EKAITZ SAIES

For this post, I’m stepping away from my usual focus on high performance sport to reflect on something a little closer to home – the food we eat, and the standards we set around it. 

It’s a sweltering Saturday afternoon and I’m having lunch in the garden with my kids. On the table: a meal that could easily belong to a summer day in the Basque Country. The salad – different classes of lettuce, cucumber and radishes – is entirely English. The mussels, plump and briny, are rope-grown in Scotland. The chips, hand-cut and golden, are made from English potatoes I peeled and chopped myself.

It’s the kind of plate that feels both local and evocative. And it reminds me, not for the first time, how misleading the clichés around British food really are.

We often reach for the same tired imagery: lukewarm frozen chips, deep-fried fish in leaden batter, peas microwaved into submission. But that’s only part of the story. In truth, British cuisine isn’t inherently inferior, it’s just suffered from decades of lowered expectations. The issue isn’t the food; it’s what we’ve come to accept as normal.

In the Basque Country, where I’ve spent most of my life, even the cheapest menú del día – usually around €12 or €14 – comes with a sense of pride. The chips are peeled and cut by hand in the kitchen. Putting frozen fries on a plate would be considered not just lazy, but disrespectful. A quiet contract exists between the cook and the guest: If you’ve come to eat, I’ll do it properly.

You don’t need a Michelin star to show care. Just a kitchen, good local produce, and some time.

It’s not that Britain lacks the ingredients. Our dairy, seafood, game and vegetables are among the best in Europe. We have native breeds of beef and lamb, remarkable apples, world-class oysters. So why has our food reputation struggled to keep pace?

Part of the answer lies in history. The Industrial Revolution reshaped how Britons cooked and ate. Rural traditions were replaced by factory meals, home cooking gave way to mass catering. Then came two world wars, and with them, decades of rationing that dulled the national palate. By the mid-20th century, “British food” had become shorthand for practicality, not pleasure.

Meanwhile, other countries doubled down on their culinary identities. France codified its cuisine, creating a formal gastronomic language around sauces, service, and presentation. The Basques protected theirs – not just with pride, but with institutions: cooking societies (txokos), culinary schools, and an ecosystem that nurtured the avant-garde while honouring tradition.

Now that I live in Oxford, I hope things are beginning to change in Britain.

A generation of British chefs, growers, winemakers and home cooks have been rebuilding something more thoughtful, more rooted. Vineyards in Kent and Sussex now produce sparkling wines that compete with Champagne. Restaurants from Padstow to the Pennines are celebrating British produce with care and clarity.

At its best, modern British food is seasonal, ingredient-led, and confident. It doesn’t need to imitate other cuisines. It just needs to believe in itself.

If Britain has a culinary flaw, it’s not in its flavours, it’s in its standards. Somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting meals to be made with care unless we were paying £60 a head for them. The problem isn’t that we eat chips. It’s that we’ve come to accept the frozen variety as default, in pubs, cafés, and even restaurants.

But we should still notice the difference. We still know, instinctively, that when someone peels the potato, fillets the fish, dresses the leaves, that’s food made by someone who gives a toss. And that, really, is what separates a great meal from a forgettable one.

Lunch in the garden today reminded me of that. Everything on the plate was British. But the ethos behind it – the respect for ingredients, the effort behind the preparation – was pure Basque.

British food doesn’t need a makeover, just a little more care, and a little more belief. As for me, here in the garden and the kids already watching something on TV, perhaps just one more glass of this fizz from Kent.