The Crust We Trust: British Pie Week

0:06Hi, I'm David Ellis. I'm the Standard Restaurant Critic and welcome to the Standard podcast. Today I am joined by Josh Barry. Hello, I'm Food Writer. So Josh, we're here today just to chat about pies because it is British Pie Week as of today. So pies have been in London since the Greeks, I think. Yeah, possibly the Greeks or the Romans brought them over. It's a little bit hazy, isn't it? Yeah, I wasn't around. I thought those were your early years, primary school. Yeah. The thing with pies is that they started as a way to preserve food, right? Yeah, they really took off in Britain in the Middle Ages.

0:39Dirty meats, no refrigerators, unfortunately. Put it in pastry and away you go. I suppose in a similar way that's got a similar origin story to the reason we have curry. This was just our method rather than using spices. We just thought we spilled a box on top of it. The first ever recorded cookbook I think in the UK is Hand of Glasses, The Origins, or Cooking with Curry or The Origins of Curry or something.

1:05so one thing that's different about pie week this year compared to previous years is that we seem to have this movement towards very traditional pie and mash that you would find in east end shops um why do you think that is well they're very of the moment always have been i mean pine mash has been eaten by londoners for well over 100 years parliament recently brought them up it uh last year to try to grant traditional east london pine mash protected status just like stilton uh cheese or cornish pasties or whatever and you know such as their importance in the city you know they're an institution unto themselves uh we we should be safeguarding them you know whether you like them or not pine mash parsley liquor eels these shops kind of make up the fabric of london and they've been around so long um they're one of our traditions well they have an interesting history themselves right those shops because it was about the meat sellers on the street and then slowly that morphed into what we've got today i suppose also a lot of these places are shutting down as you rightly say i think it's interesting that we're seeing places like the wolsey or even the dorchester do their own version of these because you can look at it two ways right on the one hand they might be shining a light on these historic institutions and that food stuff and on the other hand are they capitalizing on the popularity of those places because they've been in the media to me you could either see it as being supportive or you could look at it and think this is a very cynical cash grab which side of the fence do you fall down on on that i'm not sure i haven't decided yet um i think you can look at it two ways two sides of coin one for example the dorchester teaming up with g kelly one of the one of the oldest places i think that's been going since 1936 uh and uh it's a favorite of i think danny dyer's a big fan of that one um and that's probably the right way to go about it tom booton the chef of the dorchester yeah he's a good grounded guy and he's teamed up with them and he's putting his own spin on the pie itself so it's very upmarket i mean it's the dorchester five-star hotel doing it with mash and parsley liquor and the chili vinegar which is all too important when you're having proper pie and mash um you got to douse the top in chili vinegar that gives it real good flavor and a bit of a punch so we obviously we went to a pie and mash shop yeah manzi's tower bridge your first ever time my first ever time my first ever pie and mash of that of that ilk i think the only thing i liked was the chili oil the chili vinegar yeah chili see i don't even know what i was having my main memory is just thinking this isn't quite for me i suppose that actually leads us onto an interesting point i do think it's sad that these shops are going but part of me thinks there's a reason that they aren't packed out that they aren't turning over uh tables all the time and to me as someone who'd not had it as an outsider i was like well the quality is just not there but i know that you love it because it's a comfort food for you right yeah i love it there's a nostalgic element i think if you grow up having pie and mash you're always going to like it i'm not hard and fast i'm not from the east end of london you know i'm not david beckham who adores pie and mash or whatever but i did used to go every now and then it was something to have it's cheap it's affordable and i think there's a real point with this i mean about 10 years ago people started noticing that they were going and this the closure started happening uh a lot of old timers who grew up eating them moved out to places like essex and kent and so that sparked a kind of delivery trend for pie and mash and there are still shops that exist but equally you know lots are closing and And it's quite weird.

