This is an old trope. Like the English language, British cuisine takes all the good bits from everywhere and if you go to pubs in England you can find some terrific food. Of course, it can very variable, but all in all I'd say London is shoulder to shoulder with Naples as the food capitals of Europe.
Even the middling pubs seem to make some sort of effort these days.
While I've definitely had great food in pubs and I agree that London has spectacular food options, I'd still opine that across England as a whole, "good pub food" is the exception rather than the norm.
Thai restaurant upstairs, pub downstairs (where you can order the Thai food too).
Similar thing near me in London, very middling karaoke pub with pretty decent curry from upstairs.
Here in the Cotswolds we're spoilt for choice - there's at least one good food pub in pretty much every village. The same's true of the Yorkshire Dales, much of Mid-Wales, much of the South-West, and so on.
Generally in the ex-industrial areas it'll be less impressive. Pub food in much of the Midlands, for example, is essentially whatever's offered by the owning chain (often Marstons or Greene King). But it's not necessarily terrible, and there are some smaller chains who are pretty good (e.g. Brunning & Price). It's more a function of the fact that the pub is ubiquitous in British society - you wouldn't expect haute cuisine from a bar in the Midwest either.
To be fair for every Green Dragon (Cowley) or Tunnel House (Coates / Sapperton) there are plenty of tourist traps selling pre-made cook-chill food from microwaves or tired carveries.
I think the tourist trap pubs are largely restricted to the few honeypots - Bourton-on-the-Water springs to mind, but then I've had good pub food in both Stow and Broadway.
These are the places people actually live.
I lived in the Midlands for half a year, and I've spent a good deal of time in the American rust belt as well (via a job where I had to travel a lot). A typical English meal is significantly more bland than meals served elsewhere in the world, and I think it throws people off who don't already have a relationship with it and therefore can't perceive it as comfort food. It took me months to warm up to.
That's not to say "food in England is bad". I'm ethnically Hispanic, and ended up eating a ton of Turkish food and Indian food during my time there, which was spicy, flavorful, not too common in America at the time, and awesome. And a full English breakfast with your friends when you're all a bit hungover is perfection.
》London is shoulder to shoulder with Naples as the food capitals ^ yeah... <insert expletive here>
Maybe some high-end London locations have the same easy access to fresh and better food (via dedicated airplane rides), but that does not make London one of "the food capitals of Europe".
Later edit: Please do substantiate your point in what you think makes London food great, with some examples, maybe I've been living in the dark all this time in thinking that a place that glorifies "fish and chips" cannot be the "culinary capital of Europe".
> What do you imagine does surround London?
Suburbia? Is there anything else for a radius of 50-60 km?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Green_Belt
You can also hit the sea in that distance from London.
Yes
>Or frozen fish brought in from half a continent away?
You can get that too.
The negative response you are getting from users is because you are completely wrong about inability to get high quality, same day picked/slaughtered/fished food in London.
edit: in regard to frozen fish, I trust that the Japanese (who regularly freeze the absolutely highest grade Tuna during transit) know what they are doing.
> Is it fish caught in that same day like you can get in any Greek taverna in the Cyclades?
The UK has some of the richest fishing waters in the world. We have so much that we export worldwide. Of course it's available in London.
> Suburbia? Is there anything else for a radius of 50-60 km?
How big do you think the suburbs of London are? It's not LA. Draw a 60 km radius circle around London and take a look at the expanse of rural England for yourself.
> I've visited London only once 10 years ago
Clearly.
Yes. There's huge amount of fish bought in from inside the UK from Cornwall/Brixham etc etc. Never mind all the stuff that's air freighted here.
>Or frozen fish brought in from half a continent away?
All fish in the EU is frozen anyway [1].
1. https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/freezing-fish-and-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk#Economy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk#Economy_and_industry
London has the largest fish, meat, and veg markets in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_markets_in_London#Whol...) sourcing fresh every day
you don't need to right be next to a field to have fresh produce every day and yes, there are plenty of farms near London
You kind of have, because frozen produce is not the same as real fresh stuff. Yes, better-off people living in metropolises like London or NYC (like many of the users in here) probably lie to themselves in thinking that their money can purchase better food compared to a peasant in Turkey who lives just between an orchard and the Aegean See, but that is not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Spitalfields_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billingsgate_Fish_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithfield%2C_London#Market
You have to arrive at these markets extremely early in the morning. This is the case with any b2b market, e.g. Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo:
What I'm saying is that London cannot compete with countries/provinces where plums or what have you grow just a 15-min van drive away from said restaurants, and as such calling a city like London "the food capital of Europe" is a joke. Anyway, also calling Napoli the "food capital of Europe is a joke" because of its size and population density, I can assure you that a 2- or 3-hour drive to the South can get you to some random Calabria small town with way better food than you can get in most of Napoli.
But the food-mania is high with many people who think that just because a place happens to have money it also has good food.
London is only 35 miles away from the sea, how far do you think it is to a field.
As to your Van Drive: For example, Brixham (160 miles) is a popular place to get high quality seafood for the posher end of the restauraunts, this is ~3hr30. Getting fresh ingredients to london is a completely solved problem.
In the meantime if you're into cocktails the bar manager of Nightjar (same owners as Oriole) has some great videos online: https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1151/tonys-cocktails
I am not affiliated with Oriole or Nightjar in any way, just a huge fan. (So much a fan that I've flown in to the UK on several occasions just to go to these places, can't praise them enough!)
What do the poor eat where you come from?
Also, "I've visited London only once 10 years ago but I don't remember any fishermen bringing their catch in the morning": Restaurants will be stocking up roughly when dawn breaks, and not through the front door.
Billingsgate fish market opens at 4am and closes at 8am. Peak is 4am to 5am (by which time all the best fish will have been sold); if you want a bargain you wait until 7am.
https://www.intotheblue.co.uk/blog/2017/06/26/billingsgate-f...
This conversation is a bit weird. There's plenty of terrible food in London. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. But there is also a lot of very good food in London. I guess it depends what you mean by good food, but there are over 60 restaurants with Michelin stars. (3 with 3 stars, 10 with 2 stars).
(I upvoted you. I think you're wrong but you're polite and adding to the conversation.)
If you happen to select veg that is actually available local and in season, you can get it fresh. That means you have to be a bit selective; the most premium example is probably asparagus. Lots of UK veg growing is in nearby counties like Kent.
The British reputation for disastrous food is mostly a legacy of rationing combined with a slightly colder temperate climate, and ceased to be representative in the 90s.
It may not be as bad as it was in the 90s, but I still find nicer stuff in supermarkets in Spain, France, Germany.
Of course I'm not usually shopping at the equivalent of Tescos on the outskirts of town when I visit a supermarket on the continent, but I'm not exactly searching hard either.
Food in London is great, and varied. I don't much enjoy most Asian food, but London has a lot of it, in a way that e.g. Paris isn't as good at. OTOH I've had a much better hit rate, and at cheaper prices, in Barcelona for great food in restaurants, ethnicity aside.
Sainsbury and Tesco are on par with Carrefour and Mercadona. Waitrose is on par with or better than Albert Heijn. But the Chinese supermarkets through Europe have the best value and range of ingredients for cooking, imo.
>I don't much enjoy most Asian food
I'm so sorry. :(