Brits United

[GreyLord]

As a foreigner, I will say: Your motorways are a nice drive, truly excellent, but London red route in rush hour? Woof.

Driving in London at all has been pretty woof for many years in my experience.

Meanwhile, driving in villages and the country is mostly playing Russian roulette with potholes.

I have no desire to drive in London...rush hour or not.

The worse traffic I was ever in was around 8? years ago in Los Angeles. It was 10:30 at night and Rush Hour was still going on. It took me 2.5 to 3 hours to traverse that area on my way to Disneyland. I've been to Disneyland since but I've never driven in Los Angeles again. I always hire another driver to drive me around. 3 hours in the middle of the night to go a few miles...awful.

The Craziest Traffic has to be in Asia. In some parts of India and Asia I think the people feel the traffic laws are more of...suggestions? rather than anything else.

As far as the country/rural areas go of the UK (and Ireland)...regardless of what you think of the state of the roads...at least the drivers are more civilized than those two places above.

 

[pete284]

We've had the Marmite conversation now we must mention the king of all hot drinks a good beefy Bovril

 

[jian]

We've had the Marmite conversation now we must mention the king of all hot drinks a good beefy Bovril

Do people still drink Bovril (or what people in old books call a nice strengthening beef tea)? I guess they must if it’s still on the shelves.

One thing about being in Vancouver is realising how influential and widespread internationally Ovaltine has become. It’s sold routinely as a drink in HK and Taiwanese cafes and still seems fairly popular in Malaysian and Filipino places too (though not as popular as Milo - damn those Aussies for stealing a march on us there).

 

[Morrus]

Do people still drink Bovril (or what people in old books call a nice strengthening beef tea)? I guess they must if it’s still on the shelves.

I'm pretty sure I've never had it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Do people still drink Bovril (or what people in old books call a nice strengthening beef tea)? I guess they must if it’s still on the shelves.

My mum still drinks posh versions of Bovril, i.e. beef tea, albeit extremely rarely and she is in her 70s. I am not aware of anyone younger who does.

One thing I must note about the UK that fascinates me - maybe it's true of all countries/places, I dunno but... - is how much fast food and restaurants - and sweets, actually - have changed over even the relatively short time I've been alive (I'm 47).

For example, when I was a kid, in the 1980s, we got all sorts of Americana, with a lot of restaurants loosely based on American 1950s diner nostalgia stuff and serving a lot of burgers (which linked to general 1980s nostalgia for the 1950s). By the 2000s, those were mostly gone, and by the 2010s, if you wanted a burger, it was likely going to have to be a "smashburger" or some ghastly microwaved-seeming pub thing (which I would, perhaps unfairly, also file "Honest Burger" and that similar one under). Used to be back in my day < snaps suspenders, leans back noisily in chair > you could get a malt vanilla milk shake reet easy. That was true up until about 2015 (in part because "smashburger" places initially brought it back) Nowadays though, good luck getting any milkshake which isn't bad chocolate, bad vanilla, or "bad vanilla but with some kind of overly-sweet chocolate bar/biscuit blendered into it".

Or we could look at the rise of the mighty "chicken shop" (i.e. place dedicated primarily to selling fried breaded chicken), going from barely existing in the 1980s, to pretty common by the early 2000s, but super-super-declasse, like you normalized towards "urban working class" a huge amount just by stepping inside one. And those tended to be independent and on-off, or regional-specific brands like Morleys. And now it's become not only not-declasse, but so mainstream and typical that smug middle-class middle-managers might take people there for a "team lunch". Indeed, this is so obvious even the often culture-oblivious BBC News wrote about it recently - How US fried chicken craze is transforming British takeaways - of course the BBC acts like this is some recent thing, not a gradual change over the last 20+ years because they're run by people so hopelessly middle-class they'd catch fire if they stepped over the threshold of a Morleys. Also amazingly manage to get the name of one of the brands wrong (it's Slim Chickens, like the country musician Slim Pickens, not "Slim's Chicken", you culturally and functionally illiterate dimwits!).

 

[jian]

My mum still drinks posh versions of Bovril, i.e. beef tea, albeit extremely rarely and she is in her 70s. I am not aware of anyone younger who does.

One thing I must note about the UK that fascinates me - maybe it's true of all countries/places, I dunno but... - is how much fast food and restaurants - and sweets, actually - have changed over even the relatively short time I've been alive (I'm 47).

For example, when I was a kid, in the 1980s, we got all sorts of Americana, with a lot of restaurants loosely based on American 1950s diner nostalgia stuff and serving a lot of burgers (which linked to general 1980s nostalgia for the 1950s). By the 2000s, those were mostly gone, and by the 2010s, if you wanted a burger, it was likely going to have to be a "smashburger" or some ghastly microwaved-seeming pub thing (which I would, perhaps unfairly, also file "Honest Burger" and that similar one under). Used to be back in my day < snaps suspenders, leans back noisily in chair > you could get a malt vanilla milk shake reet easy. That was true up until about 2015 (in part because "smashburger" places initially brought it back) Nowadays though, good luck getting any milkshake which isn't bad chocolate, bad vanilla, or "bad vanilla but with some kind of overly-sweet chocolate bar/biscuit blendered into it".

Or we could look at the rise of the mighty "chicken shop" (i.e. place dedicated primarily to selling fried breaded chicken), going from barely existing in the 1980s, to pretty common by the early 2000s, but super-super-declasse, like you normalized towards "urban working class" a huge amount just by stepping inside one. And those tended to be independent and on-off, or regional-specific brands like Morleys. And now it's become not only not-declasse, but so mainstream and typical that smug middle-class middle-managers might take people there for a "team lunch". Indeed, this is so obvious even the often culture-oblivious BBC News wrote about it recently - How US fried chicken craze is transforming British takeaways - of course the BBC acts like this is some recent thing, not a gradual change over the last 20+ years because they're run by people so hopelessly middle-class they'd catch fire if they stepped over the threshold of a Morleys. Also amazingly manage to get the name of one of the brands wrong (it's Slim Chickens, like the country musician Slim Pickens, not "Slim's Chicken", you culturally and functionally illiterate dimwits!).

