Rude Travel by Vir Sanghvi: London diary

For centuries, the British were notorious for their cuisine: perhaps the worst in the world. Then, around two decades ago, the Brits themselves declared that this had changed. London was, or so we were told, the gastronomic capital of the world.



This claim should have been greeted with derision but three factors had contributed to the change in the London restaurant scene.



The first was that a new generation of British chefs had begun to take pride in ingredients and reinvent simple dishes with high-quality produce.



The second was that by the Nineties, Britain had become genuinely multicultural. It wasn’t just the Asians and West Indians who finally came of age in that decade. It was also that Europeans took advantage of the EU’s Open Borders policy and flooded London.