As many of you mentioned, it was pretty easy to deal with vegetarianism and a tree-nut allergy in England: restaurant menus were marked with vegetarian/vegan options, and many restaurants had an additional card that gave more detailed information. If anything, we encountered TOO MUCH carefulness: like, a server might caution against Elizabeth having salad, because it was too hard to know if it might have encountered a tree nut, even though they didn’t serve any salads containing tree nuts. And there seemed to be some conflation of vegetarian and vegan, so that frequently the vegetarian options would also be eggless and cheeseless, and eggs/cheese are two of the main things Elizabeth eats. But we found restaurants very flexible: if we said “Could she have this, but with an egg instead of bacon?,” no one ever said no—and in fact they tended to say yes with large willingness, as if they were glad we’d asked, even HOPING we’d ask.
Eating IN GENERAL, though, was a constant burden/stress. It felt like having a small baby, where you feed them, and then by the time you get them changed and dressed and get yourself ready to go, it’s already time to feed them again. It seemed like we were constantly, constantly dealing with the issue of needing to eat.
(The meat pie at lower left was not pretty, but was one of the most delicious things I ate in England. Now I CRAVE it. It was minced beef with cheesy mashed potatoes on top. SO GOOD.)
The MAIN issue was our group size: there are SEVEN of us, which is EXPONENTIALLY more difficult than if it were, say, just Paul and me. We don’t all of us go out to eat even at home, because seven is a big group even for fast food, let alone sit-down restaurants; and because it’s so expensive to take a group of seven out to eat, and because it’s difficult for seven people to agree on a restaurant. This is one of the trade-offs we deliberately made when deciding to have a large family: we don’t go out to eat. Also, I don’t think I have ever made a dinner reservation before: I’m not inclined toward restaurants that need them, and I don’t live in an area where many restaurants DO need them.
Take that starting point, and then imagine us in England, where we HAVE TO eat out twice a day, AND even the pizza places and casual pubs need reservations, AND everything costs much more than at home, AND it’s hard to make group decisions. Combine that with someone (me, it’s me) who gets stressed by unfamiliar things.
One of our best solutions was to split into two groups, even if we were planning to eat at the same restaurant. It was interesting to me, the different reaction we got as one group of three and one group of four. Often we were even seated at adjacent tables. But if we went in as a group of seven, the restaurant staff would get agitated/flustered.
I also found it much, much, MUCH easier to figure out our order when I was only dealing with a group of three or four, and when I didn’t have to coordinate that effort with another parent. And of course this was easier on the server as well.
And splitting into two groups helped with the vegetarian situation: all the restaurants had vegetarian options, but some of those options appealed to Picky Elizabeth and some didn’t. This way, Paul could take three of the kids to a gourmet burger restaurant they wanted to try, and I could take the two vegetarians to a restaurant that had some appealing vegetarian pasta dishes. Or Paul could take the picky vegetarian with the group going to a pizza place, while I took the easy vegetarian to a pub I wanted to try.
And splitting helped me cope mentally with the cost, since I was only seeing 3/7ths or 4/7ths of it. I KNEW the other 4/7ths or 3/7ths was happening, but my brain was soothed anyway by seeing a bill for 65 pounds instead of a bill for 150 pounds.
Oh, and another thing! Some of you had mentioned that restaurants WORKED differently in England than in the U.S., but I was too pre-trip agitated to take any of the details on board. Still, this meant I was not surprised when we found differences. But I find Unfamiliar Things stressful, so I needed a work-around to cope. Here was my work-around, which is going to seem so simple as to make some of you cross your eyes at me, but it took me significant time/effort to come up with it, so I will share it in case anyone else is in my boat: I ASKED.