Yeah, basically, the U.K. gets as much international influence as anywhere - probably more, because we’re so used to importing whatever we like and whatever looks good for so long, and food trends are relatively easy to import. Korean fried chicken, Dubai chocolate, Vietnamese pho, Japanese ramen, Indian chaat, whatever looks tasty right now. We do tend to get those trends second-hand after they’ve been tried and proven successful elsewhere, but we do get them.

(Re-read The Citadel by A J Cronin - a 1937 novel which was very important in the founding on the NHS and thus one of my holy texts - last year and there’s a throwaway line about how popular borscht restaurants have become in London, which is cool.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Dubai chocolate

That's a fascinating one because it's essentially been astroturfed into being a thing by (I suggest by initially paid) influencers. The UAE have been looking into and willing to put their huge amounts of money behind anything they could claim culturally for quite a while (as people may be aware)

It's not even from Dubai or the UAE in any real sense, the concept was originated by a professional chocolatier who is British-Egyptian, and developed into a reality by a Filipino chef, and was sold in Dubai solely because it's one of the few places a professional chocolatier can still do good business with $30/serving chocolate. Then suddenly in 2023 after selling as "I can't get a knafeh of it!" (awful name to be fair) becomes "Dubai Chocolate" and loads of heavily-sponsored influencers are praising it.

To be fair, Dubai had the sense to "back a winner" here in that they picked something which was pretty okay, but still pretty funny (in all senses of "funny").

The rest though are all genuine AFAICT.

One other British peculiarity that may surprise some Americans and maybe others is that a lot of Britain-based Indian/South Asian and Chinese restaurants serve very different specific things to the US (something which is far less true of Japanese and Korean places). Sure you'll be able to get a lot of similar general categories of food like "curry" or "chicken with noodles", but a lot of the actual specifics will be quite different, and some things which are major in one country will be "What are you talking about?" in the other.

 

[GreyLord]

One other British peculiarity that may surprise some Americans and maybe others is that a lot of Britain-based Indian/South Asian and Chinese restaurants serve very different specific things to the US (something which is far less true of Japanese and Korean places). Sure you'll be able to get a lot of similar general categories of food like "curry" or "chicken with noodles", but a lot of the actual specifics will be quite different, and some things which are major in one country will be "What are you talking about?" in the other.

What are the big items that each sells (British vs. American) in their Chinese Restuarants, which are the same, which are different?

I have been to an Indian Restaurant once. It was run by Indians who had very heavy accents. I think it was authentic Indian, but that's a supposition as I would not know how to identify it as authentic or not. I didn't know what anything was. I had no idea if there was a certain way to eat it (they didn't tell me, and there was no indications on what I was supposed to do). It wasn't just the normal curry and rice that so many in the general population make, it was all this other stuff with no rice and some bread (that I dipped into the stuff, but wasn't sure whether that was correct or not...as I said, nothing to tell me what to do). Very little experience with Indian food after that embarrassing episode on my part.

 

[jian]

One other British peculiarity that may surprise some Americans and maybe others is that a lot of Britain-based Indian/South Asian and Chinese restaurants serve very different specific things to the US (something which is far less true of Japanese and Korean places). Sure you'll be able to get a lot of similar general categories of food like "curry" or "chicken with noodles", but a lot of the actual specifics will be quite different, and some things which are major in one country will be "What are you talking about?" in the other.

This is probably true of almost all cuisines that have been imported for any length of time (say fifty years or more) - British Indian cuisine is its own thing, like British-Chinese cuisine, Canadian-Chinese cuisine, Korean-Chinese cuisine, or Japanese-Chinese cuisine. Heck, those Chinese guys got around.

Canadian-Chinese cuisine is actually kind of hard to find in Vancouver these days, it’s massively outnumbered by the actual genuinely Chinese places (Chongqing, Gansu, Yunnan, Szechuan, etc., not to mention HK and Taiwanese) that have opened. It’s mostly found in old-fashioned breakfast cafes like The Northern Cafe.

 

[jian]

What are the big items that each sells (British vs. American) in their Chinese Restuarants, which are the same, which are different?

I have been to an Indian Restaurant once. It was run by Indians who had very heavy accents. I think it was authentic Indian, but that's a supposition as I would not know how to identify it as authentic or not. I didn't know what anything was. I had no idea if there was a certain way to eat it (they didn't tell me, and there was no indications on what I was supposed to do). It wasn't just the normal curry and rice that so many in the general population make, it was all this other stuff with no rice and some bread (that I dipped into the stuff, but wasn't sure whether that was correct or not...as I said, nothing to tell me what to do). Very little experience with Indian food after that embarrassing episode on my part.

The classic British-Chinese dish is sweet and sour pork, which is similar to a lot of other dishes (such as tangsuyeok in Korean-Chinese cuisine) but is its own thing, quite sweet and orange and with pineapple. The classic Canadian-Chinese dish is ginger beef, which was invented in Canada. Otherwise, both cuisines are similarly aimed at Western palates fifty years ago.

I know a lot less about Indian cuisine, but traditionally British-Indian food is predominately Bangladeshi, with a lot of dishes invented or adapted for Brits (tikka masala, vindaloo, balti and so on). Here in Vancouver, the main influence is Punjabi. One thing I don’t like about that are the naan, they’re a lot less fluffy than in the U.K., sadly.