Why is British food often perceived to be terrible?
No.Britain has had problems with a long-standing rivalry with culinary giant France. There is also a tendency to use things which in many nations would not be considered food. However, there is plenty of room to shine in British cuisine.Breakfast William Somerset Maugham famously quipped that in order to eat well in England, one should eat breakfast three times a day. There is some truth to that, as English breakfasts are generally very good. Bacon, sausage, eggs, beans, tomatoes and bread are just the thing to get you going in the morning.Fish and Chips Americans have long ago established that battering and deep-frying makes everything delicious, and so it is also with white fish, such as cod and haddock. The traditional condiment is malt vinegar, a peculiarly British chemical with tastebud-killing properties. Skip that, and you can probably makeChicken Tikka Masala Britain has always, as befits a trading nation, been very good at gathering culinary influences from all over the world. Indian restaurants have been a thing in London since 1810. Chicken Tikka Masala is an example of a curry created to please the English palate.The Sunday Roast Almost like Thanksgiving Dinner, except you have it every sunday.Of course, everything in British cuisine is not sunshine and roses. There are plenty of British foods that are near inedible (I'm looking at you, fruitcake and royal icing) but in most of the cases where British cooking is truly inedible, you've ended up in the hands of one of Britain's many bad cooks.
Would someone from the US suffer a culture shock when they visit the UK for the first time?
I didn't suffer any culture shock when I first visited the UK.I'm an American, but I was living in West Berlin at the time. I'd already traveled pretty extensively around Europe and North Africa when some friends and I decided we needed to experience London.I loved it.It was almost, but not quite, like going home.I got to speak English all day every day.I got to eat food that was more like American food than what I generally ate — especially breakfast. OK, so no truly sane person eats beans for breakfast, but I was willing to overlook that.Then there was the art and other parts of English culture that were just perfectly familiar for me. Not foreign in the least. Compared to where I'd been for the past couple of years, I was most definitely home, spiritually speaking.In England, I knew what to expect. I could read body language and facial expressions much more naturally than elsewhere in Europe. When it was time to fly back to Germany, I was definitely headed back to a foreign land, by comparison.A decade later, I brought my husband Lenny to London for the first of several visits.He was a native New Yorker. A thick-accented Jewish American born and raised in Manhattan's East Village.He was not a sophisticated man. He knew Manhattan and Cape Cod. That was about it. He delighted in people, though. It typically took him about 7.3 seconds to make friends somewhere.I'm not sure how he accomplished this, but once when we visited Paris, he had three Yiddish-speaking Parisian Jews drinking with us in our hotel room about three hours after we touched down at the airport.So, he may not be a fair example.Nonetheless, he also experienced no culture shock in the UK.We took to staying at the Strand Hotel when we visited London, and he got to be on friendly terms with some of the staff. We learned our way around pretty well, and he even ate the beans with his English breakfast. Cultural traitor, anyway.So, there's two examples of Americans who did not experience culture shock visiting the UK.It's not de rigueur, but I'm sure it happens.Not everyone is quite so accommodating as my Lenny was.