‘The American impression of British food is still so dim,’ says Ed Szymanski, chef-co-owner of Dame and Lord’s, two British restaurants that have become among the hottest tables in New York in recent years. ‘It’s a fool’s errand opening [a British restaurant] here. We’re lucky it has worked out for us. Most restaurateurs have to compensate for the local distaste for English food by involving a lot of international influences.’
No matter how hard we might try to shake it off, our culinary reputation over there remains anchored by impressions of greasy fish and chips, stodgy pies and what the Americans are fond of dismissing as ‘breakfast beans’, an abomination before noon.
While Szymanski is doing his best to introduce New Yorkers to a whole range of delights, from fish and chips to kedgeree to duck pie, hesays there is one British dish that needs little introduction. One dessert has broken out and is bravely flying the flag across the city, a golden-brown ambassador of this island’s historic abundance of sugar and sponge cake: sticky toffee pudding.
‘That’s really caught on,’ he says. ‘Americans love it – it’s rich, sweet and soft, which I think a lot of people associate with English food. Comforting, stodgy soft things.’
It’s not only at his restaurants where sticky toffee pudding is proving a hit. At Crown Shy, off Wall Street, there is an indulgent version for two, priced at $26, although Szymanski notes, ‘they have the indignity to serve it with apple sorbet, which is just offensive’. The Four Horsem*n, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brooklyn, has its own version. Torrisi, an Italian restaurant in SoHo, has a dessert that they call ‘Sicilian date cake’, but they are fooling nobody, least of all Szymanski. ‘It’s a sticky toffee pudding by any other name,’ he says.
Then there is Hawksmoor, the British steakhouse that has enjoyed remarkable success since it opened in New York in 2021, a move that initially looked a lot like launching a coal emporium on Tyneside. Pete Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic, summed the consensus up when he wrote, ‘If I were asked which of all the restaurants from other countries would be the best addition to the New York dining scene, I’m not sure I would choose an English steakhouse, exactly.’ Yet even he was wooed. His rave review concluded with an admiring mention of the ‘exemplary’ sticky toffee pudding.
Given the rapacious sink-or-swim capitalism of New York’s restaurant scene, the success of sticky toffee pudding is testament to its power. Thinking through the list of English puds, it’s hard to argue that it is not a worthy representative. Sticky toffee pudding is as reassuring and delicious as dishes come, with the heat from the ginger cutting through the caramel sweetness of the sauce, while contrasting with a springiness in the sponge. Nobody takes their first bite and thinks ‘not for me’. It’s a Trojan horse for other delights. Where sticky toffee leads, steak and kidney might one day follow.
‘The stereotypical New Yorker is on their way to three dates and co*cktail parties that evening,’ says Szymanski. ‘They don’t want to sit down and tuck into a big bowl of stodge. They want Italian coastal fare because they’re flitting around on their way to Broadway. But luckily it’s a big enough city that we can find enough people who want to eat real food.’
