These are the fascinating food trends influencing how Brits are eating in 2024

We're well-known for being a nation of committed foodies. While it's easy to make a case for Brits shunning our own culinary history in favour of new flavours and cultures – just look at the variety of cuisines that make up London's best restaurants – we're pretty good at picking up on a new food trend. These can be as wholesome and simple as nostalgic flavours that remind us of gut-busting suppers at Grandparents' houses, or as OTT as embracing the mob-wife aesthetic when we hit the town in search of good grub. Following Condé Nast Traveller's inaugural Top UK Restaurant Awards this spring, we asked some of our resident gourmands to tap into the eating habits sweeping the nation. This is how we're eating, collectively, in 2024.

There’s good food in less familiar places

Reckon you could pinpoint the Howardian Hills on a map? A clue: they’re named after Castle Howard, the stately star of Bridgerton and Brideshead Revisited. But it’s culinary pilgrimages rather than set-jetting we’re talking about here. The North Yorkshire district is now one of the UK’s most appealing food destinations, thanks to restaurants such as Pignut in Helmsley, Mýse in Hovingham and Tommy Banks’s Abbey Inn; and Ruth Hansom opened her first solo venture in Bedale earlier this year. Also set the GPS for the Lancastrian village of Aughton (Moor Hall, Sō-lō), Chester (Covino and Twenty Eight) and Fife, whose gastronomy scene is so lively it recently held its first food and drink week. Whisper it, but are the most exciting menus being devised outside London these days?

Hyper-regionality is rising

Back in the day, it was enough to know that the food on your plate was simply Italian or Thai, never you mind the culinary traditions of Umbria or Chiang Mai. Now, lesser-known cultures are being pinned to London’s food map, with Akub bringing Palestinian sharing dishes such as red-lentil moutabal to the table, Abby Lee giving a masterclass in Sarawak and Penang heat at Mambow and Kolae introducing southern Thai recipes such as namesake kolae (meat or fish marinated in coconut). Meanwhile, third-culture cuisine – traditional dishes fused with British ingredients and techniques – informs the Filipino menu at Donia and the Korean plates of Sollip. What next? Well, the first Scottish café in London, The Shoap, by Gregg Boyd of Dalston stall Auld Hag, has just opened in Angel – scran and a dram, anyone?

Farm-to-fork continues to flourish

How does your garden grow – with cardoons and brassicas and nasturtium flowers, all in a row? Farm-to-fork has been a mantra for years, but sustainably led restaurants are blooming, inspired by Simon Rogan’s Our Farm in Cumbria, Canterbury’s The Goods Shed and Coombeshead Farm in Cornwall, and reducing food miles to mere feet for hyper-seasonal menus, such as the Jerusalem artichoke salad at Chalk on the Wiston Estate. Some are secret walled-garden restaurants (Worton Kitchen Garden in Oxfordshire, Kent’s Water Lane), and others are creating ecosystems to nourish the local scene (Higher Ground in Manchester shares ingredients from its Cinderwood Market Garden). Mayfair’s new Farm Shop is a -rotating harvest festival of the Somerset good life. And at the end of the polytunnel, a Michelin green star perhaps, like the one won by Dan Cox at Crocadon, his 120-acre, labour-of-love -project in Cornwall’s Tamar Valley.

Nostalgia is so now

In times of uncertainty, do we go running for the apron strings of our childhood food memories, skipping Proust’s stale madeleines for the ding-ding of the cake trolley – a large slice of Victoria sponge, please – at Ham Yard Hotel? The post-lockdown success of Norman’s Cafe in north London, a Formica-and-chips homage to the traditional English caff, would seem to say yes, as does the recent opening of Café Britaly in Peckham, where fried eggs recline on the spaghetti carbonara.

More cheffy interpretations include the rarebit crumpet at Bath’s Beckford Canteen, the oxtail steamed pudding and mash at The Palmerston in Edinburgh, and the “cheese and onion crisp” at that city’s Lyla, formed from onion, quince and Alp blossom cheese. Hash browns, meanwhile, are everywhere – Victorian nostalgia for a few, ’80s-era McDonald’s for most. Try the ones topped with caviar at The Dover. Oh, and don’t forget Arlington, the Le Caprice reboot, where the ’60s David Bailey beau monde portraits have been rehung, and the old regulars will still get their bang bang chicken.

Price still matters

Affordability. Not a word you associate with eating out in the UK, is it? For some chefs, though, accessibility is a priority. When Jackson Boxer took over the reins at the rebooted Cowley Manor Experimental last summer, he was determined to keep prices down: starters and mains from £12 – not bad with Soho Farmhouse within striking distance. And his roast jowl of Gloucestershire Old Spot feeds four. Big sharing plates are the way forward for those wanting to eat at top restaurants for less, as are set menus, which reduce food waste and cost. In London try the ones at Angela Hartnett’s Murano (three-course lunch for £55), Dinner by Heston Blumenthal (£59) and Luca (£26 for the two-course bar lunch).

