Eating up England

Keen readers (of which I know there are at least 2) will have noticed that to this point, I have not written much about food. There's not much eating about this "eating up Europe" blog to this point.

Sandy and I were talking about this over dinner this evening. We have been lowering the bar, we decided, when it comes to the food here in the UK. If we look at it objectively - in other words judging what we've eaten based on the quality of what we eat at home - then we struggle to identify any really, truly good meals. Meals that have surprised us; meals that made us feel really, really good. We tried to make a top 10 - of the whole trip, of each place - and found we peetered out at about 5. Five dishes in two and a half weeks that have been almost as good as the food in New Zealand.

I think it's safe to say it's more difficult to find really good food than it is at home. This might be because we are just taking pot luck. But I tend to think that if you did that as a traveller in New Zealand, chances are you'd still end up eating something really good, than not. It might also be partly that the food here is not really like the food at home.

There's a huge pub culture here, and much eating is done in pubs. Many of the pubs seem to have very generic menus; I think the food is franchised out to central operations who design and print the menus and the cooks just churn it out. It can be quite grim: rock-hard scampi nuggets, flaccid pies, deep-fried fish, piles of nachos (nachos! Remember them?) swimming in cheese; and everything with chips, chips and more chips. Some days in the past fortnight the only vegetables we've had have been the peas which also seem to accompany everything. I had read with some excitement about the "gastropubs" that are popping up everywhere in the UK; although I did have high hopes, I don't think I truly experienced one of these.

There were a few rays of light in the otherwise grey (or should I say brown and beige) landscape. Breakfasts were generally very good; I've had perfect boiled eggs, kippers, tasty bacon and tomatoes and some really delicious black pudding on my breakfast plate.

In Cornwall the cooks generally seemed to take pride in serving as much local food as possible, and this meant the food was, overall, tasty and well-cooked. We shared a fun meal with our friend Neil and his family at the Bay View Inn, near Bude, where we were also staying. When we'd checked in at this laid-back surfer hangout the chef had been getting a drink in the bar. "It must be hot work out the back in the kitchen", we said. "Nah, it's great", he said. "I get to be around food all day." I liked that attitude a lot. (It made up for the fact that they lost our dinner order and we didn't get fed for two hours). The meals when they came were fresh and interesting and well-cooked, although I think we'd had a couple of glasses of wine too many to really appreciate it, which was a shame.

In York we enjoyed a really interesting lunch of small dishes, a sort of English tapas, at a restaurant called Nineteen, housed in a tiny 16th-century building that had once been a brothel. We ate a really very good fish pie, a lovely smoked haddock risotto with black pudding, a steak and local ale stew and a goat's cheese and onion omelette. The owner served us and we told him we were on a food and wine trip and that I was a food writer. He seemed to lack the "mine host" gene which does tend to make for a good maitre d'. Conversation with him was like pulling teeth. I don't think he even cracked a smile when we said it was the best food we'd eaten so far in the UK.

We did better as far as friendliness goes at the Doric in Edinburgh, which actually was close to a gastropub if I think about it. There we ate a pretty good dish of mushrooms stuffed with home-made pate and bacon, and Sandy had some really good venison sausages. The guy there who served us steered us away from the wine we'd chosen in favour of the house white, which he said (and he was right) was cheaper and a better wine. You have to love the Scots.

But the plain truth finally dawned on me today, back in London, as I ate the first meal that has truly satisfied me in 10 days. It was a simple plate of parpadelle with a sauce of fresh and wild mushrooms, with some fresh green parsley and a bit of parmesan. The kind of thing I might cook at home. (We were back at Carluccio's after dropping the rental car off at Russell Square; it was a tribute to my navigation skills, I think, that this was not the fraught exercise that getting out of London was).

The truth is: English food is just not me. Or Sandy, truth be told, as much as he loves sausages and mash. We like freshness, we like zing; we like clean Asian flavours and fresh vegetables and tomatoes that taste like tomatoes and plates of food full of vibrant colour. I have no doubt that there are lots of people here cooking amazing food that I would love. But it seems like you have to a) work quite hard to find it and b) spend a lot of money to eat it. And as Sandy says, it really shouldn't be this hard.

Here's hoping France will provide an antidote to all this bland brown-ness. If not, there's always Italy.....