In London, the sun rises on a new culinary empire

LONDON has long been an international city in commerce and trade, culture and diplomacy, and because the sun took a very long time to set on the British Empire, the cuisine of at least one of those empire outposts -- India -- was a London staple long before it appeared in the United States. But the internationalization of the city’s cuisine came much later, and it’s never been more global -- or better -- than it is today.

My family and I recently spent a week in London, and -- relying solely on friends’ recommendations, without consciously intending to turn our stay into a culinary version of around the world in seven days -- we wound up eating in excellent restaurants that were, in sequence, Indian, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and French (again).

There are now several world-class Italian restaurants in London, among them Zafferano (where we ate on our previous trip) and Locanda Locatelli (where we dined, after the theater, this time). Chef Giorgio Locatelli’s char-grilled squid with chile and garlic and his tagliatelle with baby goat ragu were among the highlights of our week.

The Michelin Guide for London lists 39 Indian restaurants, more than for any other foreign cuisine. We liked Zaika this time and Tamarind last time. A nine-course tasting menu at Zaika included a spectacular kekda kadi (crab, turmeric and yogurt soup with a fresh crab dumpling), dhungar machli tikka/mahli jhinga (home-spiced smoked salmon and a rosemary-infused tandoori prawn) and an invigorating aam ki jhaag (chilled, frothy mango lassi with toasted cumin, black salt, coconut milk ice cream, roasted coconut and pistachio).

The courses were paired with individual glasses of wine, and here, too, the international character of the experience was striking. We had three French wines and one each from Italy, Portugal and South Africa.

The Real Greek, in trendy Hoxton, served soutzouki sausages, grilled octopus, avgotaraho (cured grey mullet roe) and filo pie filled with seasonal greens and feta cheese that were better than anything I’ve eaten in Athens.

Leading the pack

The Hart brothers, Sam and Eddie, spent more than $1 million to remodel the basement of an old Italian restaurant and turn it into Fino, which opened in March 2003 in the Bloomsbury section of London. It was our tapas lunch here that I most enjoyed.

In addition to an a la carte menu of more than 50 different tapas, Fino offers two tasting menus -- at approximately $33 and $52 per person (depending on the value of the dollar versus the pound). There’s also an express menu at lunch for $28 (with dessert) and $24 (without dessert). I arranged to meet friends there, so we were six in all and managed to sample most of the menu. Fino specializes in seafood, and we especially liked what they did with octopus, sardines, langoustines, cod and clams -- the latter served with bits of jamon iberico and Manzanilla Tapada sherry drizzled across the top. But we also liked the crisp pork belly, a fricassee of wild mushrooms and lamb’s kidneys with an onion marmalade.

When I compare this meal -- and almost every other meal on our trip -- with the food I ate on my first visit to London in 1975, it almost seems as if I were not just in a different century but on a different planet.

On that first trip, the city’s -- and the country’s -- reputation as a gastronomic wasteland was still largely deserved. I had food that made my junior high school cafeteria look like Chez Panisse. To be fair, there were faint glimmerings of change, though, even then.

I can remember having superb French meals at Le Gavroche that year and at La Tante Claire on my next visit a few years later. But fine, high-end French fare is the standard almost everywhere in the Western world; what’s much more interesting -- and a much more recent development -- is that London has become, gastronomically, a truly international city.

“Although there have long been a few high-class French places and, lately, high-class Italian places in London, the idea of a top-level Spanish restaurant and a top-level Greek restaurant and [Michelin] one-star Indian, Chinese and Thai restaurants -- all of which exist now -- is a new thing,” says Fino’s Sam Hart.

Hart attributes this broadening of the London food scene to a growing, if belated culinary sophistication among Londoners -- “a more discerning public no longer happy just to go to some French-British hybrid,” as he puts it.

“As the city’s eating culture has grown, people’s choices have grown, and the interest and the availability have fed on each other in an organic, symbiotic process,” he says. “Now Londoners can pinpoint what they want -- northern Thai, south Indian or a specific region of China, rather than just some vaguely Asian restaurant.”

If you eat only at pubs and modest British restaurants, you’ll think all the old jokes about English food are still valid. But at better restaurants, especially better ethnic restaurants, well, Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine and former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, says, “Right now, I’d rather eat in London than in any other city in the world.”

Perhaps the biggest reason for London’s dramatic culinary improvement, says Nicholas Lander, the widely respected restaurant critic for the London-based Financial Times, is the sudden strength of the British pound.

“Even in the very recent past,” Lander tells me, “top chefs here competing for produce from France were invariably the last in the queue because they were paying with weak pounds. Now the pound is strong against the Euro, and German and French markets are pretty weak, so chefs at the top end in London tell me they can buy better produce than at any time in the past 10 years.”

Good, fresh produce has always been crucial to improving a country’s cuisine; just look at the role it played in the development of the New American cuisine movement of the late 1970s and ‘80s. Twenty years ago, when Richard Binns complained in his book “Richard Binns’ Best of Britain” that “food in Britain still lacks refinement” and that “vegetables, fish and meat are too often overcooked -- and frequently are just not fresh enough,” he said the “greatest difficulty chefs have in Britain is obtaining top-class produce consistently, day in, day out.”

Products are key

The restaurant boom in London and throughout the country has led to more native artisanal production as well, not just produce but poultry and cheese and lamb.

Moreover, Lander says, London chefs -- like those elsewhere -- now have “better access to better products from around the world, thanks to overnight flights.”

The greater availability of fresher, higher-quality products at, in effect, lower prices has triggered more competition among “individual chefs, each one trying to excel the other,” Lander says.

On my next trip to London, I want to try Moro, which combines the cuisines of Spain, North Africa and much of the rest of the Mediterranean. And Zuma, the highly touted Japanese restaurant, and Hakkasan, which friends say is better than any Chinese restaurant in the United States. And I want to go back to Nahm, where on our previous trip to London, we had the best, most authentic Thai food of our lives. And....

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.