The fire burns hot

The most enduring recent trend is also the oldest – around a million years old, actually. Fire dining, rather than fine dining, is searing meat and blowing woodsmoke around the country, as you might be able to tell by restaurant names such as Mayfair’s Humo (“smoke”), where a 13-foot grill fires up British-Japanese plates, and Stuart Deeley’s Smoke at Hampton Manor in Solihull. If you fancy your own culinary fire pit, get in touch with Guy Ritchie, who has been inspired by Francis Mallmann to make personal WildKitchens, or Galápagos-born, Somerset-based chef Ana Ortiz, architect of the turbot cooking cages at Tomos Parry’s Mountain. Mind fingers.

The pub is back

“All those pubs you hear about closing down,” says Oisin Rogers of The Devonshire, head thrown back, a pint of Guinness in front and wood-fired stove behind, “well, they must have been a bit shit.” The Soho boozer with a restaurant above has been jam-packed since opening in late 2023 – and it’s not the only one. Chickpea Group is busy reviving fading inns around the West Country – Salisbury’s The Market Tavern is the latest – and Max Halley, whose third opening is the Wellington Arms in Marlborough, champions the pub as a social hub of the community. Don’t throw in the bar towel yet.

Foraging gets more sophisticated

Catch the dawn light on the Pembrokeshire coast and you may spot the figure of Matt Powell gathering in the seaweed harvest for his menu at Annwn. Laver, bladder wrack, sea lettuce: a poem on the shore. Foraging has evolved over the years: more nuanced, more informed, with edible flowers, fir and pine the current poster children. Harriet Mansell’s soon-to-open Garden Table, at Lilac in Lyme Regis, scatters wild rose, sea purslane and pineapple weed, and foraged food is the star at the festival-style feasts popping up like mushrooms after rain, from Horrell & Horrell’s Somerset barn sessions to Fire + Wild outside Lewes.

OTT is in

Press here for Champagne and mind the sculpted mermaid on the way out. When little Oliver asked for more in the workhouse cantina, did he actually mean the maximalist excesses that have been turning heads, such as Martin Brudnizki’s colour-popping interiors at Dear Jackie in Soho, which make Doja Cat look like Julie Andrews? (The retro-Italian-American, mob-wife aesthetic is also in at spots such as Soho’s Grasso, Mayfair’s The Dover and Louis in Manchester.) Or the “clubstaurants” – a phrase every bit as teeth-grinding as “bleisure” but more fun – which bring experiential dining to the table, from DJ J Cub’s five-hour sets at Ynyshir, immersed in birch smoke, and Charlie Dark’s DJ sessions at Bambi in East London to Manchester’s Diecast, where avant-garde dancers twist above -pizzas and frozen margaritas.

West African has gone mainstream

This year’s breakout cuisine is West African: at spots such as Akara, Aji Akokomi’s follow-up to Akoko in an arch in London’s Borough Yards, or the ever-more popular Chuku’s, a Nigerian tapas joint in Tottenham. No one has led that charge quite like Chishuru’s Adejoké Bakare, winner of the best new chef of the year category in our UK’s Top New Restaurant Awards, who recently became the first Black woman to be awarded a Michelin star. Her dynamic set menus that recast everything from scotch bonnets, okra and spinach to moi moi (bean pudding) are all the more remarkable given her lack of formal training. She learnt to cook from her grandmother in northern Nigeria, and came to the UK with plans to study biological science before supper clubs led to a pop-up and the first Chishuru restaurant in Brixton Village, the precursor to today’s widely lauded Fitzrovia space. “For young chefs coming up, seeing African food done this way opens them up to being more creative about African food,” says Bakare. “We don’t have to layer it with other cuisines to give it validation. We can be ourselves authentically and be accepted as that.”

Pie possibilities are endless

When folk struggle to define what constitutes British cuisine, point them to the pie. Infinitely adaptable, flaky but dependable, “heavyweight champion of comfort food”, as chef Jamie Shears of Mount St Restaurant has it. His lobster pie is a thing of high-low beauty, as is the chicken-and-Champagne one at Bob Bob Ricard; self-styled “pastry deviant” Calum Franklin turns latticework into an artform at Holborn Dining Room and Roberta Hall McCarron champions shareable pies at her latest Edinburgh address, Ardfern. Our island in a crust, maybe, but the pie isn’t insular: try the Filipino lamb-shoulder caldereta at Donia or Spasia Dinkovski’s Balkan bureks at new London supper club-shop Mystic Burek.