The World in 202 Meals

Sorry for the lack of new posts—Andrea and I have been away in Toronto, stuffing ourselves at Phở hung and suburban all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants, and delaying the next group meal until tonight (we’re doing Japanese!). In the meantime, I thought I would compare London’s fare with that of Toronto, a major competitor for the world food crown. Living there certainly helped inspire Andrea (Canadian) and I (Brit) to suggest the London mission. In fact, with the incredible diversity of its immigrants, Toronto is surely worthy of a 202 Meals operation itself.

Firstly, some Toronto foods we miss in London:

Vietnamese subs (Bánh mì) and ubiquitous Phở restaurants

Bánh mì are sold from dedicated delis in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown-cum-Vietnamtown. Reflecting the French colonial influence on Vietnam, they fill a baguette with pâté, preserved meats, and a seasoned Vietnamese salad mix of pickled daikon and carrot.

The ubiquity of Phở (the classic Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and Bún chả (grilled pork on vermicelli and salad) in Toronto were also responsible for turning me on to the delights of London’s east-end Vietnamese cluster. Phở hung on Spadina was my regular haunt in T.O, and Cây Tre on Old Street is the best I’ve tried so far in London (it’s always busy, although may be resting a little on its laurels recently).

Chinese dumpling houses

While London has many dim-sum restaurants, from mediocre chains to classy Hong-Kong-style eateries, the dumpling house is a simpler, cheaper and ultimately more satisfying proposition. The menu is typically simple—batches of freshly made dumplings come boiled, steamed or pan-fried. They’re dipped to taste in a hand-crafted mix of the soy sauce, vinegar and chilli available at the table. Some menus add a few sides, and some diversify to pancakes and buns, but the focus is clear: you’re there to scoff warm dough-clad parcels of meat. Wash them down with some tea on the house, and you’re ready to head out into a cold afternoon.

Mother’s dumplings, at Dundas and Huron, offered the best in Toronto, made and served by a genuine Chinese mum in a basement dining room. Where is London’s answer?

Pierogi and Kiełbasa

Pierogi are Polish dumplings, filled variously with cheese, potato and meat; kiełbasa is just Polish sausage in its numerous forms. Despite London’s sizeable Polish population, these delicacies prove surprisingly elusive here. Sometimes they’ll appear in an innocuous Polish-owned corner shop, but in Toronto they’re readily available in all supermarkets.

Perhaps it’s the cold weather, and the number of early Ukrainian settlers in Canada, which account for the wider popularity of Eastern European food in Toronto. Future Bakery on Bloor is as good a place as any to try a Canadian take on the region’s cuisine, while in London, try Polanka in Hammersmith for an authentic Polish deli and restaurant.

Farmer’s sausage

This one is perhaps a genuine original Canadian foodstuff, albeit heavily influenced by the German wurst. Andrea has searched high and low for these in London to no avail—Winnipeggers here allege that they’re little known beyond the Mennonite communities of Manitoba, although they evidently make their way to Toronto.

Frequent complaints are also directed at the scarcity of German sausage in London. These were something I was fed regularly as a child, but seem less common these days in supermarkets. Luckily Kurz and Lang have sprung up in Clerkenwell offering a very authentic German sausage experience—great fast food with potatoes and sauerkraut on the side.

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Now, here’s what I missed from London whilst in Canada:

Mince pies

And in fact anything made from mincemeat. Homemade mincemeat, made from chopped apples, dried fruit and nuts, sugar, spice, cider and booze and matured for months in sealed jars, has been a yearly fixture throughout most of my life. The warm little shortcrust pies which result, sprinkled with icing sugar, seem so essential to getting through the winter that I craved them desperately during my first Canadian winter. (I will say this though—the mince pie’s reputation suffers needlessly from the poor flavour and consistency of their shop-bought imitations. What is it that lends even a high-end Marks and Spencer pie that cloying aftertaste of preservatives?)

