England's Best Pub Food - Articles - Travel + Leisure

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See our slideshow of England’s Best Pub Food.

At the Sportsman , a seaside pub on the pebbly Kent coast, I recently ate the best lamb I’ve ever tasted. A pale pink chop, a hunk of crisped shoulder confit. Outside the window the animal’s brethren grazed in the mist. The Sportsman’s chef, Stephen Harris, also cures ham from nearby pigs in fleur de sel he made himself. A dish he calls “rockpool” has cockles, crabmeat, and candy-sweet clams in a dashilike broth made with scavenged seaweed. This was a pub. No tablecloths. Old wood tables. A place you could stop in just for a beer. But you’d quickly realize something different was happening in the kitchen.

In London, at his famed “nose-to-tail” restaurant St. John , Fergus Henderson told me about what has happened to lowly pub grub. There was a time not too long ago, he said, when British chefs had to post a Beefeater outside to signal their intention to serve their own cuisine. That’s all changed now. Britons seem to have come to terms with the existence of something called British food. The better news is that some of the most satisfying stuff is coming not out of high temples of gastronomy, but from that indigenous treasure, the English pub.

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