British food week at Lidl (from Thursday 5.Jun.08)

Opus = Our Perfect Uneducated Shithead.When you all start going on about potatos do not forget which nation introduced them to Europe = England.The last time i saw this much crap was in a muck spreader

not heard the word 'shithead' in yonks...thanks Mik!
gonna make a point to say it often now!
brilliant

Some of the British posts here are quite nationalistic, touching jingoism. All this because your cuisine did not get appreciated?

But then it's the British who discard British cuisine, all foreign holidays advertised with foreign food, Britons take great pride in displaying their knowledge of Italian, French cuisine, or sea food and wines.

What I consider the greatest mystery of British cuisine is that an island country that ruled the waves couldn't develop a basic sea food menu?

You've never heard of Fish & Chips?!

We're so backward we invented a seafood breakfast.

Everywhere you go you'll find lots of Chinese, Italian, and Greek restauarants. To a lesser extent French, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese. Even lesser Russian, Swedish, Australian.

Now try and find an English or Irish restaurant (not Irish pub serving food)? In huge cosmopolitan cities like New York you might find one or two in comparison to 10,000 Chinese/Italian.

I think that says everything that needs to be said about English cuisine. Unless of course we're talking about chicken tikka masalla.

Yay! From next thusday Lidl will be selling British food including Fish and Chips, Vinegar, Pickle and CRISPS THAT AREN'T PAPRIKA FLAVOUR!!!

Here!

Topics merged by admin

Why would you need an British restaurant in the States?, much of their food originated in Britain anyway.

Seems we are busy making other countries food so well, they are importing it from England due to our well renowned culinary skills. Tuck into your Baguette or Brioche in France and you may find it is produced in the UK. The black pudding competition in France was won by a Brit too. Read on:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/s...2278068,00.html

Seems the French are keen on some of our wines too.


For full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jun/30/f...ddrink.shopping

History:
One point must be made clear: for centuries the English aristocracy ate French food, and their menus are peppered with accents graves and circumflexes.

Today:
You may already have several ideas about typical British food, but the most popular dish in England at the moment is… curry!

This says a lot about the British food, along with hardly any thriving British restaurants any where in the world.

Crikey, you really seem to have a bee in your bonnet about this, Opus.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from The Taste of Britain:
Much these days is made of British food culture. Chefs and food writers, myself included, are keen to tell you that it's thriving, it should be celebrated, it's as good as anything our Continental cousins enjoy. Yet sometimes it seems as if our words come rolling back to us, as if bouncing some distant land mass, unheard and unheeding along the way, so that we begin to have trouble persuading ourselves, let alone others, that there is something here worth fighting for.

Opus, try eating here in France: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_...icle3521972.ece

One of their best restaurants, allegedly. (Best you ask for the menu and the wine list with the prices on though)

I'm a long-standing lurker on here but if there's one thing that's sure to shake me out of my lethargy and get me typing furiously it's ignorance about British food.

Right. Ignorance is the key word here. For whatever reason(s) - wasn't it Jamie Oliver who put it down to "bad press"? - people just don't know what British food is (apart from the stereotypical fish and chips and a few others like, and I quote from a German I was talking to once, "lamb with peppermint sauce" (sic, LOL, WTF, etc.))

The other thing is bad experience of British food. Personal subjective tastes aside, this is invariably down to the sad fact that so many people these days (and not just Brits) simply cannot cook - it's certainly not the food in itself. I found the example in an earlier post of shepherd's pie revealing: as someone who has lived (and cooked) in Spain, France and Germany, if there's one British dish which never fails to impress it's shepherd's (or cottage) pie - when it's cooked well. Ask my present Bavarian (or ex-Spanish if you can find her) girlfriend and ask them what they think of British food and you'll get something along the lines of: "Mmmm, shepherd's pie, pork pie, mmmm, pan haggerty, chicken tikka masala, mmmmmmm, Yorkshire puddings with gravy, scotch eggs, cheddar cheese, stilton, mmmmmmm, fishcakes, cornish pasties, roast potatoes and parsnips, mmmm, etc.

On the Lidl British food week - a massive disappointment if all it is is pre-packaged and/or frozen stuff. Shame.

