. And beefsteak clubs were not too dissimilar to the Quality Chop House, where Ben and I are sat now. But that’s not the only parrel between the past and the present that Ben points out.

BR: I'm struck by the really strong similarities between the politics and the sort of particular sort of cultural politics of late 17th century, 18th century Britain and today's divisions over Brexit and the Metropolitan elite. The way in which English roast beef eating, Bulldog owning, John Bull, patriots in the 18th centuries would characterise their enemies both internal and in this case European. This is very, very similar to the way that Brexiters characterise remainers and no doubt remainers look down on Brexiters a bit like sort of how the court looked down on roast beef eating John Bulls

In fact, it’s hard to ignore how John Bull, the buffoonish, rotund caricature of roast beef eating old England that was often depicted in cartoons in the 18th century, shares a few characteristics with Boris Johnson.

[Clip of Boris Johnson: “But when it comes to chilled meats, the wurst is behind us”

5. Why is English food so bad?

But while we can find continuities with England’s past, we should look closely at the changes as well. Does industrialisation, as we mentioned before, account for a decline in the quality of English food? Paul Freedman, the professor at Yale that you heard from earlier, certainly thinks so:

PF: Part of the answer is early industrialization, certainly in the case of England, that you get a rapid breaking of rural traditions and the creation of big cities with a population that doesn't have access to producing its own food. So that the food of Britain in the 17th century, was not regarded with contempt by foreigners. But by the late 19th century, when a vast majority of people were living in the cities, and were poor and subsisting on tea, bread bought from a store, jam, and, you know, maybe meat drippings, the food traditions were quite poor.

However, Paul says that industrialisation isn’t the only thing that explains England’s bad reputation when it comes to food

PF: You have some of the same thing in the United States, but also, in both places, the upper class culture regarded France as its example. So the best chefs in Britain and the United States were French chefs, the fancy restaurants were French restaurants. In New York in the 1960s, the top rated three star restaurants in the first New York Times guide, with only one exception we're all French. And you'd get the same kind of rankings for restaurants in London at that time. And then finally, the cultures of the two places shared a contempt for people who fuss about food, who make food, a kind of item, like music or art that is worth talking about and fussing about. So there's, to this day, a kind of tendency simply to say, food is functional, or food is whatever I like. And cuisine is kind of an affectation. In France, on the other hand, cuisine has, since the 17th century, been an expression not only of taste, but of national skill, and the wedding of pleasure, to prestige. And so, from the 17th century until I would say, around the 1980s, French food was the great standard of international haute cuisine, and only in the past 40 years has this diversified so that other countries such as Italy, or Denmark, have become prestigious or, you know, leaders in world gastronomy.

Paul says that England has a comparable food culture to the US, both of which contrast starkly with places like Italy

PF: So the love of processed food comes from a love of efficiency and health and being modern. But processed food actually doesn't taste as good as seasonal and local food. So what do you do, the ice cream may not be very good, but it comes in 30 different flavours. So variety is a distraction from quality. My epiphany on this was in Italy. So I was in Bologna, and was taken to a restaurant and we had to order tortellini that was one of their specialties. That's a specialty of bologna. They were the best tortellini I've ever had and my host said in other parts of Italy they make tortellini sometimes with cheese or with spinach. And I said, in a very American remark without intending it to be, “Oh, do you ever just get tired of meat tortellini and just have spinach tortellini for a change?” And the guy looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, “No. We're in Bologna. In Bologna. We eat meat tortellini.” We never find that in the United States. We have I mean, my supermarket has 10 kinds of tortellini. I could go there right now and get, you know, three cheese tortellini, pancetta tortellini, portabella, mushroom, tortellini, spinach tortellini, but it's not very good. I mean, it's not as good as these lovingly made Bolognaise tortellini.

DE: Well, the United Kingdom doesn't really have a peasantry.

This is David Edgerton again

DE: It has, in fact, a tiny rural workforce already in 1900, we're talking about less than 10%. And that's radically different from France or Germany, or Norway or Sweden, or indeed any part of, part of Europe. So, the agricultural population is essentially being eliminated by 1900. And food has become much more industrialised than elsewhere. And food is brought to the country by giant enterprises. And goes through all sorts of industrial processes. And we can mention canning. I mean, British people eat enormous amounts of canned food from a very early date. And as many commentators have pointed out, poor people in cities ate enormous quantities of unfresh food, which would not have been the case for a French or German peasant, for example, they might have had restricted diets, but they'd be they wouldn't be diets that came out of a can or out of a fridge. So, there was a profound effect I think on the British diet.

So industry – both industrial processed foods and industrial poverty – has had a big impact on England’s food habits. But, again, that’s not the whole story.

DE: There's another element, which is that the United Kingdom is free trading. And that's, that's really important and quite, quite distinctive. It means that half the food roughly that is consumed within the United Kingdom comes from overseas, I mean, from Europe and from the other side of the of the world. And that's true of no large economy at that, at that time. I mean, that gives you a very different sense of what the, of what the nation is. There's no expectation that you should, you should eat British flour in British bread, there's no expectation that, that you eat the roast beef of old England, you eat the roast beef of, of Argentina, and, and Uruguay and so on.

