The BEST BRITISH & GERMAN Food In NEW YORK

Who ate all the pies? It's the answer to every situation in England. We're about to order fish and chips from a real British guy. This is maybe the closest experience I'll have to London right now. What does British and German food have to do with the shaping of America? A lot of the classic dishes we ate growing up have strong European roots, some of which you wouldn't expect. So let's explore some authentic British and German dishes and find out more. And maybe we'll bump into a really proud British guy along the way. Is it fair to call this white food? All right, we're out here in Greenwich Village with Wes Wilson, former college football player slash cultural white guy who's going to be taking us through all this today. Cultural white guy is my Instagram bio, actually. You know, I do have a little British background. My mom's family on the dad's side is British. But do I hold any of those traditions, any of those recipes? I do not. Do you watch BBC? None. We're checking out Anglo-Saxon food in the Greenwich Village. Let's go. All right, everybody, we're here with Sean from Tea Sympathy. Tea and Sympathy here in Greenwich Village. Let's do tea time here. Afternoon tea. English people, we drink tea even when it's bloody hot like it is today. And then the English breakfast, we'll get like one of those plates with the beans. Oh, yeah. Now you want a proper fry-up as well? Damn. What's a fry-up? It's a proper English fry-up. A proper one. A proper fry-up. Yeah. I might have had a fry-up, but not a proper one. No, a proper one. When do you find that people know or do not know about British food? Is it most people have no idea? I mean, there is a sort of throwback to a lot of people think that, you know, English food, they're like, oh, English food, why would anyone want to eat that? In fact, when my wife started the restaurant 30 years ago, she used to be mates with the guys from the B-52s. When Nicky was talking about maybe setting up a restaurant and doing English food, Kate Pearson said, oh, English food, why would anyone ever want to eat that? There's a restaurant called The Fat Duck at Bray, which four years ago, it was run by a guy called Heston Blumenthal, and it won the award for the best restaurant in the world. Yo, Wes, what are we looking at right now? I mean, I'm looking at you like you're supposed to be the expert, but I don't know. I do actually recognize this china. Obviously, we know tea, it does originally come from China from way back, but now it's part of British culture. It's part of like, it's like one of the staples of British culture. Cheers. I don't think that's what they say. Pinky's up. Oh, this is so delightful. Then, you know, there's so many different British accents. There's like high class, middle class, low class. We, as Americans, are so used to watching the action movies that are more low class. Like street, street shit, people stabbing each other. You guys, real quick, I want to bring it back to why we're doing this episode. Why are we exploring British food today? Bloody good. Sean, Sean, what do we say when we cheers? What's the cheers? Americans always think, oh, yes, you know, pinky in the air. We were stereotyping, we were stereotyping. We don't do that. What we do is, basically, it's a really working class thing. It's the answer to every situation in England. You go, oh, I just had a terrible accident and I tore my right leg off. Oh, let me get you a cup of tea. Or the other end of the scale, oh, I just won the lottery. Fantastic, I'll put the kettle on. It's the answer to everything. So there is no formality to it. That's why you'll notice none of the cups and saucers match. A lot of people say white people have no culture. And even this white kid growing up in high school was like trying, I don't know if he was trying to pander, but he was like, ah, you know, Asian's so cool, I don't have any culture. And I was like, I don't think that's true. I think it gets lost because if you ask your white friends, right, where are you from or, like, what race are you? People just say, oh, I'm just white. You're not just white. Like, you're from somewhere. Unless you're a Native American, your family comes from somewhere. You're not just a white American. Right. All right, you guys, the first round of British tea time foods slash breakfast foods has arrived. You guys growing up in Missouri don't have this contraption, right? No, see, that's already way cuter than anything we ever ate on. You know what is the most Missouri-ish on this table? The baked beans. Baked beans in a bowl. But not for breakfast. Not for breakfast, no. So if you ate baked beans growing up, and I've had it growing up, you're eating a food of British origin. It's odd, though, to think that what I picture, cowboys, you know, putting beans over the fire, scooping them into a bowl. Now I'm eating baked beans with teacups. Black pudding. That wasn't bad. I want all at once. The Asian blood sausages that I've had, because they do eat it in different parts of Asia, it was a lot more bloody than this. This almost tastes more like a sausage. Fried bread with baked beans. Tongue twister? That's a McDonald's half round with beans on it. But the beans taste different. They don't taste like how they did on the push westward. You know what I noticed? They didn't have the barbecue flavor. I think that this is clearly distinct from America. They never give you a grilled tomato in the U.S. British breakfast fry. It's not bad. He was making fun of the American bacon a lot, so I think it's important. We've