Straight outta Stratford

In the comfort of his Jolly Good Meat Products processing plant in South-Central Los Angeles, Martin Lunt proclaims his “philosophy of life.” “Tough times do not last,” Lunt says, his bald head dabbed with flour from the morning’s batch of Melton Mowbray pork pies, “but tough people do.”

In 1979, as an expat Brit fresh off the plane, Lunt could not have anticipated the need for such perseverance. By age 30, he had bought his father’s Altrincham butcher shop, in England’s Cheshire county, then made a small fortune in meat and commercial properties, and resolved to retire to Los Angeles, where he was promptly broadsided by a real estate swindle. “I came here as green as grass,” he says, “and I was shorn like a sheep.”

The newly destitute Lunt found a job cutting meat at Fedco, then invested in a Sierra Madre butcher shop. Clientele from a nearby British retirement villa steered him toward home-country fare. “The residents found out I was a Brit,” Lunt recalls, “and they asked me when was I going to make them some bangers.”

At first he was skeptical, but his wife convinced him that God was trying to tell him something. “I said, ‘Yes, yes!’ ” Lunt smiles at the memory, slapping together hands grown thick with meat-pie kneading and sausage pulling. “I realized that it was a way to make a living for myself, to get me out of the ca-ca.”

So he began churning out bangers--the traditional English pork sausages that are not technically sausages, according to USDA standards, because they contain 11.59% bread crumbs. Lunt abandoned the butcher shop and briefly bootlegged the bangers in his garage before officially launching Jolly Good in 1983. He now markets bangers, Melton Mowbray pies and the ham-and-egg pies that constitute a traditional ploughman’s lunch. He supplies the renowned King’s Head pub in Santa Monica, as well as British restaurants and specialty stores throughout Southern California. Fresh-frozen, his pies and bangers also fly Delta to pubs in Texas, Florida, Colorado, Oregon and Louisiana--wherever the expats have attained critical mass.

Popularizing British specialty meats among the Yanks, however, has been another matter. “When Americans hear ‘bangers,’ they say, ‘What the hell is that, the title of a porno movie?’ ” Lunt says. “Of course, when they taste them . . . one bite and we got ya!”