I was at a party on a New Yorkrooftop not long ago – uselessly sober amid the bustle and whirl of what might as well have been a mass attempt to break some obscure spicy margarita consumption record – when an American stranger turned to me purposefully. “So… London,” he began, having been told where I was from and what I do for a living. “It’s not really a place that’s known for its great restaurants, huh?” Friends, please know that I did not wholly take the bait. Yes, there was a momentary flash of defensiveness. A temptation, perhaps, to detail all the ways in which the land of bang average “fluke crudos” and sweet potato with marshmallow could hardly claim total superiority over the eclectic verve of the capital’s food culture.
But mostly I was just a little bit baffled by the uselessness of the implicit comparison. Chiefly, because New York and London’s restaurant landscapes have arguably never been more closely aligned. A pronounced mania for revivalist French bistros currently proliferates in both cities; the time zone-straddling likes of Hawksmoor, The NoMad and Sunday In Brooklyn are packing in practically interchangeable crowds on either side of the Atlantic. And now, here is Llama Inn: a freshly launched and utterly scintillating, Shoreditch-based spin off of Peruvian-American chef Erik Ramirez’s Brooklyn-born hit, that further cements the sense of culinary kinship between our scrappy, sprawling burgs.