6. Is English food even English?

So it’s not just industry that has defined British and English food over the past two centuries. On the one hand, is our attitudes towards food and on the other is the consequences of empire. England and Britain’s ability to organise the world in its own image in order to reap the benefits of trade and sometimes direct extraction has meant it never needed to invest in an agricultural workforce: because why have a peasantry at home if you can outsource one to the Americas, India and Africa? But doesn’t this raise a question about the Englishness of our food? Surely, if you’re taking wheat from Canada, tea from China and spices from India, how can you then call what you eat and drink English or British?

KOC: That's the difference. I mean, if you have got an empire, it's your food, it becomes yours. That's the whole, the whole thing about conquest, it becomes yours. And so, you know, back then, I mean, of course it was foreign, but it was our foreign, right. And because kedgeree was really a colonial dish, I mean, there's nothing quite like it. In the original, it was taking elements of, you know, traditional cuisine and mixing it together in a way that would be palatable to the colonials. So that's another way that it It's ours.

In fact, and as contradictory as it might seem, English and British nationalism went hand in hand with the expansion of empire during the 19th century. As Kaori explains.

KOC: So, there was a huge rise of interest in the mythic past and one of the heroic figures was Alfred, you know, who had done so much to bring the foundations of England together.

Kaori tells me that a story that was popularised at the hight of England’s empire was that of King Alfred and the stove cakes. The story goes that in the 8th Century, before England even existed, Alfred, the Anglo Saxon King of Wessex, had been fighting Vikings and had sought refuge in a peasant woman’s home. Not knowing he was a king, the woman asked Alfred to watch some stove cakes. But the great king’s mind wondered, and Alfred let the cakes burn. When the woman found out she gave Alfred a telling off. And the king, in spite of being a king, accepted the punishment.

KOC: The Tale of the cakes was a kind of a test of character. Here he was, the king driven out, in a peasant woman's house, having burned up all her food, and, and he apologised, he let her berate him, and, you know, from then he went on to succeed.

LB: it just feels like such a contradiction to be at the peak of Empire and at the same time to be so heavily invested in constructing a pure domestic origin story?

KOC: You have to. You're constructing the homeland to which, you know, the motherland the father land, to whom the new subject peoples may now feel a family relationship. I suppose anthropologically, the point is you say, we are ancient, we spring from the soil we are we are pure, we are English. But what you want to do is you strengthen your own identity at the point at which you begin to dominate others. Yeah, there's no point in being sort of fluffy and saying oh, well, we're all sorts of people were really cosmopolitan. That will not do not at that early stage, you want a very, very strong image.

Conclusion

Empire and industry are two inescapable features of England’s past that continue to animate who the English are today, evident in what we eat. Already, we find that defining who and what England is has a lot to do with the country’s relationships with places and people outside its national borders. The English breakfast itself is fundamentally similar to an Irish and Scottish breakfast. At the same time, a full English served in Cornwall is often distinct from one served in Yorkshire. That’s because nations share features as well as contrasts with other countries externally, while they’re not as homogenous internally as nationalist myths tend to imagine.

If England is a country in crisis today, having left the EU and existing within a frayed union with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, then understanding what England has been will be the first step in asking what those who live here want it to be now and in the future.

For the rest of this series we’ll be digging a little deeper into some of the themes we have just covered, starting in episode two with sheep farming and the birth of capitalism in England. In episode three we’ll be looking more at England’s place within the history of slavery and the British empire by examining our taste for sugar and tea. And from there, we’ll hear more about how modern agriculture changed the way we eat and how it continues to do so in the context of climate change. We’ll chart the invention of what is often referred to as modern European cuisine in England. And finally, to end season one, we’ll examine who has the authority to make a national cuisine, and whether immigration changes how we might view Englishness.

Credits

That’s it for episode one. This show was made by me, Lewis Bassett. You can follow the Full English on Twitter and Instagram @fullengpod.

Music and sound engineering for this show was provided by the very talented Forest DLG. You can find him on Twitter and Insta @ForestDLG.

Huge thanks to all our guests. There are more details about them and their work in the show notes.

If you want to support this show, please head over to Patreon.com/fullEnglish. For less than the cost of a fry up you can gain access to tons of extra content, including full interviews and recipes related to the show. Relevant to this episode you’ll get a recipe for devilled kidneys, Bombay toast and stove cakes. You’ll also be supporting us making future episodes of this podcast. So please sign up. That’s patreon.com/fullenglish.

Thanks for listening.

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Good morning and welcome to this special edition of Vittles. Normally Friday articles are paywalled, but I have dropped the paywall for today because I would like this conversation to be widely read, especially by people in Bristol.

The following article is an abridged transcript of a conversation between five people involved in the Bristol food and media scene ─ Fozia Ismail, Jan Ostle, Aine Morris, Khalil Abdi and Holly Nash ─ taking off from an article published last year in Vittles. If you wish to listen to the whole thing, then the podcast is embedded in the article. All contributors are paid for their time, so if you can, please do consider subscribing through Patreon.

