If London’s restaurant scene has long riffed on New York’s latest culinary preoccupations (see the French bistro revival or the omakase phenomenon), it’s only recently that the capital has woken up to the five boroughs’s more enduring signature dishes. Think of the queues for Dan Martensen’s lox and schmear at It’s Bagels! – whose third site just launched in Soho – or the city-wide obsession with The Dover’s Vesuvian prawn cocktail and USDA ribeye.
This autumn, cult FiDi pub The Dead Rabbit decamped to the South Bank to ply Brits with its Irish-American coffees at Ryan Chetiyawardana’s Lyaness, while LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy is rumoured to be taking over Carousel with The Four Horsemen team next spring, translating the Williamsburg spot’s chicken livers and chilled Brouilly to W1 following the UK release of its cookbook, Food and Wine for Good Times, this month. Also of note for Manhattan-philes: the publication of chef Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park: The Plant-Based Chapter in December.
Further ahead, Carbone, the red-sauce institution as known for its pap walks as its veal parm, is due to open at the Chancery Rosewood when the hotel launches in the former US Embassy next year. It remains to be seen whether its Goodfellas appeal will translate from Greenwich Village to Grosvenor Square, but expect Murano chandeliers, platter upon platter of spicy rigatoni vodka and enough celebrity sightings to keep Deux Moi busy for the foreseeable.
Further afield, the influence of NY’s food scene can be felt across culture. In his new film, festival hit La Cocina, Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios probes the darker side of Gotham dining. Inspired by Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play The Kitchen, it shadows line cook Pedro (Raúl Briones) and his pregnant girlfriend, server Julia (Rooney Mara), during a relentless day of work in a tourist-trap Times Square diner. Meanwhile, Kay Sohini’s graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, recounts the ways New York fed her, in every sense, after fleeing a deeply abusive relationship in Kolkata.
More surreal? Daria Lavelle’s much anticipated darkly comic debut novel Aftertaste, about food, ghosts and the New York culinary scene. When protagonist Konstantin loses his father, he gains the ability to taste the Proustian madeleines of ghosts. Cue his launching the Hell’s Kitchen Supper Club for the bereaved, where he conjures the dead via their cravings. New Yorkers love nothing so much as novelty, after all.
