This summer, nobody could have predicted quite how well-received Scotland’s Tartan Army would be – The Dubliner, an Irish pub in Boston that has pulled pints under that name for years, spent two weeks running as the unofficial headquarters for the dark blues. A few blocks over, The Haven, Jamaica Plain’s actual Scottish bar, shipped in and promptly made their way through 120 kegs of Tennent’s (Scotland’s most iconic lager). And when Arsenal won the Premier League, New York’s newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, celebrated as loudly as anyone in N7 (the area code for the namesake team for those not in the know).
And where culture leads, the kitchens follow. Dishoom, Ambassadors Clubhouse, Straker’s, Kricket, The Wolseley and a very good pub called Dean’s are the names staking Britain’s claim across the five boroughs this year – maybe what Americans loved most about us was never the accent after all.
Over the past few months, New York’s culinary landscape has picked up a distinctly London swagger. A swathe of stellar British openings – either cultural institutions from our side of the Atlantic, or the work of British chefs setting up shop on your side – with a bunch of high-profile pop-ups in between. Who can forget Nando’s taking over a SoHo storefront with a cheeky peri-peri flavour splash for three weeks this summer, resulting in the type of queues, sorry lines, usually reserved for trainer, sorry sneaker, drops.
Hawksmoor feels like the impetus of this trend – opening to acclaim in 2021 (“Does New York Need a British Steakhouse? Yes, if It’s Hawksmoor.” – Pete Wells) and five years on, it’s still not an easy table to get. The NoMad district, meanwhile, keeps winning the British-Indian half of this conversation; Dishoom will open its first restaurant outside the UK there in late 2026, after years of speculation and a Pastis pop-up so oversubscribed it briefly turned the Meatpacking District into a waiting area for bacon naan rolls.
For those two weeks it certainly was meatpacking by name, meatpacking by nature. And that follows Ambassadors Clubhouse – a two-story, maximalist Punjabi room from JKS, the group behind some of London’s most decorated Indian hotspots. The instant hit recently got New York’s version of the hall of fame – a Taylor Swift-restaurant-exit-pap-walk.
In up to the minute news on the anglo takeover, the British, butter-soaked bad boy Thomas Straker is opening the first outpost of his cult restaurant Straker’s next month in the SoHo address that spent thirty years as Keith McNally’s Lucky Strike, whilst the much-loved restaurant that started life in a Brixton shipping container, another Indian favourite, Kricket, is set to debut its first stateside site in the spring of 2027, following a sold-out pop-up at Comal in October 2025. Perhaps the biggest of all the fish, The Wolseley is set to open in the landmark 1905 Lambs Club building near Bryant Park in early 2027.
And it isn’t only the restaurants. We can’t not touch on the members’ clubs, news of which broke – fittingly – via the internet’s own must-be-a-member-of club, Rich People Shit: both Annabel’s and Maison Estelle are heading to the Big Apple, with 2027 openings pencilled in. Provided there are no more hiccups with the neighbours.
The special relationship may not be quite what it used to be – in the diplomatic sense – but it may be more special than ever in this one. It could be said that New Yorkers and Londoners dine the same way, consume the same media – we like to believe that we behave like two ends of the same city, rather than two different countries. New Yorkers keep coming back from London with stories about Marks & Spencer, picky bits and Boots, and talking the cultural conversation like they’re locals – and now they can order like them too. Just you wait for pie, mash & liquor.
