Communal tables spilling out onto cobbled streets, stacked burgers served on crisp white linen tablecloths, and Parmesan-towered fries served with an ice-cold martini (that will be $25, please). If you’ve walked London’s streets lately, you might begin to think you’ve acquired the superpower of teleportation. But no: the Big Smoke really is beginning to feel unmistakably like the Big Apple.
While there may be reported tension around the strength of the so-called Special Relationship in the geopolitical sphere, within the hospitality world, the transatlantic love affair has never been stronger.
There are the imitators, and then there are those taking a more knowing cue from the Concrete Jungle. Spots like Automat, The Dover, and its little sister site Dover Street Counter are building menus around New York’s greatest hits – French dip sandwiches, chicken cordon bleus, loaded salads. But while Londoners may have found themselves craving comically large pizza slices or cream cheese bagels so loaded and stuffed they require two hands to hold, the Americanization of London’s dining scene is also coming from New York institutions themselves.
In the past year, the UK capital has seen an influx of native New Yorkers picking up W1 postcodes of their own. From the takeover by the bar Dante NYC at Claridge’s (complete with American flags flapping above the hotel’s famous red brick façade), Masa opening its sushi sister restaurant, Tobi Masa, within the former American embassy turned Chancery Rosewood Hotel, which also houses London’s imported version of the New York institution that is Carbone.
“London has always been a dream of ours and mine,” chef and restaurateur (and native New Yorker) Mario Carbone tells me. “It’s the closest city to me that acts and looks and feels like New York. I have always felt at home here.”
We’re sitting down ahead of Carbone’s first lunchtime service since its opening in September. We’ve just watched the legions of waiters (or ‘captains’, as they’re known here) discuss the new springtime offerings on the restaurant’s Italian-American billing, and now they dance around the dining room with billboard-sized menus under arms. It’s theatrical, flashy, and a thrill to watch. This is exactly the New York dining experience that Carbone wanted to recreate for his first European outpost.
“It’s sort of the idyllic version of all the old restaurants that I grew up going to as a kid,” he shares. “As a young lover of restaurants, I was very excited. It was a show when we walked in; it was busy and loud and bustling, with these giant menus and big, big personalities all over the place.”
See also: Carbone London: “There’s Nothing Else Like This Here”
That sense of spectacle is precisely what drew John Genovese and Damian Mould to open Automat just around the corner on Mount Street. Billed as a “classic American diner in the heart of Mayfair”, it trades in lobster rolls and shrimp cocktails, thick-cut pecan pie, and skillet-baked cookie dough, all served in a low-lit, candle-flickering room concealed behind a leather workshop façade.
Unlike Carbone, Automat isn’t a direct import, but that doesn’t mean its New York-ness is any less personal; instead, it is rooted in Mould’s own time living in the city. “The goal wasn’t to replicate New York literally, but to capture the feeling of those places that stay with you – the kind you return to again and again,” he says.
That feeling, as he describes it, is built as much on people as it is on plates. He recalls a West Village diner that became part of his morning rhythm, where a waitress – “straight out of The Sopranos,”– would greet him already knowing his order. “There’d be conversation, a laugh, and then you’d carry on with your day.”
See also: Is Mayfair Ready To Be Mayfair Again?
That sense of ease and everyday energy is exactly what he believes parts of London have been missing. Mould feels that in recent years, Mayfair particularly has tilted towards the polished and the private, all members’ clubs and hushed dining rooms. Automat, by contrast, leans into something more open-ended. Its tongue-in-cheek, unofficial door policy, “non-members, members only”, says as much: “If you come in and make Automat your regular spot, we’ll build that relationship and look after you.”
While atmosphere is no doubt part of the appeal, that sense of homecoming has to be delivered in the food, too. At Carbone, it arrives in the form of Italian-American classics dialled all the way up: spicy vodka rigatoni that has captured the zeitgeist a decade ago and shows no signs of slipping, Caesar salads assembled tableside, and a roaming dessert tray laden with towering slices of cherry chocolate cake and tiramisu – so weighty I could almost feel the strain on the server as I deliberated over my choice.
“Italian American food is very comforting,” Carbone says. That familiarity is precisely the point. “It’s the opposite of the sort of very minimalist traditional fine dining – the absolute inverse of that,” he continues. “It’s like, come one, come all, the bigger the table, the better. It’s really an extension of the Italian mom and grandma.”
See also: Inside Automat: London’s Hidden American Diner in Mayfair
In other words, this is dining designed less to impress than to envelop. And right now, that shift feels timely. As Carbone puts it, “it’s a pendulum that swings.” One that has, for the moment at least, moved away from the precision and performance of the tasting menu and courses that extend well into the double digits. “It had its moment,” he shrugs. “I’m sure it will come back around.”
For now, though, London appears to be happily leaning in – towards something looser, warmer, more instinctively social. Or, as the team behind Automat succinctly put it, “people are craving something more relaxed and real.”
When I ask Carbone whether he’s concerned that London’s newfound appetite for New York-inspired dining might prove to be a fleeting trend, he laughs it off. “No,” he shrugs. “We’re born in a city where there are thousands of Carbones. We do our thing, and people seem to like it. We take good care of our regulars, and people come back two, three times a week. That’s what a good restaurant is.”
