How to celebrate this very American holiday in London? I’ve been wondering that myself for about a decade.
The thing about celebrating Fourth of July is that the enjoyment comes from knowing all your family, all your friends, the entire nation is celebrating too. When I lived in in New York, the Fourth meant cookouts in Prospect Park organised by my friends, legendary party-makers and grillers John Fasciano and Frank Reilly. It meant ball games and hanging out among a whole bunch of other groups of people, all playing ball games and hanging out and happy to be off work. Everybody eats hamburgers and hot dogs and it’s all about ritual.
In London, it’s still about ritual, but…different. I’m not lucky enough to be invited to the American ambassador Matthew Barzun’s party. The Democrats Abroad group has an annual ticketed picnic, but it’s always seemed a bit big and impersonal. Plenty of restaurants put on special menus with “American food”, god help us. Just booking a table with our little family seemed sad and anticlimactic as the kids don’t have any of the associations with the holiday that I do.
A few years ago my friend Jenn came to rescue. “Come to dinner for Fourth of July!” her email beckoned. She gathered a group together and booked a table at an American-style restaurant on the busy King’s Road, deep in the heart of West London. We came, we ate and drank, we waved little American flags.
To be honest, the place where we eat is a little bizarre. It’s called The Big Easy — yes a restaurant for Fourth of July — and the menu looks like they free-associated when someone yelled, “Southern food!” Lobster, barbecue (Texas, Memphis, Carolina and Kansas style), jalapeno poppers, fajitas, jumbo shrimp, clam chowder…it’s like hitting every roadside diner from San Antonio to Charlotte.
This isn’t the holiday as we know it. No fireworks, no ball games, no John F. and Frank R. Today my husband is already anticipating his lobster bib (lobster for Fourth of July?) and ice-cold longneck. But it’s good friends and food and a new ritual. Happy Fourth of July!
My tips for celebrating the Fourth of July in London
- If you plan a barbecue, have a rain-day Plan B in case English weather appears. This year it’s hot and sunny but it can just as easily go the other way.
- Book any American-style restaurant as far in advance as you can. They get packed with expats and what must be every good-looking American blond (male and female) that Kensington can hold.
- Forgot about recreating an American menu from A to Z. You can get excellent hamburger meat. The free-range sausages are fab. Roasted corn always works. But it just won’t taste the same. Celebrate the Aberdeen Angus and Lincolnshire sausage approach.
- Go wild with the red, white and blue. Without the wall-to-wall TV ads for July 4th blowout sales and flags festooning the lamp posts, it’s hard to know that it’s an all-American holiday. Show it off with pride by donning American flag deeley-boppers or an Old Glory shirt. Naff? Yes. Wholeheartedly yes!
- Don’t go on and on with Brits about winning the war of independence. We may be American, but we still have manners.
What do you do to celebrate the Fourth of July in the UK?