got to cut up that banger. Are we doing this right by putting everything on the fry pan? This is a crime against humanity. This is a British crime. Doing it right, doing it wrong. That's like just a bacon, egg, and cheese, but the bread is fried. That's the best. Bangers. Listen, guys, between the fried bread and the blood sausage, those are two things that are clearly not conventionally American. More British. Yo, Marco, you just joined us. What's going on, everybody? As our resident non-white, white person. Marco is an Italian kid who grew up in New York City. We got a white guy from Missouri. Are you white? We talk about this sometimes. I talk about it all the time, actually. I'm not white. I'm Italian. It's almost like cornbread. It's a solid cake, though. That cream is really good. We've got butter and jam over here. He said cornish. It's not butter. It's cream. Cut everybody back to whatnot. Do not get this confused with butter. This is clotted cream. British clotted cream. All right, our last dish here at Tea and Sympathy is we have a shepherd's pie. This is like the British pie. The British baked casserole. I've definitely eaten these before in a much less prepared fashion. You never had the British proper one? Not with this. All right, well, go for it. At least you're using the word proper. Yeah. That's nice. Shepherd's pie. No, that's the best shepherd's pie I've ever had in my life. I think we've got to move on to our next spot. Before we do, what was your favorite thing that you had? Mine's a fried bread, no question. And kind of just throwing stuff on it all day long. I can do that. But I'm going to go with the shepherd's pie. All right. I'm going to go with the bangers. That was a really good sausage. Yo, I'm going with the shepherd's pie. Really good. You know, I thought a little more flavor needed, but it was good. It was good. All right, guys. On to the next spot. So we just finished up with a proper tea time and a fried breakfast. I mean, that was something that maybe a perhaps upper middle class person would enjoy. Or really working class. It covers the gamut. We don't have as much of a social strata in that sort of a way. Are you sure? Because I saw a section reserved for monarchy. Yeah, but they're not around at the moment. So it's all right. And then now we're going to go get some fish and chips, which is, I feel like, more associated with drinking. Fish and chips originally was the first occurrence of fish and chips that we discovered. It was sort of like a market trader that was doing it and banging it out. And it became so popular, everyone else started copying it. Now, how old are we talking? We're talking, you know, late 1700s, early 1800s. You don't feel the necessary need to point out things and be like, by the way, do you know where that came from 300 years ago? Listen, I'm 54 years old. I would have spent 54 years going, excuse me. We're about to order fish and chips from a real British guy. This is maybe the closest experience I'll have to London right now. Do you cuss at us? Are you rude? How's the British service at a fish and chips bar? No more rude than I am normally. You said tea was kind of like it's a celebratory. It's the answer to everything. When does fish and chips come into play? When do we want to go get fish and chips? We don't open late here because that's not the sort of crowd we cater to. But, yeah, you'd be out and, as they say, nothing comes from alcohol quite like Greece. Nice. Quick question. You say the great British pop. Do you guys say pop or soda in Britain? We call it fizzy pop. Okay. Fizzy pop. What did you guys grow up saying? We grew up saying pop, but now I say soda. You know what they say in the deep south? What? They call all soda Coke. So you say, can I just get a Coke? That's what I say. What if we had a nice British pub chant? What would it be? We'd say, I don't know, up your bum. Up your bum. There we go. What do you think? Look at that. Who ate all the pies? You have us a custard. You ate all the pies. This is haddock. I think it's the best piece of fish we do. You've got chips underneath it. These are shrimp, and then these are scallops. You've got the chips underneath. Now, you've got pickled onions. These are our own ones. We do these pickled on the premises. You don't put these with something. You just pop them in your mouth and eat them. That's the curry sauce, which you put on your chips and all the good stuff, or you dip stuff in it. And then this is mushy peas. It's very popular up north. They are marrow-fat peas soaked overnight with bicarbonate of soda. And we're supposed to put this on the seafood? You can spoon it out there and eat it yourself, or you can put it on the thing. Immediately, guys, we're all, you know, born and raised in America. What are you guys looking at versus, you know, a Long John Silver, a Skippers, et cetera, et cetera? Well, for me, just the froth, like the batter, looks beautiful. I think it's a good coloring. I mean, you can give it the old scrape. It's tough. It doesn't have those little tiny, like, breadcrumbs, you know, that a lot of the time you're used to eating in the fried food, so it actually almost looks more like a dark orange or yellow tempura batter. What we're going to do is first load the salt, some vinegar. Oh, see, that's the part where Americans wouldn't do that, isn't it? Vinegar on fries? No way, dude. And then a little bit more salt on it. Salt and vinegar chips. Wow. Because the vinegar kind of cuts through some of the grease, right? Yeah, but it also gives it a little, you know, it just brings