Christmas pudding, and puddings in general

To me Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without one of these (and one of my Nana’s ice-cream Christmas puddings on Boxing Day, a dish as tasty as it is sacrilegious). The plum pudding, as it’s otherwise known, is another rich, long-maturing English dish made from similar ingredients to mincemeat. It contains a lot of booze, which keeps it well-preserved during the maturation process, and is traditionally served with a sprig of holly and a flame of burning brandy.

While richer and fruitier than the typical variety, it also serves as a great example of a traditional English Pudding—a foodstuff not so common in North America. The true pudding is boiled or steamed in a cloth, and is typically quite heavy, carb-filled and high on suet, a form of animal fat. Golden Syrup, another very British ingredient, also tends to feature heavily. Traditionally these would be tied up over the fireplace and cooked over the same big pot as your dinner (whoever said British food is simple?), but these days you’re as likely to try a baked version, with gourmet flourishes, in one of London’s more traditionally leaning gastropubs.

English-style pork sausages and bacon

We agree to disagree on this one, but to my mind, nothing beats a good quality, well-constructed English pork sausage—especially when bramley apple or leek are added to the mix. I also sorely craved back bacon in Canada. The kind generally available there is what we refer to as “streaky bacon”—the cheap, fatty kind cut from the pork belly—and it’s typically fried to a crisp. A really rich, juicy, thick, sizzled slice of good quality back bacon is one of the best things in the world, and probably one of the biggest enemies of vegetarianism known to man. The “bacon butty”, too, is a simple wonder not commonly eaten over the pond.

Lardy cake

This dubiously named desert is a speciality of various southern counties, including Oxfordshire, where they can be (and were, frequently, by me) purchased in Oxford’s covered market. Yeasty dough is rolled in thin layers with sugar, lard and numerous raisins, then baked until the top crisps up to a syrupy crust, the middle remaining soft and horribly tasty. It will probably give you a heart attack.

Good curry restaurants

Not that there aren’t any in Toronto—in fact, Toronto has a Little India in on Gerrard Street in the east end. But the curry is not the cultural institution that it is here, and most of the restaurants I visited proved decidedly mediocre. Some all-you-can-pig Indian buffet joints on Queen West made up for this in their sheer generosity, but I saw neither the variety of regional Indian cooking, nor the range of Bangladeshi and Pakistani specialities which London boasts.

Good quality sliced-bread sandwiches

While great subs and panini are in abundance in Toronto, a decent sandwich on sliced bread seems hard to find. When you do find one, the fillings and general quality and freshness are no match for the yuppie lunch pickings we’ve come to expect over here from the likes of Pret a Manger and Marks and Spencer.

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Overall, I would call this world food competition a draw.

Relative to others, I feel that neither British nor Canadian food is desperately distinctive—both are known as much for an amalgamation of foreign cuisines as for their own. I think the advantage of Toronto is that, because of the large number of first- and second-generation immigrant communities living near to downtown, it’s easier to find really authentic, affordable, international home-style cooking when dining out. Easier, too, to find a wide variety of great, affordable ethnic supermarkets and ingredients within easy reach. St. Lawrence and Kensington markets also offer a great range of foodie shops.

London does have some advantages too. Biased as I am, I would give us Brits the edge in terms of the depth of our culinary history, despite our tendencies to over-boil vegetables and disgust the French. London also benefits from its sheer size, and the number of top-class restaurants it hosts. We have a great number of specialised (if expensive) foodie shops and long-standing food markets, including the wonderful Borough Market, but also Billingsgate, Smithfield and others. London is also the home of the gastropub, which while something of a recent and occasionally-sneered-at construction, does boast a distinctively British food experience.

One thing I regret is that restaurant eating in England does still seem to carry more of a pricey, “special night out” connotation than in North America. Toronto restaurants are happier to hand out sides and top up drinks on the house, “all-you-can-eat” menus are more common (something of a mixed blessing), and in general, eating out seems a little more casual, affordable and generous as a social activity. We are coming closer to this, especially in metropolitan centres like London, but there’s still some work to do.