About a year ago, I received a pitch from the journalist Holly Nash who wanted to write an article about the Bristol Food Union (BFU), which had recently formed. I commissioned it, first of all because I was interested in how restaurants were changing to adapt to the pandemic conditions and there seemed to be a hopefulness that business models could be permanently shifted to take a wider community into account. I was also interested on a personal level, that I seemed to know more about the food ecosystem of New York or Los Angeles more than I did Bristol, so dominant is the London narrative in food writing.

A few weeks later, not too long after a Guardian article which promoted the community work of four pandemic success stories, including the BFU, Holly returned to me saying that the issue was more complex than she had initially anticipated. Although the BFU was undeniably doing good work, there were many more organisations doing community work that needed promoting, as well as a feeling of insider/outsider-ism in terms of who gets media coverage. After chatting to her about it, we agreed on a new direction, and I also put her in touch with the chef and writer Fozia Ismail, who was able to confirm these ambiguities and also put Holly in touch with more chefs and activists. All in all, the article took around four months to publish and was, at that point, the longest I’ve ever had an article in edits.

Holly’s article remains one of the things I’m most proud of publishing at Vittles. When it got published, the response from people who lived in Bristol was overwhelmingly positive ─ that it was one of the first times they had seen Bristol food culture be accurately portrayed in a non-local publication, but also that it did not shy away from the truth that there is an elitism and hierarchy in what the media usually choose to portray. Another reason I’m proud of it is because it was taken in the way it was meant to be taken ─ as a piece of constructive critique rather than a takedown. I think many people could have ignored it, or shut down any criticism, but Aine Morris, who is one of the BFU’s founders, engaged with the hard questions that the piece asked.

It is because of Aine, who proposed this talk, as well as Fozia and Holly, that we are having this conversation today. Over the past few months I have been reflecting on food community projects ─ having talked to other people in charge of community work and seeing how it plays out in my own community ─ and how complex the subject is. No one article can capture the logistics involved, as well as the trade-offs every organiser has to make: whether to get corporate sponsorship, how to marshall the media to grab attention, whether to stay small and local or to increase your reach and spread yourself thinner. Larger projects can overshadow smaller ones, but it’s also true that they can also be responsible for funding or supplying food to them ─ as Bristol Food Union does.

The aim of today’s discussion is to look as those complexities, and unpick the areas of commonality and the areas of friction, and look at how collaboration between sectors is possible, and indeed, where there have already been collaborations. In addition to Fozia ─ who will be leading today’s conversation ─ Holly and Aine, we also have Jan Ostle from the acclaimed restaurant Wilsons and Khalil Abdi from Bristol Horn Youth Concern. Over to Fozia!

Fozia: Thank you all for being here! I’m just going to kick it off with some of the themes we want to talk about. The article caused controversy at the time but we really wanted to explore what is it about the Bristol food scene that is unique compared to London. Bristol does get a lot of food media attention in some respects, but there is a lot that is also ignored by the media. So we’d love to get your opinion on what you think characterises the Bristol food scene? Aine shall we start with you?

Aine: Thank you, both. Holly for writing the original article, and Fozia and Jonathan for creating the space to be able to continue the conversation. I think I came to you after the article because it felt like there was more to be said, both around the challenges, but also the potential here in Bristol to deliver something that is genuinely unique and more inclusive than food communities in other cities.

How would we characterise the Bristol food scene? In and of itself, that’s quite a challenging question. Because what’s come out, not in the article, but instigated by the article is this period of collective thinking. It’s clear that while we have a thriving food community here, one which is genuinely committed to change and food access at every level of society, we also have quite a silo-ised food movement. Not just silos in terms of celebrity or Michelin starred chefs vs community food projects, but we have a very white, middle class, farmers market and food sustainability movement here, we have a very active food access and food waste charity sector here, which can be separate from the fine dining and food media collective. I would characterise what already exists here, and I would say it carefully, as having lots of potential, but not being particularly joined up in the way we think it is, or in the way it comes across in media articles to people who don’t live here.

Khalil: Thank you for organising this, I really appreciate it. It’s the first time we have been involved in something like this. To answer the question: Bristol has been dominated by white led food banks, which don’t want to engage in the community. We don’t have that much connection. There’s a lack of communication and lack of connection with them, because they know people, they’re well connected, and they dominate because they know each other. They have links and they have more opportunities than us. When they come into the community, they don’t give us culturally appropriate food: people wanting Halal food for instance, or people who come from Africa wanting to see African food. There’s a lack of language ─ people give tins of meat that are not Halal which people don’t understand. And that’s why people don’t accept the food, because they don’t know what’s in it. Most of the people who work in food banks are white, they have no connection to the community, they don’t speak the language.

That’s how it is in Bristol. It’s segregated when it comes to food. They often don’t want you to be involved; they never invite you to the meetings, or if they have an event. In terms of media, they only want to interview you if there’s something negative. When you’re doing something positive, they don’t want to promote it. That’s the culture in Bristol. We’ve seen many times when there’s something negative, all the media come, but not when there’s something positive.

“That’s how it is in Bristol. It’s segregated when it comes to food.”

Fozia: That’s a really interesting point Khalil. You’re talking about the wider system of accessing, I guess, funding, and also those networks about who gets to access these networks in the Bristol space. Not just funding but media attention. I’ve seen a lot of grassroots mutual aid groups being set up by BAME groups, and that’s amazing to see on the ground. It is interesting that this doesn’t get spoken about in the same way.