I figured it like this: not everyone knows everything! And all of us humans know that to be true, because we have all personally experienced Not Knowing Things! So it is not weird that I don’t magically know how a new-to-me system works! And the humans who work there DO know how it works, and they are being paid to deal with customers, and I am a customer! So what I would do is, I would snag a server, or someone bussing tables, or someone standing at a cash register, and I would say in my absolutely blazing American accent, “Oh, hi! This is our first time here; can you tell me how this ordering system works / how we pay when we’re ready / how we add some cake to our order?” And each time, the person would just TELL ME! And usually I was very glad I’d asked, because the system was not difficult but nor was it intuitive: at one place, for example, we had to notice that there was a number on our table, which I had not noticed, and then we needed to go to the register and tell them our table number and pay there.
For me, the key was “This is our first time here.” It FOCUSES the issue. It’s not that I’m from another country and also a newbie traveler and also kind of an anxious person overall and also over-panicking about a relatively simple situation; it’s just that this is my first time at this particular restaurant. A laidback cosmopolitan who lives just down the street might have the same question I am about to ask!
I have just realized this entire post is about the LOGISTICS of eating, with no mention of the FOOD of eating. ACHIEVING food always felt difficult, but EATING it was delightful.
I wanted to try a lot of things that sounded familiar but I’d never tried—mostly things I’ve encountered in books/shows set in England. Here are some of the things we tried: a meat pie in a pub; Victoria sponge; jam roly poly with custard; a cream tea (scone with clotted cream and jam, plus coffee or tea); sticky toffee pudding; coronation chicken; mushy peas; sausage rolls; pasties; rock cakes; Hobnobs; McVitie’s Digestives; Cheddars; Tunnock’s tea cakes; lots of Cadbury things. And I can get fish and chips at home, but I think of it as an English thing (“chips” is the hint), so I made sure to get fish and chips there.
There were a lot of things that were familiar but in unfamiliar flavors: for example, the hotels would have familiar little individual yogurts, or familiar little jams, but the yogurt would be rhubarb, and the jam would be currant. The rock cakes were available in chocolate chip (familiar) and sultana (at first glance unfamiliar, but turned out to be another word for golden raisins). (A currant is also a raisin, from a different kind of grape.)
In our experience, cheese was always better than what we’d expect. For example, we ordered “chips and cheese,” which was french fries with cheese on them, and the cheese was like a high-quality sharp cheddar just barely rouxed to make it softer. I got a meat pie with “cheesy mash” (cheesy mashed potatoes) on top, and the cheese was the same sort of very good sharp cheddar taste.
In our experience, eggs were always much wetter than what we’d expect. Fried eggs had liquid yokes. Scrambled eggs were…well, I don’t know how to describe them in a way that doesn’t sound negative. “A wet heap” is what comes to mind. They were good!
In our experience, English restaurants know their way around a potato: the chips (fries) were excellent, the jacket potatoes (baked potatoes with skin) were excellent, the mash (mashed potatoes) was excellent.
Oh! A very surprising thing to us: one evening we got take-out Chinese food, and IT DID NOT COME WITH RICE. We despaired a bit about the rice, thinking “Oh no, this is one of those cultural things and we were supposed to order it separately!”—and then looked back at the menu, where rice was not even listed. The food came with some puffed scoopy things—something in the neighborhood of rice cakes or pork rinds. We don’t know if this is typical in England or if we encountered an anomaly.
Scones, famously, were different/better than the scones I’ve had in the United States. I’ve had the U.S. dry triangles; the English scones were round and biscuity (in the United States sense of the word biscuit, not in the British sense) and soft. I had heard people rave about clotted cream and jam on scones, and the first one I had, I thought “Oh, sure, that’s nice,” but didn’t see the big deal. But then a day or two later I had the opportunity to add a cream tea (that’s the scone/cream/jam plus a coffee or tea) to my lunch, and I did. And a day or two after that I found myself questing for more, and now that we’re home I’m pining, and Paul is experimenting with making clotted cream from raw milk he bought at a local farm, and we’re both browsing scone recipes online. So apparently it just takes a little time for the addiction to take hold.