4:37And I think this tallies up with the whole kind of high-end restaurants, such as the Walshley and Dorchester, creating their own versions. Because a lot of London doesn't feel like the London of before. And there's this sort of ironic love of pie and mash from people like, you know, they moved down from Cambridgeshire and they're like, I want to be in London. I want to go and sit amongst the white tiles and be, you know, a proper Londoner and take the Instagram photos. And in one sense, I think it's a bit of a poison chalice because on one hand it's good to shine a spotlight on these old pie and mash shops but at the same time they're not going every day just as people back in the day used to and that they're supporting them to a point but they're not carrying them forward for the long term i mean i don't see how there's longevity in fad obviously so i think that tallies very much as you say with the kind of posher places doing pie and mash one being the Wolseley which is doing a traditional pie mash its own take on it a meat pie parsley sauce and mash but they're charging 22.50 and when I spoke to Emma Barrington the current owner of Manzi's on Tower Ridge Road which is the one we went to she was astonished at the price because traditionally these are kind of five pound meals and actually I do think even though personally it wasn't for me what I did notice when we went for lunch is that there were people who looked like they've been going for many years because they were so familiar with the staff I mean and it's a cheap meal it's warm fills them up a lot of these people were slightly older and you got the impression that maybe it provided comfort it provided like a place to meet so it sort of felt very entwined with the community aspects of the area

6:29The other one who's really famous for doing it is Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist. He lives in LA, right? So he can't get pie mash up there. So when he comes to London, he always makes a real point of going around, touring, seeing all these places. Because that speaks so much to Steve Jones's childhood. That's what he did eat when he was growing up. So when he comes over, he gets that warmth from it. There is nothing to do with the actual intrinsic quality of the product itself. In fact, it's not to do with the product itself. It's to do with the situation, it's to do with the memories that it stirs.

7:00And I think in many ways that speaks to the way that we all consume our favourite fruits. Quite often when you're tucking into whatever it is, a lasagna or even a steak or something, it's not to do with what you're having, it's to do with the associations you make. And that's what great restaurants do in general. You know, the places that I love and go to a lot, sometimes they're brilliant, sometimes they're passable. One of my favourite restaurants in London is Andrew Edmonds, and I take people a lot. sometimes people are a bit nonplussed as to why i like this place as much as i do but every time i go i have a brilliant time and i remember the first time i went and i remember the nights there i remember the long lunches and i think actually it might seem trite to compare andrew edmunds to amansi's but for those people amansi's with the cup of tea and the pasta sauce and you know you have to eat the pie upside down right you were saying that that's a big part of it yeah there are there are little old time things that happen there and you mentioned food quality and whether they're for i think they are still abundantly popular and there is still a community that go into these places regularly there's a whole conversation we could have about rents could mention that horrible buzzword gentrification all of these things but i think like you know pie mash is probably an acquired taste and as you say i think it you know closely aligns with london's traditional greasy spoons which are also under threat to a point you know if you think about food quality if you go into bar bruno in soho a classic of the age is this old time anglo italian place the sausages are they you know um regeneratively farmed pork from you know pigs that probably not the bacon is just bacon the eggs they're probably free they're free range but i mean they're not you know saint you eggs from cornwall and so if you go for a greasy spoon fry up yeah delicious i think well i think you're getting at the point though right that actually it's to do with folklore we build up these ideas of these places we build up what a fry up means what it represents when we go in and if we're hung over it's a sasaday treat or whatever it is same with the pie and mass shops same with the the restaurants i was mentioning same with pubs we kind of imagine a different era and that we in some way i definitely think this in in some places it's almost as if people are playing at a life that came before them that they would have liked to experience and and sometimes that's that that can be the case for these places that's the best restaurants though right it's exactly romantic it's as much about time place who you're with personality and history as the food and that's why a lot of these kind of new restaurants that open i i find quite grating because they're a little bit contrived and they're trying to tap into an old thing when actually we've still got those old things to enjoy and moving forward and being progressive in food and drink doesn't always have to hark back to something before you can be your own thing you don't have to rip off what already exists because then you're just stealing their customer base speaking of things that already exist it's not just pie and mass shops i think one of the big um movements in pies becoming really popular is when the hoban pie room and when callum franklin was there and actually knox is there doing an amazing job now those photos of pies suddenly were just taking over Instagram and kind of seemed to go a bit viral and I think with that that was a big resurgence because everyone would just go there for one of the one of the hotel's pies and in the same way the pestle and crew has become a big thing again a form of pie arguably I suppose I think there's a sort of certainly a visual aesthetic quality to the pies that you get in sort of high-end places where they just look beautiful and actually that does seem to appeal to a certain type of diner who is more concerned with how it appears on their feet yeah I mean look is really important with pie and I really liked when they launched the pie hole whatever it was because back in the day you could stroll around London go to a pub and more than likely there'll be a meat pie little dainty thing and again probably not the best bit I mean this is another point about pie it's leftovers and like sausages and so on it's supposed to be and burgers are supposed to be the bad bits of the meat and the animal that you use up in old school sustainability making a wagyu burger is utterly preposterous yeah if you've got wagyu eat a steak yeah stop wrecking you yeah yeah don't put it in a burger equally don't put it in a pie um it might make for a greater eating experience but it sort of renders it pointless and you know pie is for a leftovers we would have growing up we might have a bolognese and then the next day we would have it on toast or we'd put it in pastry whack it in the fridge or not even in the fridge actually because the pastry keeps it sound cut off a slice and away you go one of my favorite things to eat i probably shouldn't be missing this in public is i will bake a camembert and then i will put that in bolognese sauce and then just dip it in it's so delicious it's like a leftovers meal but it's great if i've got leftover bolognese one of the most mental things i've ever heard honestly it's incredible put a camembert in it well i mean you know put that all in pet putting camembert and pastry and baking that in the oven that's a pie that's delicious yeah uh favorite pie probably like a suet pudding is that a pie yeah it's a pie it's i think i think it counts yeah like a wobbly flabby doused in gravy steak and ale situation i think you've really sold it there stands like a turret in gravy in goes the mash maybe some peas on the side that with a nice beer is good news i mean the devonshire is doing really well for that i mean devonshire is doing well for everything but their suet pudding seems to be really popular fish pie fish pie is the best pie i thought you might say that i nearly said fish pie i do like fish pie but i recently went to sweetings and had the fish pie there which is again one of my favorite places to go and eat and have you know many many years and from memories unfortunately the last time i had it too much salmon i mean costs right at 16 15 you're in the city of london and they're keeping costs down it used to be as much sort of um white fish as salmon and salmon is my least favorite fish i mean i'll abide it in a fish pie because you've got the creamy sauce and everything otherwise it's just a dry dry but you just take personal offense at salmon because one time a salmon was rude to you.

