It's still OK to like ‘American' food — here are London's best

Times

30-06-2025

'I wasn't looking to open a bagel shop,' says Dan Martensen, founder of It's Bagels (itsbagels.com). 'I was just a New Yorker in London who wanted a proper bagel.' What began as a lockdown craving fast developed into an obsession, as Martensen strove to perfect the taste and texture of Manhattan's culinary icon. Yet the closer he came, the more he realised the final missing ingredient wasn't the Manhattan water, as many claim; it was the 'feeling of a bagel shop: the music, the photos of and by New Yorkers, the subway maps, the shouting servers.' Five years on, Martensen has three across London, in Primrose Hill, Westbourne Grove and Soho.
It's a familiar tale among the new wave of restaurateurs dishing up regional American food in London — the realisation that the flavours they are looking to create are inextricably linked with the cultures that gave rise to them. This was true of the fast-food chains that gave American food culture a bad name — McDonald's and Burger King, say — brands that still capture a particular type of 1950s Americana. But it is even more pertinent when it comes to the regional cuisines that have historically not been well represented in the UK.
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'The buffalo wings you'll get here are as good as any you'd get in Philly,' JP Teti says. He's founder of Passyunk Avenue (passyunkavenue.com), London's 'First True Philadelphia Jawn'. 'My aspiration was more to sell the Philly lifestyle than it was cheese steaks and picklebacks,' he says. The walls are covered with Philadelphia Eagles merch and dollar bills, there's a lifesize model of Danny DeVito by the loos, and the service is generous and fun with a 'a little bit of Philly frankness' mixed in. It is, Teti says 'an intensely ethnic cultural experience'.
'Food is an output of culture,' Jacob Kenedy, chef patron of Plaquemine Lock (plaqlock.com), points out, 'and the food of Louisiana is very symptomatic of where it has come from.' At Plaquemine Lock, Kenedy serves Cajun and Creole cuisine: a melting pot of Louisiana's French, African and American cultures. The restaurant is a love letter to New Orleans (where Kenedy has family) and to his fascination with how 'a truly repugnant period in history — slavery — resulted in a comfortable marriage of cuisines and cultures that permeates everyone's life, everywhere,' he says proudly, pointing out the city's formative influence on jazz and cocktails.
Unlike more generic iterations of southern cuisine in the UK, this food feels as nuanced as the walls adorned with family memorabilia and hand-painted Mississippi murals. It is, on the one hand, part of a larger, longstanding trend toward more regionally specific restaurants in London. Just as Brat is Basque, not Spanish, and Bouchon Racine is Lyonnaise not French, so Plaquemine Lock is Louisianian, not American. Yet it feels more significant, in part because of the identity crisis gripping the States, in part because American food has been (and still is) so caricatured.
'Dude food, mama's mac and cheese, fast food — everything has been obvious pastiche,' the chef Tom Browne says. In 2014 he founded Decatur (decaturlondon.com), a pop-up restaurant showcasing southern specialities like shrimp boils. The clichéd American food that has made its way round the world, Browne reckons, 'has been linked to capitalism, rather than immigrants seeking a better life'. The truth is that most American food comes out of the waves of newcomers who have settled in different parts of the United States and made their culinary peace with what came before them.
'The regional foods which are associated with different immigrant communities, and the interplay between them, that's what's interesting,' the food writer Felicity Cloake reckons. Tex-Mex for her is a perfect example. Richard Burghardt, the co-founder of D Grande in Chiswick, agrees.
'It's wildly varied because it's had decades of evolution since Mexican immigrants first established Mexican restaurants in Texas — and the cuisines of Mexico are wildly varied in the first place,' he says. Hence a menu that includes fajitas, whose name is derived from the Spanish word for belt but which first emerged on the ranches of West Texas — only to be evolved into the sizzling, steak-and-salsa dish we know today.
When the Philadelphian Teti opened Passyunk, it was because he would 'constantly see new American hospitality concepts here that were broad brush and generalist, when the America I know is idiosyncratic and regional.'
Of course, it is impossible to talk about American food without mentioning the man in the White House. Not one of the restaurateurs I speak to are running 'political' restaurants — yet Trump's effect on their country's global reputation in the last six months has made their specificity interesting. 'Trump's own burger-based diet reinforces the very clichés that these restaurateurs have been trying to upend,' Browne says.
Like his political ideology, Trump's view of American food is informed by 'a rose-tinted idea of America under Eisenhower in the 1950s: the glory days of fast food, and people getting refrigerators. They are his glory days — not the glory days of American cuisine,' says the journalist and podcaster Jon Sopel, who found much to love in its regional specialities during his six years as the BBC's North America editor.
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Nevertheless, 'Brand America suffers as a result of what Trump is doing, and that applies to food as much as anything else,' he continues, pointing out the declining interest in American tourism in the UK and in Canada, where he was struck recently by efforts of several restaurants to highlight their use of Canadian, not American, produce.
'When you're in the business of selling Americana via a hospitality medium, it is not entirely helpful when the government of the day launches a global insult tour that undermines the values that many people find so attractive about American culture,' Teti says.
The specific cultural nuances of Passyunk Avenue, which Teti feared would be lost on non-Americans, have proved a saving grace. 'American regionality — its glories, weirdnesses and aspiration — is what we represent and it's a bite-sized interpretation of America which people everywhere can relate to or at least find curious.' Americans are proudly American — but their local identity matters as much, if not more. 'The way I feel when I say I'm American versus when I say I'm a New Yorker is very different,' says Martensen, who points out that New Yorkers are New Yorkers first and foremost. Equally, 'the people of New Orleans have this passionate, enchanted relationship with the place,' Kenedy says, 'which I can't recreate at Plaquemine, but I try.'
Politics and dinner are not supposed to mix. 'One is powerful and scary, and the other is delicious,' says Kenedy. In their passionate regionality, these restaurants showcase what non-Americans love about American dining: the generosity, the familiarity, the funny blend of excitability and earnestness. In so far as these restaurants are political, it's as 'an antidote to the disappointment and malaise', Teti says. 'We're showing this positive form of America, which we hope will come again and will cling on to.'