LOL you discovered prawn crackers which are an ABSOLUTE staple of Chinese takeaway in the UK. Often you get them for free, and if they’re warm they’re full on delicious. I’m glad you rated the cheese; England is after all the home of cheddar cheese. And we do love our potatoes as well 😁. What did you think of the chocolate tho’?
PRAWN CRACKERS.
The chocolate was yummy! I don’t have a sensitive enough palate to tell “U.S. Cadbury” apart from “England Cadbury,” but enjoyed trying the kinds I haven’t seen in the U.S.
That’s clever – to split up into groups for dinner and to give each group more options! Our family of four struggles to get everyone happily fed on trips. With one vegetarian and two adamant meat eaters among us it’s tricky to find a place that’s suitable for all. One of us also doesn’t like pizza (?!) which could fit the bill when all else fails. Sigh!
Thank you so much for this post!!!
All these posts are making me so happy for you getting to try all those foods and discover a place outside the US – it is fun but also def stressful to discover new places. I’ve always traveled a lot but now finding after all these years that I’m in fact quite happy at home! That said, going to England still fascinates me because it feels so familiar and yet many things are so very different. There’s always something on the menu that I have to look up on my phone because I don’t understand… and yes, everything is to expensive!!!
I live in the UK and this was such an interesting read, thank you for writing it!
It was funny to hear someone discovering the joys of a prawn cracker for the first time. Most Chinese takeaways come with rice as an option, I think you got unlucky.
The secret to a good scone, as with lots of things, is not handling the dough too much. Also, it’s good to hear you didn’t get embroiled in the Devon vs Cornwall, Jam-on-top vs Cream-on-top malarkey. Or worse still insufferable debate about how to pronounce ‘scone’ at all.
I am so happy that you had a good time here in England! (And that you liked the umbrellas :))
The tip to “just ask” such a good one. It works SO well every time, and people are almost always delighted to help – and yet I always tie myself in knots wondering what to do before “just ask”ing comes to mind!
Your comment about the combinations of familiar and unfamiliar was exactly my experience when we moved to Scotland. Our first night there we were standing in the grocery store, jetlagged and uncertain, and surveying the tinned soups. There was a chicken noodle, there was a minestrone, there was a…carrot-coriander. I felt like I had slipped into another dimension: carrot-coriander?!?!
(It became a favorite, btw.)
Ha, yes, the FREQUENT “Yep…yep…WHAT???” of international grocery-shopping!
Ooh, I love traveling in other countries and checking out the yogurts and the jams. So similar and yet, so different. I should have thought to mention marmalade in your pre-trip post, last time we were there, we so enjoyed the many, many different sorts of fruit marmalades we could find in the stores. Er, shops ;) ! So yummy.
Your “Just Ask” strategy is perfect. Thanks so much for describing it.
The two-parties-at-the-restaurant description made me laugh because it reminded me of a time a cousin and I were trying to co-plan a somewhat impromptu large (~24? people, ages ~4 to ~80) family gathering without a suitable private venue (e.g. home) in which we could host it, in a large city. The core plan was “meet at park X” but the weather was questionable so we stomped around to try to scout out restaurants that could accommodate our group. We had 1 family member who could not join the gathering but was around during the planning stage who was so funny, because she kept insisting that either our 2 ideas (get 1 large 24-person table by planning ahead, or perhaps 2 12-people tables; or, option 2, have let’s say 6 4-person groups and just eat at separate tables) were DISASTROUS and WOULD NOT WORK. The large table would not work because no restaurant could possibly accommodate such a thing, and the small groups would not work because the point was to assemble as a group, so splitting up would RUIN it (this ignores, among other things, the fact that with multiple generations there were some obvious divisions in shared histories and interests that led to natural subsets, whether needed or not). Mostly, I think said family member (who is prone in any case to identifying the reason YOU ARE A FOOL! YOUR PLAN WILL NOT WORK!) was disappointed about not being able to join the gathering … the weather was lovely, in the end, and we had a great get-together at the park and did not get to test either approach to convening in a restaurant.