a whole new dimension to the flavor and all that. I would suggest, if you want the northern experience, chips dipped in a curry sauce. All right, you guys, chips and curry. Yeah, try it. Chips and curry sauce. Let's go. Fish and chips. And other animals of the ocean. Yeah. You need the vinegar. Okay. You need them. No, no, because it cuts through it, gives it like another whole dimension to the flavor. Oh my goodness. So we would be inebriated right now if we were eating this. Yeah, there's a decent chance you might have had a head start on it. British onion balls. Pickled onions. Wow. That's a lot of onions. Oh, Andrew took a bite of it. You like the pickled onions? No. You ate it. It was strong. You ate the whole thing, yeah. I liked it, though. It woke me up. I don't even need Red Bull. Tempura with wasabi. Almost that same vibe. Yeah, so it's got that thing going on, yeah. I mean, those are the ones we make on the premises. We also sell jars of them pre-made next door that's not our own brand. They're very popular in England. I love pickled onions. When Americans come here and they get to see the original version of a food they're used to having, maybe they were never aware of it. They came from Scotland or England because they just don't think about it. Are you happy to introduce to them that? Or are you just like, hey, just try our version. I'm not even trying to hammer it home that it was the originator. No, no. I'm just like trying to present it. I'm happy that they're trying it because, you know, I think with anything, you know, one shouldn't be too stuck up one's own ass over it, really. Does this tick British people off when they go, when Americans say, man, you guys really speak English funny? Oh, yeah, no, I get that all the time. You know, I mean, I get people asking me, oh, so what language do they speak in England? I don't know. If there's any way to open a door for like sheltered American people who don't try a lot of different foods, I mean, what more could you want than, not fries, because I'm speaking to Americans at this point, but a basket of fries and deep fried fish. Right. You're not asking them to take too huge of a risk with this. Is there any American version of British food that you think that Americans generally might have done better? Like, oh, that's a good one. Because I know I get the whole bet. I get it. Because, you know, you're like, oh, gee, oh, gee, oh, gee. Is there something you have to be like, no, these Americans live here. No, I mean, if you look at in general, a lot of places go to vegetables on the side for something compared to the slightly more al dente tastes of, you know, slightly less cooked vegetables here. It would be, well, you know, it's about having a bit of a bite to it as opposed to in England where, you know, if you have Brussels sprouts or something, they're cooked out of existence sometimes. All right, you guys. Wrapping up here on our British pub food crawl, we went with, you know, high end British food, low end British food. We have the fried Mars bar. Should I do the honors? Do it. Andrew, you want to get this side? Yeah. OK. One. Brothers in the Mars bar. Totally looks like fried poop. Straight up like fried dookie. I'll go first bite. Or we want to go fourths. You go fried Mars bar. Ah. I got you. A little piece mouthful. You know what's funny? I've seen the Mars bar at the candy store. I didn't know it was from Britain. The Mars bar is British. You're looking at a British fried Mars bar. All right. Boom. All right, everybody. As that wraps up, our British section of this food crawl, we're going to go get German food because not only are you part British and German, Germans. It's more relatable. Austrian, but they're neighbors. We got to cover up the languages that almost took over America. They were deciding between English and German as the national language of America. They ended up going with English. I'm not going to lie. I'm pretty glad. Let's go get some German food down in the Lower East Side. Guten Tag. Boom, you guys. We have arrived at what? The Loralee Beer Garden in the Lower East Side. German. German restaurant. Yes. So we're going to cheers. This is your classic German mug with beer. It's a golden pilsner, a German type of beer. What do we say? Is there anything? Oh, I should know this. I don't know. Say one, two, three. Eins, zwei, drei. Boom. Eins, zwei, drei. Okay, so essentially what you have here, it's like we Americanized it and turned it into Bratwurst, where we just put a brat in a bun and put like mustard on it or whatever. But this is traditional German sausages. Well, like in the presentation, especially served over sauerkraut. All right, Wes, your grandmother's from Austria. You do speak a little bit of German. Tell us what you know. This is a smashed pork loin and then it's breaded. I had my first one in like 2004 at a hotel in Vienna, Austria. I actually heard that the origin of the pork katsu in Japan comes from the schnitzel. Wiener schnitzel. What do you have to say when people say, you know, British and German food, there's not that much flavor. Maybe not as much flavor, not as much spices, but I do want to tell our audience German food is very masculine in my opinion. If it's good for anything, putting some meat on your bones, get the boys together, grab some drafts and get some sausages. Light bulb moment, pretty sure the Wiener schnitzel I had in Austria was served with like a jam on top. They didn't bust out the jam for the American market. No, they didn't want it. I think we got to just each pick a sausage, guys. I'm going