Khalil: Other big food banks or charities don’t want to entrust things to you, or want you to be seen as a success. They don’t want to give you a platform. They have the power, they have the connections, they have a system where they can access more information than you. They always shut you down and change the subject if you manage to get a little bit up the ladder, and the next time you won’t get an invitation, especially if you speak up about how you feel about it. Other people tell you “oh the meeting is still happening, we haven’t seen you?”. But that’s how it works.

Fozia: Holly you interviewed a few other organisations working in this space, do you think what Khalil says is reflected in the work you did last year on this article?

Holly: Yeah, what was just spoken about, definitely. I think the intention is always there in Bristol to have this really cohesive food scene but I think, there’s not an awareness of the disparity. I mean, I found out so much just from writing that piece, and stuff I was so ignorant of, so I’m a case for the point.

Fozia: Going forward, how can we think about what can be done differently in our local and national media representation?

Aine: I don’t want to speak for Jan, but both of us have been quite conscious about coming to this conversation with bringing our listening. Part of what I found challenging about Holly’s article personally, was that the BFU came across as the establishment, and I don’t see us as the establishment, or that we represent only a group of white, middle-class, Michelin starred restaurants. There is a problem with Michelin-starred chefs behaving like superheroes and going into communities and saying “don’t worry everyone, we’re going to cook for you now”, but it didn’t feel like that’s what we were doing in Bristol. Because, yes, we were working with kitchens to produce food, but we were supplying those meals directly into the Community Kitchen that featured in the article, or Baraka Community café, which featured in the article.

We were working with those organisations not to override what they already do, but to plug into systems and communities, and become a source of nutritious, restaurant quality ready meals to get out during the pandemic. And I think, it felt a little bit like we weren’t successfully capturing this in how we were communicating about the project. You start with what you know, and ultimately the people we started with were the people who knew each other already. So when the article comes up to say that not everyone has this same experience in Bristol, what I’m hearing is that there are communities here that very much don’t have that access to that same inclusion and opportunity for participation. So we have to be open to listening to that. We have to come from a place of “as the established community project in Bristol who do a lot of strategic work about how to move the city forward, we need to do a lot better”. And there’s no point to argue on that front, we have to just do it, because these communities are telling us that this is their experience of trying to collaborate with the Bristol food community.

“There is a problem with Michelin-starred chefs behaving like superheroes and going into communities and saying “don’t worry everyone, we’re going to cook for you now””

Jonathan: Just to interrupt for a second, are there accurate local representations of Bristol relating to what is happening? Because I understand that national media always want a big story that’s easily sellable to a white, middle class public, and in that sense, the BFU is a great story to focus on. But Holly, have you found that the local media representation is also a problem?

Holly: Yes, I would say it’s quite similar to the Guardian stance from what I’ve seen. There’s Bristol 24/7 and probably some grassroots publications that I’m missing. But yes, from what I’ve seen it’s been quite similar. There is a bit more on the ground reporting.

Jan: Sorry, I’ve been listening and I’d just like to share my thoughts and a bit of my experience on a couple of the topics. I think the Bristol food media is an exclusive thing that covers the same thing on repetition. I believe that we are in an echo chamber. It’s a nice echo chamber, but it is an echo chamber.

I think what Aine says about us feeling like outsiders, I mean, I still feel like an outsider. You always feel like the little guy, but then you realise there’s guys in your community who are littler and need a hand. For me recognising that even though I’m liberal, even though I always try to do the right thing, I’m part of the system that is holding people in my community back. And that’s really really uncomfortable. So sometimes I don’t really want to face it. For me the crux of the matter is that there is an issue in Bristol with people in our community not getting the support and exposure that they deserve because what they’re doing is infinitely more valuable than what I’m doing. So even though it’s uncomfortable, you have to start addressing that. And that starts with making that decision as a business.

Aine: That feeling of discomfort, that’s probably a really appropriate feeling for the conversation that we’re trying to have. I hope Jan won’t mind me saying that when we were discussing the possibility of getting involved on this panel, he was like ‘hold on a minute, what if I’m a part of the problem?’. But we might all be part of the problem. The business of change, and not tokenistic change or the need to recruit a few more faces of colour into your business, but deep systemic, community led change, is risky, and its sticky and it’s a bit messy, and you have to be willing to get some stuff wrong, and be accountable and think ‘what do I need to take responsibility for in this situation?’. We need change, and we need change at the speed and scale that our communities are changing, and the systems we depend on are changing. That means just rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. I’d rather be in it and have it be imperfect, than be so afraid of getting it wrong that we stopped being active.

Jan: That’s the thing, there’s a reluctance to take the risk. I think it’s a lot safer all of us patting each other on the back in our little social media echo chamber, where you have the same people. You go to an event and see them ─ it’s a closed system. A lot of it is self serving, and that’s a tough pill to swallow. I don’t have anything else to add, it’s just uncomfortable that this problem is going on. If we can show people a pathway, and we can start walking that path, then others will follow because that’s how Bristol works. There are key people we need to get sat down in a room and make them f*g listen, not talk. We’ve done enough talking, we need to do a bit of listening.