I WISH I had tried grapefruit marmalade, which I didn’t know existed until we were home and looking for English jams to order for our scone experiments! I might put it on my Christmas wish list!
Recommend! Christmas list for sure!
I thought you were going with extended family so you would have more than 7 people. Are you ok with sharing the reason for the trip?
We did go with extended family, but everyone split into their household groups for meals; sometimes the smaller households would combine (a 4-person with a 1-person, or a 2-person with a 1-person), but our household was too big for combining.
I am enjoying this series of posts SO MUCH. You have at least one reader who will happily read as many stories about your trip as you’d like to share.
Seriously, tell us more! Every detail! I want to travel abroad so much, but it’s not in the cards for the time being, so I am living vicariously through you, and thoroughly enjoying it!
I love food and logistics, so this post is completely my jam. I LOVE your “This is our first time here!” starting point, it is genius, I am going to try to remember it for unfamiliar situations in which I feel dumb for feeling unfamiliar.
This paragraph, though: “Eating IN GENERAL, though, was a constant burden/stress. It felt like having a small baby, where you feed them, and then by the time you get them changed and dressed and get yourself ready to go, it’s already time to feed them again. It seemed like we were constantly, constantly dealing with the issue of needing to eat.” OMG YES. The constant need to find food is so wearying. I think it’s the worst part of travel for me. I have memories of endless, “Well, what are you in the mood for?” conversations and trudging all over town to find a specific restaurant only to learn it isn’t open that day of the week, or feeling like you JUST ATE but also being ravenous, or being overwhelmed with choices. (And when I am hungry, I get less decisive and more cranky which is a stupid, stupid way to be.)
The last few Big Trips I’ve gone on, my husband and I picked out restaurants in advance of leaving the state/country. When we did a road trip across the US, we picked restaurants by city. When we were spending several days in one city, we picked restaurants based on location; we were planning on going to a specific museum, so we looked at restaurants nearby, for instance. Sometimes it was two or three restaurants, so we had a choice based on location/whim. And then my husband input everything into a maps app. It is SO helpful to know that on X day in Y city we can go to A, B, or C restaurant (and then follow up with ice cream). That doesn’t remove the weariness of eating constantly, or the shock of prices, but it removed a major aspect of stress from the process.
Prawn crackers? Like, with real shrimp in them? And this wasn’t made clear by a helpful allergen card? Yikes – my husband has a shrimp allergy which I would not want to have to deal with on a trip!
I don’t think there much prawn in a prawn cracker. They are a staple also in Australian Chinese neighbourhood restaurants and my husband (also a crustacean allegergy winner) eats them merrily
If I can recommend some EXCELLENT soft, biscuity (in the American sense), delicious scones that ship nation-wide, in a huge variety of amazing flavors, check out https://www.sevensistersscones.com/collections/all.
Laughing about the London and having to feed everyone debacle, because in my family of origin, when someone is “having a London moment”, that means they are so hangry that they are about to have a complete psychotic break. Apparently this phrase originated on my parents’ honeymoon to the UK and Ireland.
The good news: scones are SUPER easy to make, to the extent that my just-turned-4-year-old can make them pretty much by himself. Very few ingredients, minimal prep, just remember to not cut them too thin with cutters, and to egg/milk wash them before they go in the oven.
Clotted cream however I’ve got no idea! They’re still good with whipped regular cream, but it’s not quite the same.
Also, on the Chinese – rice is usually standard! Maybe it was an unusual one? Or maybe they just forgot to deliver the rice? But prawn crackers are a joy.
Were the eggs, perhaps, “soft scrambled,” as opposed to scrambled hard, which might have some brown on them? My MIL hates wet scrambled eggs so always orders them scrambled hard, and when I was a breakfast waitress I would get some orders for soft scrambled which always came out looking wet to me.