to go with no mustard on the andouille. You know, the andouille, you should be by yourself. Mini brat, but it looks just like the regular brat. So that's a juicy guy right there. Yeah, andouille is good. There's nothing wrong with like beer, babes and some brats. Beer, babes and brats. German breakfast sausage. Yo, I like the brats. You haven't been to Germany and Austria. How does this rank? This is good. Yeah, this is good. It's a good replication. Well, if you and I were just going to go, we're not going to get eight different Wieners. You know what I mean? This is nice because we're with the boys. We get a little variety and you figure out one through eight, rank them. Do you think Germans invented the term sausage party? I don't know if they invented the term, but they provided the situation for us to call it. Wes, you brought up an interesting point when you saw the jam. I did, and I'm just now finding this out. I think this might be OG. I could be wrong. Better. It's better with the jam. It's like dessert-y. Wiener schnitzel. Marco, take a piece of the pretzel. German pretzel. In the cheese? Should we go in the cheese or go first? Oh, hey there. Wes, you got to tell people, a lot of people eat pretzels growing up. We eat them at the carnival, we eat them at the sports games, we eat them at school, but we don't know that this is a classic German food. These pretzels are way better than the street vendor pretzels that they have on the street in the corner. Last but not least, we got potato cakes. What do you know about these? Nothing. These were not a part of Oma Millie's table ever. So your Austrian side puts applesauce on mac and cheese. That one's going to make a lot of people upset, probably, at home. I know it's super weird, but that's the culture. My mom, my aunt, Oma, and my brother. German potato cakes. Remind you of a hash brown, sort of like. Did you die with the apple on it? I didn't. We got to do jam on schnitzel. Schnitzel jam. You know what? I'm just going to throw it all on. This is the way Wes had it in Austria. Cheers to Oma. To Oma. All right, you guys. We're with our favorite items here at this German pub feast at Lorelei's. I picked the andouille sausage. It's spicy. I don't know if it's traditionally German. It could have been a little bit Creole. From New Orleans. I don't know. It was my favorite. But you have the sauerkraut on it. I'd have the sauerkraut on it. I picked the classic bratwurst. This is just delicious. The mustard was tremendous. You said it was busted. It was busted. The mustard was busted. This is your classic German pilsner, baby. It's all I need. Yo, can you count to 10 in German, just to show the accent that you've got? Eins. Zwei. Drei. Vier. Fünf. Sechs. Sieben. Acht. Neun. Zehn. Yeah! I don't know if it's just the media that I grew up with, Wes, but you sounded like a bad guy. Or a BMW engineer. Hey, amazing cars and amazing sausage. All right, you guys. Thank you so much for watching that episode of Fun Bros Food. Today, we were able to delve into British cuisine, as well as German pub food. Very eye-opening. Those were two things that we had never covered before on the channel. Huge shout-out to Wes. Thank you for doing it, bro. I appreciate you. Marco, thanks for showing up. Yo, always. Always. You're exploring the more dominant white culture that I guess you're not a part of. Yeah, yeah. It was cool. Well, we'll see. Thank you so much. The beer that I got. The sausage we had. It was great. We really wanted to do this video. One, because I think a lot of people wouldn't expect us to. But two, because I think growing up, there was always this sense that American culture, just because it was the de facto culture, it didn't have culture. But this is the culture behind American culture. Yeah, this is the culture before the culture. This is what birthed a lot of American culture is British and German culture. So, that's why we have to explore it if we explore culture. And we're a cultural channel. I think that the best way to put it is often, you know, all my white friends, too, I ask them, where are you from? You know, where's your family from? And people will just say, oh, I'm just white or I'm just American. But, like, you're not just American. You come from somewhere. Unless you're a Native American, your family can be traced back somewhere. And everyone needs self-identity and you need to figure out who you are, where you come from, why your parents are the way they are, you know, what food you're eating. And so, I think looking back at those things not only is important to you, it's important to your family and it helps you kind of realize who you are and that other people come from these places as well. And I've got to say this to end off, guys. If I was Braun, I would want both Kevin Love and Marco Bellinelli spotting up for me on the wings. You already know, all day. Where can they find you, West? At Westling Conrad is my personal, but you might see me on Bleacher Report here and there. We'll pop it up. Yeah, pull it up. We'll pop it up. Marco, where can they find you at? Yo, morgalsworldnyc on Instagram. Come find me. All right, you guys, thank you so much for watching that episode of Fun Bros Food. Again, you know, we went everywhere. Renwich, Lower East Side, British, German. Such a dope talk, man. Huge shout out to everybody. Cars are coming at us. Until next time, we out. Peace. Bye, Omar. All the things that people know us from those, like, British kind of street movies. Like, what you think you're going to do? I know what you're going to do, but what you're...