Fozia: Listening, but also acting actually. Small acts can make a huge difference. Like Jan taking a huge risk on the supperclub, that was four years ago wasn’t it? That was incredibly generous of you, and actually that got us into Crumbs and that got us into other things. So that was a tiny act of kindness, Jan didn’t have to do that, he chose to do that, and Somali food got repped. It was just wonderful to be given a restaurant space like that to do Somali food. So it’s stuff like that that can have a knock-on effect.

Jan: But what I’d like to say is that these acts of kindness as you call them ─ and they are acts of kindness ─ also benefit me as a business. They improve my social standing. I think that’s sometimes what we don’t want to talk about ─ being generous and being seen as liberal, massively benefits me. So if we benefit from that, then that should be built into our business plans. So rather than it be a one off thing, we should say look, let’s get a year of bookings on Sunday at Wilsons for people who need the profile. Let’s start coming up with something practical ─ it doesn’t cost me anything.

“I think that’s sometimes what we don’t want to talk about ─ being generous and being seen as liberal, massively benefits me. So if we benefit from that, then that should be built into our business plans.”

Fozia: It’s something that Asma Khan does with Darjeeling Express in London, and that makes a huge difference to so many supperclubs and businesses run by diasporic communities to get into the restaurant industry. So just little practical ways that crosscut across the network. There are so many people out there who don’t have access to the right space, or don’t even know how to go about it.

Aine: How do we create spaces from a restaurant community perspective that are inclusive for those who don’t feel comfortable in restaurant spaces? Dining in a restaurant in and of itself, of course its exclusive. You have to have the surplus income to afford the meal, feel confident to order dishes, or wines that you might not recognise. There is an assumption that ‘my restaurant is open and anyone can come in and sit down, so how am I not inclusive?’. But we really need to recognise that.

I keep thinking that the BFU should run something around ‘democratic dining,’ where we use funding to subsidise meals in restaurants for people from communities who don’t normally come and experience them. I’m a big believer in taste and deliciousness, and the sensory experience of dining, as being a massive driver for change in people ─ at least, that’s what transformed my life. There is a space for fine dining, and a space for dining as art, and the sensory experience of food and how it can change your perception. So I worry about a situation where we’re solely critical of the structure that exists, no matter how imperfect it might be; the challenge becomes how do we make sure that those spaces open up to become more inclusive and everyone feels the benefits? experience. And vice versa ─ how do we get chefs into communities on a regular basis so that they have the experience of being on the ground, feeding people, and they get some experience from that.

Fozia: There’s two issues there. One, which is a wider societal problem about how you feel in these spaces. I know, I had a terrible experience. I’m sure Khalil will know this ─ if you’re with a group of Black or Somali people and there’s three or four of you and you walk into a space, it’s totally different to when you’re with white people. And I’ve experienced this in Bristol in certain places, which has really shocked me to the point where I’m like “this is really not acceptable”. I’ve been here with my husband before and it’s been fine, and now I’m here with my friends and the treatment is shady, to say the least. So that’s a wider issue which is more complicated.

The Watershed are doing a lot of training around this. Do you know Lorraine Copes, Aine? She’s amazing. She worked under Gordon Ramsay sorting out the HR across his restaurants. She’s a Black woman from Birmingham, she set up Be Inclusive Hospitality with the awareness that front of house should be trained appropriately. Running a restaurant is a business at the end of the day, and I think it’s sad that certain places do miss out from communities which do have disposable income, but a negative review would spread across the Black community. I wouldn’t go to that restaurant, I’d go somewhere else. There’s also an issue about staffing: is it a trade that people would go into?

“If you’re with a group of Black or Somali people and there’s three or four of you and you walk into a space, it’s totally different to when you’re with white people. And I’ve experienced this in Bristol in certain places, which has really shocked me”

Aine: Interestingly I’ve had three different chefs talk to me, in the last week or two, specifically as a lot of Bristol hospitality is now recruiting, and saying “we want to make sure we actively are recruiting from minority communities and we’re a little bit unsure as to how to go about doing that, is there any advice or policy?”. Khalil, it would be really interesting to hear your perspective as to how easy it is for people from your community to get involved in careers in hospitality.

Khalil: I would like to give you an example. There’s a sports centre in the heart of the community and the community was not using it at all. There was a new manager and he sent me an email saying “your community is not using us, is there any problem?”. And I said, “yes there is” because the former manager did not listen to us. Because we are Muslim, women want to have their own space, they want to have female coaches, female workers. So the manager said “yes, I can accommodate that”. So he designated that Muslim women could come on Sunday when there would be no men, all the workers are female. And hundreds of people came on Sunday and raised the roof. He was shocked. There was no talk, just action. And that’s what we want: action. Many times I’ve gone to meetings, like this, but there’s no action, just talk talk.

So what I say to people is there’s a lot of young people and unemployment. When they apply for a job, it’s very difficult for them to get accepted, because of their colour, because of their name. Most of the time they’ve been declined, and they don’t want to apply again. The advice we got was “change your name”! Put your name as ‘Smith’ or something like that. And that’s the people at the top, that’s the way they think about change. But that changes nothing, because you cannot change your name, you cannot change your colour.

