Food in London, as you may expect, has been magnificent. We got started with a visit to Borough Market - coffee from Monmouth, and tasting a random clutch of cheeses at Neal’s Yard. Monmouth makes probably the best cup of coffee anyone will ever brew for you - a weighing scale, a grinder, a row of 10 drip cones, and a completely unhurried barista pouring hot water over grounds and rinsing out empty cones and handing out full cups and grinding coffee all at once. Others pull hearts into lattes, seemingly unaware that the line for coffee now stretches halfway across the market. Each cup is intense and intricate. Next door is the Green Market, where you can find, among the meat pies and dried sausages, the world’s best cheese sandwich, as devised by a fanatic who’s spent several years trying to perfect it, is sold. My one gripe about the place as a whole is that it’s too much a giant gourmet store, with far too little actual produce, and far too little of it English. It’s best seen in fall, when the butchers are bedecked with game, and the odd grouse feather flutters to your feet as you ogle. It’s also worth going to Monmouth Coffee’s roasting space in Maltby Street on a Saturday morning (the only time they’re open) - they’ll show you the roasters and tell you about their beans and their process, and, best of all, they will, if you ask, let you do a side by side tasting of a bunch of their coffees.

A few general observations - bread in every proper restaurant we went to was somewhere between excellent and superb. Butter was consistently good, and usually cultured. Milk tastes different in England - it’s richer and more flavourful, even the standard organic stuff coffee chains put out on their counters. There are two chains of earnest, organic, feel-good sandwich shops, both of which try to give the impression that they’re the sandwich chain Jamie Oliver would open if he ran a sandwich chain. Sandwiches from Eat are somewhat better than those from Pret a Manger. Innocent smoothies are very tasty, though we had no guilty ones to compare them to. Service was overwhelmingly better than in the states - servers were genuinely warm rather than studiedly friendly, generally knowledgeable, treated you like an adult, and, most importantly, did their job without trying to sell all the fucking time.

We made the pilgrimage out to Bray, for lunch at the Fat Duck, which provoked the most mixed reactions of the trip. The place is a museum at this point - our maitre d’hote said the tasting menu was largely the same as when he joined two years ago, and unlikely to change much due to the nature of the custom. Much of it is flat out delicious - snail porridge, quail jelly with oak moss, all the desserts (much more consistent than the savouries) etc.etc. You come to see one of the places where it all started, and what you get is a snapshot of a certain period in time, when this kind of food had to be presented with a theatrical flourish - except that none of the stage business has changed and now it feels a little dated. Perhaps I’m just jaded. My impression wasn’t helped by the fact that the service was really not to our taste. It was discreet and expert, as it would be in any three-star, but almost the entire front of house was French, spoke with a sneer, and not entirely fluent in English (leading to much harmless but unresolved misunderstanding). The contrast with the warmth and hospitality we experienced at every other restaurant we went to just could not have been greater. Not really worth the money, I’m afraid.

Instead, visit Bray to eat at the Hind’s Head, the pub adjacent to the Fat Duck. Heston Blumenthal bought it a few years ago and set about perfecting pub grub A fair number of the tables we saw at lunch wound up having pints and sausages at the Hind’s Head afterwards - which says something about the experience of lunching at the Fat Duck, I suppose. The food and beer are both really very good, including platonic examples of chips (triple fried), and trifle (as seen on TV). Also, tasty Warwickshire Wizzers - what they are, you have to find out for yourself. The 17th century building helps with the atmosphere, and the staff are much nicer than they are next door.

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"Eating in London, 1 of 3" was written on 21 May 2009 and filed in General