13:11Salmon is just a nonsense fish. You've just never forgiven it for that one slight as a child. Have trout instead. Have trout. I hate salmon. Got it. Sweetings is great for that. And actually, I think that does speak to what pies are brilliant for, which is that sense of comfort. Because I would go to Sweetings, have the fish pie, which I think is probably the cheapest thing on the menu. And then I'll order a preposterously expensive bottle of white wine and then just sit there and enjoy the two. It's just sort of a happy place. And I think pies are sort of happy place food. Yeah, comforting. Yeah.

13:39Make you feel amazing. Going for a long walk in the countryside, rounding the whole endeavor off with a classic crusty short crust. It's golden. It comes out hot. You cut into it and the steam billows out. And you've got hunks of steak, a lovely kind of rich and indulgent ale gravy. And then that mash, I mean, there's there arguably isn't anything more comforting. And you often have people kind of deriding British food. But I think actually pie is something to be celebrated. It is intrinsically British. And of all these kind of food days, I think there's a day for pretty much everything now, like National Prawn Day, you know, National Yoghurt Day, whatever.

14:18Don't need any of that. But British Pie Week is something that I can fully get behind. Well, we'll wrap up there. I just want you to name me your favourite place to go for a pie. Well, I'll just say Manzi's on Tower Bridge Road just to annoy you because you had such a horrible experience. Actually, no, I'll retract. I do love that. But I think instead I will say Bentley's Fish Pie. I'm going to top you there even better than Bentley's fish pie is Wilson's fish pie oh yeah it's unbelievably good there yeah you've been listening to the Standard Podcast thank you very much if you got this far through if you want to know anything more about pies whether that's pie shop pie and mash whether that's really upmarket ones we have loads of articles about that on our website at standard.co.uk forward slash going out and you can always reach Josh or I on Instagram I'm at dvh underscore Ellis and Josh you are at Josh by the sea so if you've got any questions about pies slide into our DMs don't do that please