I think the best way is to offer the people and offer the community training, to build their confidence and to show that you want to support and help them getting a job. Some of them haven’t worked before and this is the first time they’ve worked, and they’re coming out of their comfort zone, they’re coming somewhere where they’re not comfortable. When I talk to schools and say is there any POC working, they say “yes”, and I say “where?” and then they say “they are the cleaners”. Which is not right. So we want young people to learn how to cook or learn how to become a chef and raise their aspirations, to maybe have your own restaurant, or own business or write your own book. It would be good to start somewhere like that.

For us, when we started work in Bristol, Bristol city council shut down the conversation. They said no, you can’t do it. But when we worked with Fozia, we became a success. We had 200 young people accessing our activities, we met over 1000 young people a year, we have 400 families coming for food access. But this hasn’t come from nothing, it’s come from people like Fozia massively supporting us to help us get the network to access them. Things like that help us. When you don’t have all the things to network you get stuck and can’t do much. But when you have the people who are willing to support you and willing to open the doors, just showing you how to do it and how to get the help, who to speak to. An opportunity like this, it’s a great thing; the access, and sharing, and discussion, and to be a part of this, is a great thing. That the thing that we want: practical actions.

“And that’s what we want: action. Many times I’ve gone to meetings, like this, but there’s no action, just talk talk. “

Fozia: Thanks Khalil. I spent 20 years working with vulnerable young people and community projects in London, and I think that’s the element that’s underestimated: the amount of support needed for young people, particularly young people who might have been excluded. Actually working in the restaurant trade, or any alternative trade where it’s more practical, hands on, there’s so many opportunities there. There’s a thriving food scene here. Maybe that’s something simple that can come out of this conversation and having Khalil here, connecting him up to your work Aine, looking at how we can get more support for young BAME people who might want to go into the restaurant trade.

Jan: Khalil, a question for you. This may be me making some assumptions but, we’re part of the established...we get media attention, and we want to help. If there were three things we could do, right now, to improve the situation and to start getting your project closer to B from A, what would they be? Three practical things that my business and my colleagues could do. I could turn around and say, “you know what, I can’t do that”. But I think, if there was a practical pathway that I could start walking down, I’d be willing to start walking down that path and making something happen.

Khalil: I think if we developed links with businesses and us, it would help to create and maintain an inclusive strategy, that would be one thing. Also to get the publicity, and to be a part of it. And to support our young people, to access opportunity in employment and training, including women who have small businesses in catering for events, like weddings. To help them access financial advice, to set up accounts, things like that will help us and help our community. And that is something we are looking for. There are many people who want to create businesses but don’t know how to do it. Very small businesses can become successful within the community but they don’t know how to set it up, to get registered, to access financial investment. If somebody mentored and coached them, that would help, and would improve employment for the community.

Jan: So this is something I’ve been ticking over in my head, but if we were to enable some of the people you’re working with to use our space like one Sunday a month, or a different one a month. Because before I opened Wilsons, I did a series of pop-ups right, and that’s how I got to the stage of opening a restaurant. It was a way I could trial my systems and the food that I wanted to cook, how I engaged with customers, how much money it made. All that stuff. If we were to say, “ok, every last Sunday of the month, you can take it over, you can get used to the kitchen”, we would help with going through the business proposal, costing, how it works. Mary, my business partner and my life partner, has also expressed some interest in maybe creating a small amount of money to help float the business, so a small investment so they can buy the raw ingredients. That figure would be paid back from the money that they take, and the profits they would keep. And then obviously that could be promoted through Wilsons social media, stuff like that. Is that useful?

Khalil: Yes, definitely, that would help. Because it’s something that they need. We have a lot of Somali women who have food businesses, and that would promote them, that would lift them up. That’s something that we’re looking for.

Jan: Ok, I think we have to have another meeting after this then. I’ll get your details.

Aine: There are skills that the hospitality industry has to do with sourcing and pricing and costing up dishes, and EHO and health and safety, that we can facilitate this transfer of knowledge that could be really useful to food projects as well.

Jan: The only thing that I would just be conscientious of, if that obviously you guys want the promotion and we want to help, but for me a part of the problem is...it’s not greenwashing but it’s a thing where you do good deeds and everyone applauds you, I would be reluctant to be overtly say, ‘look at us we’re doing all this nice stuff’. I just want to get it done, and have some practical impacts on people. That’s not a question for me to answer, that’s a question for you guys to answer, and how you’d want it to work.

Aine: You should never be doing anything if the outcome is ‘what are other people going to think about me for doing this?’. One of the things Holly’s article did for me on a really personal level was that it made me think long and hard about why I do this work. If any of us are only in the business of feeding people because we want an article to cover us, then it doesn’t feel like the right reason to work as hard as we do, in an industry that can be this thankless. You have to have a deeper connection to your work in food.

Fozia: I was just going to say, I think it’s been really fruitful, I think all of the conversations have been really fruitful and that there’s been some real practical things that have come out of it. In terms of Jan and Khalil, and the support around that, that’s fantastic. Jan, what would you need to help with that process? Is there support from the BFU to support restaurants like Jan’s or?

Jan: To be honest, I don’t need support. I need to support. We’re alright. I need some time with Khalil, my business partner and anybody else who wants to be involved. I don’t want to be the one that’s commanding the conversation, right. I want to stand there and listen and try and be helpful. It needs to be about the person that’s cooking here, and not about Wilsons.