Yes it says that the British are prepared to try new things and experiment with their food. Curry may well be the most popular food, although i think you'll find it's the most popular take away food, but that doesn't mean they've stopped eating roast beef and Fish and chips.

Regarding the Lidl British food week - piss poor would be my reaction.

I always enjoy the food when I go back to England. I love the traditional Sunday lunches, fish and chips, sandwiches, pies. cheeses etc. Moreover I often eat out with my friends and go to different restaurants and pubs. Normally the food is excellent, interesting and above all varied. Maybe Johnny Foreigner doesn't know the good places to eat.

And if I may just slag off German food. The same dishes are served up in every German restaurant and homes year in, year out. Boring and bland. What do the German Chefs learn at Chef School? It seems to me they can cook 6 standard dishes and know how to arrange shredded cabbage on a plate.

thing is, the Lidl 'Aktions-Woche' things are always mostly grotty.
they had a 'Thai Week' a few weeks ago, there were some gems (curry pastes, coconutmilk etc) amongst the shitey Pot-Noodle stuff.

so Opus where you from?

Add tinned spaghetti to complete the picture...
When I took my German girlfriend over to UK for first visit upon return she would not stop telling everyone how GREAT and varied the food was that she had been presented.

Trouble is, just as with a car manufacturer, bad press is very difficult to turn around...


Quite. My Yorkshire puds go down a bomb here. Son & wife enjoyed eating at a cornish pasty bar in the Oxford pedestrian center a few years back (witnessing some particularly foul-mouthed behaviour from a local yobbo - but thats OT).

And cheese - on my rare visits to UK I buy a number of different English cheeses & on arriving home late at night find wife & son with bread & knives at ready to fall over the cheese...

The whole self congratulatory tone of the past years in Britain (and amongst the TT Britons) on the great revival of British cuisine is a grand delusion. At least the British should wait for the foreigners to taste and appreciate their food before indulging in the self congratulatory party. It's merely foreign restaurateurs exploiting the horrible situation that the English people must suffer through. Indeed the poor image of boiled meat may have changed but this is no grand revolution. English Cuisine is still about taking of the world's best fresh ingredients and destroying them.

An aggressive tone of discussion will not make it taste better. Proof of the pudding is in the eating and today no foreigner is eating the British cuisine.

No wonder the "bad weather, bad food" image is not without merit or why else would in hell the cooks be British.

so anyway, is this your opinion or fact?

we've taken plenty of 'foreign' visitors out for English food back home, no complaints so far...
not to mention how crowded the restaurants in Edinburgh were on a recent trip, full of 'foreign' people.

Just on personal experience. Most German/American visitors I've been with really liked the restaurants I took them too. However I often hear German visitors coming back to England and saying the food is crap. Personally I put it down to not wanting to try new foods or not being able to locate the good restaurants. They are stuck in their narrowed minded view of how food should be and turn up their ignorant noses.

I do love seeing you guys get all wound up especially since you're usually so good at doing it to everyone else.

Insulting British cuisine or the Queen is always a surefire way to get your collective knickers in a twist.

Fuck the Queen. Give me bacon.

The Vicar. I have found a lot of Germans moan about the food in the UK but they also complain about the high prices of eating out. Most of them end up eating at the absolute cheapest place they can find, in some back alley in London (naturally) but expect to be served a 30 kilo side of hung Aberdeen Angus. Some of them moaned about the food in London but then admitted it was so expensive they ate in Pizza Hut and Wimpy which summed up their UK dining experience.

A long time ago, I took my neighbours to London for a long weekend. My next door neighbour is not the most adventurous person when it comes to food, but he loved everything we had there. All of them were really surprised how good the food was, not what they were expecting at all. The only thing they didn't like was some Chilli we had in a pub, it was much to firey for them, but we all know that spicy hot food is not too popular with ze Germans. When we got back they told everyone who asked about the food, and lots of people did, that it was great. There is a myth about British food that is difficult to break, because too few of them actually go there.
God shave the Queen!

I've also heard a lot of Germans moan about the food in the States. When I was in the States I was in food heaven and eating out was very reasonable. All I hear from a lot of Germans is that it's not proper food in America.

Only because you don't appreciate Roast Potatoes or understand the difference between French Toast and Eggy Bread.