Oh yes I was also going to comment on the egg thing!
My American mother in law always specifically requests her scrambled eggs are ‘dry’ when she’s here in the UK, so I think we have a cultural preference for a softer scramble. I would describe it as ‘creamy’ rather than wet personally ;) but I can definitely understand that it would unsettle some people! And we definitely prefer a runny yolk, a fried egg with a solid yolk would be considered overcooked.
In most cafes etc you can def just state a preference though and nobody would bat an eyelid. And in the ‘full English’ situation or any kind of brunch menu, you can usually just sub out your preferred style of egg, and ask for scrambled or poached eggs instead of fried, for example. In fact the whole ‘full English’ is really flexible.. I mean SO many people hate mushrooms, or baked beans.
“So apparently it just takes a little time for the addiction to take hold.” I loved this line so very much!
I attempted to make scones once – and they were okay but a little dry. When you find a winner of a recipe, please share!
Try Delia Smith or Mary Berry :)
We also just returned from England and one thing I was really impressed by was how every single server asked about food allergies. I expected this in London, but it was also true in tiny little pubs in the countryside. I think the British food scene in general has improved a lot in the last couple of decades.
Here is a savory scone recipe that I like very much and others rave over when I serve it to them. Thought you might like it for your scone recipe adventures. https://www.spendwithpennies.com/cheddar-cheese-scones/
Splitting up your group to dine is GENIUS LEVEL, I am about to go on a family trip with 10 people total ages 13 mo-60s and if we go out I will suggest this. And my mother in law will not want to do it. Everything sounds so yummy!
https://thecafesucrefarine.com/fabulous-scones-the-ridiculously-easy-way/
These scones are the best, and you don’t cut in the butter, so it’s very easy!
My British grandmother approves!
If we’re doing RECIPES, then Nigella’s scones always work for me https://www.nigella.com/recipes/lily-s-scones (and her site has a way to switch to US cup measurements).
I love reading about your trip!
Here is my tried-and-true scone recipe (original had all regular flour, but I like the texture of subbing 1 c of it with whole wheat)
3 c flour
1 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 c buttermilk
2 Tablespoons vanilla
1 stick (1/2 c) butter, chilled
1 c of a dried fruit (like cranberries, currants, raisins) (You can switch this out with almost any ingredient. Chocolate chips work, too.)
Oven 375º
Mix all dry ingredients together. Beat the eggs. Reserve 1T egg to brush on top. Add buttermilk and vanilla to egg mixture. Cut butter into dry mixture until butter chunks are pea-sized (this is key for flaky texture). Add wet mixture to dry mixture. Gently mix (do not overmix!), first with a spoon, then with hands, until all the mixture is wet (this is pretty messy). Add the dried fruit. (At this point you can divide the dough and do, for instance, half fruit and half chocolate chip.) Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and flatten to a circle about 1″ tall. Brush the eggs on top. With a large knife, cut into strips and then into triangles, whatever size you like.
Grease a cookie sheet. Bake for about 15 minutes, but watch the oven. Scones should be golden brown on top.
“In our experience, eggs were always much wetter than what we’d expect. Fried eggs had liquid yokes. Scrambled eggs were…well, I don’t know how to describe them in a way that doesn’t sound negative. “A wet heap” is what comes to mind. They were good!”
YES! So I grew up in the UK and my US family hates my scrambled eggs. My Mum always made them kind of wet and would tell me to take them off the hob before they were quite done because they will keep cooking in the pan. I’ve had to adjust to making them drier now, because my American family won’t eat them otherwise. Brits also do love a runny yolk. I got two of my kids to like that, but one does not and my American husband does not. My husband makes his scrambled eggs so dry that I’m not a fan of them.
I had totally forgotten about the prawn crackers with the Chinese banquet we used to get as takeaway.