“If any of us are only in the business of feeding people because we want an article to cover us, then it doesn’t feel like the right reason to work as hard as we do, in an industry that can be this thankless. You have to have a deeper connection to your work in food.”

Fozia: I think that’s great, but I think there will be some practical things, like setting it up. I think if you and Khalil meet then that’s fantastic, that’s a great outcome from just this discussion. Because I’m working with Khalil and there’s a lot of young people who are desperate for work, or who are desperate to get training or employment, and they’re really enthusiastic. There are so many skill sets in various communities.

Jan: There’s enough for me to learn as well. I see it as a bilateral transaction. I’m going to gain from it.

Fozia: Also Aine, on a wider scale, I guess, how do we support people like Khalil to be more involved in the Bristol Food Union? Not just Khalil but there are many other groups as well, like No More Exclusions; the exclusion rate in Bristol for Black boys is just through the roof. It’s really sickening. There’s a lot of really good opportunities to link up with youth projects, I think. And for the Union to support some of the work going on on the ground, maybe? Having models like that would be really useful and beneficial.

Aine: I really agree. Where I would push back on Jan ever so slightly ─ every individual restaurant is a business in its own right, and can do more on an individual basis to create spaces and invite people in. What’s quite interesting is that by having a programme and creating a structure, what you do is embed that in in the much longer term. Restaurants are incredibly busy enterprises, and the people who run them spend a lot of time just busy with the daily work of running a food business sustainably and profitably, which in the current environment is not an easy task. So where I think the BFU can create structures for support is ─ it might not be as simple as one chef and one community project, it might be making sure there are systems that there’s a clear programme of activity and a chance for participation and involvement.

Jonathan: Can I ask everyone a very simple question? A year on since the pandemic started, how would you characterise the change that has happened in Bristol. If any change. Would you say things have fundamentally changed in this conversation in terms of what it was like a year ago?

Holly: No not particularly. That’s the main thing that I hope that piece was really about as well: the way stuff feeds into what the media covers. I think the media has a massive role in the problem. I think things like Vittles have massive potential, in the same way these discussions do, and writing the article pulled up discussion. We need more alternative publications, alternative spaces, and I don’t think we have that in Bristol.

“That’s the main thing that I hope that piece was really about as well: the way stuff feeds into what the media covers. I think the media has a massive role in the problem.”

Aine: It feels remiss of me not to mention a couple of things: the Bristol Cable is doing good things, not necessarily focused on food, but as a community led independent publication they are willing to occupy those more challenging spaces. And particularly with Crumbs magazine not being active in Bristol at the moment, there absolutely is a space for an alternative platform that talks about food in the city in an honest and inclusive way.

But there are also projects in the city that are putting in place structures of inclusion from the ground up, and it’s important that we talk about people like 91 Ways, which is going into immigrant and refugee communities, finding women who wish to share their culture, and create opportunities for them to do that. And also with the work that Feeding Bristol are doing with the kids food clubs around the city ─ that’s the first food project, which is taking the approach of ‘it’s not just enough to give people food’ there also has to be engagement around cooking schools, around child nutrition, around the culture of how we cook and eat together. So, I think they’re both good examples of projects that are making progress in the right sort of way.

Jonathan, you asked at the beginning about the difference between Bristol and London ─ what’s interesting about Bristol is that we’re limited by our size. Because of the structure of the city and the rivers we’re never going to be a city that can expand too massively outside of the available space, so Bristol often feels like a big village in the sense that it feels possible and feasible to get the people who need to be in a room together, together.

Khalil: I guess for me, it’s the same for us. I haven’t seen any change. I think only a little bit, there’s a journalist called Ellie who we trust to do some work on tackling the issues that communities are suffering. She always comes to the positive not the negative. From Bristol 24/7.

Fozia: Ellie Pipe is really good. I agree,Khalil, she’s good at stories which aren’t really told otherwise. Media coverage? We’re still fighting the good fight I feel laughs. I feel like I just do this constantly. I think the media has a long way to go. Holly, well done on the article. I feel it was a really brave piece. It was really good and I don’t think we’d be having this conversation had you not taken the time to do the research and interview the people that you did. So I think that was a really fantastic thing.

You know, we’re under a hostile environment, and under our government the work we’re trying to do is really hard. I do feel it’s a massive battle but this stuff really helps, and I hope going forward we can do some practical things. Just linking different people up is one way, but it is frustrating if you’re outside the system. It would be wonderful to have some practical things that come out, because it’s tiny practical things that lead to wider systemic changes. I think those things can be underestimated.

I don’t see enough Black sous chefs, I don’t see enough Black or Asian workers in our restaurant spaces. That is a massive disservice to the community in Bristol. So there is a problem in the hospitality industry in that way, in the same way that there is within the media industry and within all industries. There is something going on in how we can have a population like we do have in Bristol, and not have BAME waitresses, and sous chefs? That is a problem, and I think there’s an opportunity for Bristol Food Union to really push its members on thinking about.

This is a very segregated city. It’s a problem in education, and it’s a problem in Bristol in general. In terms of how it compares to London, that’s the main thing for me. Having come from London, having grown up in London, having worked in restaurants in London, in Mayfair and other places, and actually they were more diverse even then. I’m talking about high-end and low. Even if you didn’t see that many of us, we were there.