The sentimental experiences about girls friends and neighbors appreciating British cuisine fail to make the point. May be they were just being polite or had rock bottom expectations. The only proof is in the eating. German taste of foreign cuisine is reflected in the restaurants in Germany, not in one German moaning or appreciating it. If some one liked British food, they will seek it in their city, in their county, and we will witness a proliferation of British restaurants.

The only success of the British cuisine has been that Britons have not completely abandoned it, this survival is what British media is touting as the grand revival.

The real test is to have at least a certain % (eg 5%) of the number of Italian, or Chinese, or Mexican, or Japanese, or Thai, or Greek or French or Cuban, or Korean, or Vietnamese, or Turkish, or Brazilian or Middle Eastern or Mongolian restaurants in the world catering British.

the point is you don't like British cuisine which is fine. but to profess no non-British people like it at all is just foolish.

The main thing I think is that the food should be good. It doesn't matter if it's French, Chinese, Indian etc. The point is there is good food in Britian.

Perhaps it's more people from those countries migrate and open restaurants.

British people migrate and sit on bulletin boards all day.

Mmmm cheese and pickle sarnie………..

Now to say British food is crap is just so so arrogant and wrong.

2008 Worlds top 50 restaurants

Here is a quick summary:

2 The Fat Duck UK
13 Restaurant Gordon Ramsay UK
16 St John UK Highest Climber
19 Hakkasan UK
22 Le Gavroche UK
30 Nobu London UK

34 Vendome Germany Highest New Entry

All of the Brit entries are Brit influenced food, with the exception of Hakkasan which serves Chinese.

To say that German food is all bland is also a bit arrogant, you just need to look around a little and not got to the typical places. I will plug my favourite place:

http://www.koslowskis.de/

Fantastic food and not so expensive, if your ever in Rosenheim try it

I am going back this weekend and can't wait to get some decent grub. I don't care if it's British or not. It's the way it's cooked that matters. There are tonnes of great restaurants in the UK and I'm going to pig out on decent seafood that I just can't seem to find without speding a fortune here. Plus not everything there is fried within an inch of it's life believe it or not.

If you eat in British chain restaurants in tourist hotspots you get crap. Even little bit of research can go a long way...

This top restaurant list is from a British Publication for the British.
Have a close look at the menus: Half of it is outright French or Italian.
No doubt, there is the best food from around the world in Britain. One can have some of the best Indian or Italian in Britain, only in NYC can beat UK in food. But sadly you can have some of the worst with the local.

So Opus. What is a British dish then seeing they are all so awful?

Admittedly I'm basing my opinion on restaurants in Halle/Leipzig region. If you go to any town and head for the market square and go in the nearest restaurant. Open up the menu and I can guarantee the same old 6 dishes will be there.


Exactly. If you don't like the traditional British food, you can have something else. The traditional British pub will serve you up Fish and Chip but also a curry, frogs legs or sushi served on a naked 18 year old.

Also:

Restaurant Gordon Ramsay - French
Nobu London - Japanese

So really only 3 that serve British cuisine.

Gordon Ramsay is NOT French.

Of course you can, Britain like every other country, including France, has some bloody awful restaurants/cafes, but that doesn't mean all British food is crap.

Yes but his cooking is:

I've had crap food in Paris so this must mean all French food is crap.

edit: using a "classical foundation" does not mean his food is French.

So what? At least there isn't some kind of food purity law. Why can't British food be influenced by other places, it shows it doesn't stand still?

My Dad lives in a wee village outside Glasgow and there you can dine on fresh produce such as mussels, smoked salmon, langoustines, Aberdeen Angus beef, seasonal veg, various scottish cheddars etc...why does that not count as good british food?

I dunno, sounds pretty French to me.

Errr, no. It's a Swiss company and the board members (there's even an American in there) are from each region entered...

http://www.theworlds50best.com/academy.aspx

Scottish lobster not French.

So I suppose Singapore Airlines must serve French food to, cos he consults for them.

From the Restaurant Gordon Ramsay website...


It's a French restaurant.

Long live partial quoting. Anyway, this topic is pretty funny.

Right but the way it's prepared is.


Just because I pick a carrot in Germany doesn't mean I'm eating German cuisine.