“There is something going on in how we can have a population like we do have in Bristol, and not have BAME waitresses, and sous chefs? That is a problem”

Aine: What’s interesting about hospitality as an industry is that it wants to think of itself as really open and inclusive, no? You work in kitchens to find a family if you feel like you don’t have family and community in your own life. Like that’s the pull for a lot of people who work in food is that it does give you community, and it does give you people, those ‘Band of Brother’ sort of relationships. I think as an industry, we want to think of ourselves as progressive and inclusive and liberal, and the learning coming out of last year is, that there is potential for good stuff, but also a lot of people in this city in particular, given the national profile of our food scene, who feel like they’re not part of that, and it’s not open to them. It’s quite exclusive, so it becomes our responsibility to be constantly saying ‘how do we need to learn and grow in this situation?’.

Fozia: I do think that there are sometimes practical things. Give young people opportunities: work experience, links to schools ─ I work with a couple of people who do stuff around secondary schools, there are kids who would happily take work experience in a restaurant. So you have them in for a week or two. There are some really easy practical wins that wouldn’t be that hard to put in place, that is what I believe.

Jan: As an employer, just on a practical note. Everyone says getting apprenticeships in is a practical and easy way. It’s not. There are other ways we can do it, but apprenticeships are super, super, super complicated. This is just me being honest. But having young people coming into a restaurant that is operating at this level: the worst thing that can happen is they don’t like the experience and they fall out of love with the industry. And you lose them to the hospitality monsters. We’ve tried it before and we’ve really really struggled, trying to curtail our business to meet the needs of people coming in. That’s been really really tricky. I need support in making that happen, because if you get someone in from 7 in the morning until midnight, they’re going to want to do it for too long. We have to try and find a way of easing people into it.

Aine: It’s interesting because it draws us to the point that working in hospitality has become fundamentally unsustainable. I know a lot of chefs in the city who are talking about how the pandemic has made them realise they don’t have to work a 100+ hour week and have no money to show for it by the end of the week, because their outgoing costs are almost as high as what they are bringing in.

There was a group of us back in the summer sat around a table discussing what the Food Union could be in the future, and someone said “Of course we’re burnt out, we’re hospitality. Hospitality is always burnt out. When do you get the chance not to be?”. I’m committed to creating an organisation that thinks about those things, that doesn’t require people to throw in 100+ hours for hardly any money to not have a social life and miss every family wedding. Working in the hospitality industry you’ve got to have so much passion and commitment for the hours and grunt work in the doing of the job: how do you sell that to young people? Not just young people of colour, but young people coming into the industry as a whole. I think there’s a lot to think about what’s involved in running a genuinely sustainable food business: sustainable for people, for the planet and financially, that can do the things we’re talking about and still be a viable operation.

Fozia: Thank you guys. I just want to say I really appreciate that you all came to it and you brought your whole selves. It is a really difficult thing what we’re trying to do, and it’s an experiment. It’s worthwhile remembering that. Little experiments lead to some wonderful things. I love that Khalil is here, I know that he’s on the ground! In Easton, in Barton Hill! He’s my man that connects me up to the community! So it’s wonderful for me to see someone like that in this space, talking to Jan, talking to Jonathan, talking to you Aine, talking to Holly. Because it’s like Khalil says, a lot of the people like him who are on the ground doing this work in very difficult circumstances are never here.

And I don’t want to be the one talking for Khalil either, because it’s easy for the media to represent me as the voice of the people. But actually, what am I? I’m a very middle class Somali woman writing, doing projects, but I’m not actually on the ground doing the work in the same way. So it’s important to have those people in the room. So I acknowledge my privilege in this conversation as well, I live a very comfortable life, I’m not struggling in the same way, so how can we use whatever space we have in this pandemic and act on these connections we’re making. And who would have thought Holly’s article would have led to this? Personally I think it’s brilliant. I hope it’s been a positive experience. Thank you.

Credits

Fozia Ismail is a Bristol based food writer, activist and chef. She also runs Arawelo Eats, a supper club which explores politics, identity and colonialism through East African food.

Holly Nash is a Bristol based journalist and copywriter, who predominantly writes either for or about restaurants.

Jan Ostle is the owner and co-founder of Wilsons, a bistro in Redland, Bristol. Jan has worked in acclaimed kitchens around the country, and Wilsons is run on a commitment of sustainability and working with producers who use ethical and low impact methods.

Khalil Abdi is the director of Bristol Horn Youth Concern, which provides youth provision for young people of African ethnic heritage. He has extensive experience of working with young people, mainly from BAME communities, in Bristol. During COVID-19, Bristol Horn Youth Concern started working families and youth to provide culturally appropriate weekly food.

Aine Morris is the Managing Director of the Bristol Food Union, a new social enterprise born out of the Covid-19 crisis when a group of the city’s independent restaurants and food businesses came together to help keep Bristol fed. Prior to the crisis, Aine was Chief Executive of the Abergavenny Food Festival, and was previously Director of Communications at the Sustainable Food Trust.

All contributors were paid for their time or donated their fee.

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