In the autumn of 1991 Bryan Miller, the then restaurant critic of the New York Times, announced to his readers that he had approached the subject of that week's review with all 'the enthusiasm of a traffic cop called to a five-car pile-up on the West Side Highway'.
Miller's reluctance was understandable. New York is one of the greatest restaurant cities on the planet. It boasts some of the best Italian food in the world; it is home to remarkable Chinese restaurants, stunning Thai cafes, cracking Vietnamese joints. Hell, there's even an Eritrean outfit up on Amsterdam Avenue that's worth a look. This week, however, Miller wasn't reviewing any of them. No. This week he was going to a British restaurant. As far as New Yorkers were concerned, 'British food' was to be regarded as a punishment.
We know how this story ends don't we? Miller loved the place. He declared it to be the restaurant for anybody craving a real shepherd's pie. There were, it turned out, an awful lot of people in New York craving a real shepherd's pie. A dozen years later Tea & Sympathy, a tight snug of a room down in the West Village with space for about 20 people, racks of old tea pots and pictures of the Queen on the walls, has become, on the back of that review, the cornerstone of a mini-Empire. There's the cafe itself, a 'corner shop' called Carry On Tea & Sympathy, and two fish and chip shops both called A Salt & Battery. There is nothing glamorous about any of these places, although there is about much of the clientele. Rupert Everett is a regular and so are Sandra Bernhard and British supermodels Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Karen Elson, Erin O'Connor and Sophie Dahl. David Bowie has been there, and Johnny Depp. Even the Dalai Lama has been to Tea & Sympathy.
Now the owner, Nicola Perry, and one of her former waitresses, Anita Naughton, have co-written The Tea & Sympathy Cookbook . It is a remarkable volume, a combination of recipes for dishes that nobody else would now bother writing up - for toad in the hole and bubble and squeak and that shepherd's pie - along with stories by Naughton from the ramshackle life of the restaurant: about the broke Eng lish waitresses who copped off with the kitchen staff, the bizarre habits of the regulars, famous and otherwise.
After a few days away from Britain I make my way downtown for a little of their familiar comfort food. Tea & Sympathy is full, so I am directed next door to the shop to wait for a table to come free. The place is bizarre, an exercise in nostalgia for an England that may never have existed and certainly doesn't exist now. The shelves are heavy with jars of sherbet lemons and tins of creamed rice, boxes of PG Tips and Quality Street, even Beano annuals. And then there are the videos, of Tommy Cooper and Man about the House and, Lord save us, George and Mildred .
Perry, a handsome woman with a shock of grey-streaked raven hair and the kind of voice that can hail a New York cab from five blocks away, is behind the counter. She's showing off new 'Del Boy' greetings cards and somehow the conversation with the entirely British staff turns to British television and from there to TV commercials from the old country. Suddenly they're all singing the Cadbury's flake advert. I am just about to join in when I'm dragged next door to my table.
I order a pot of Earl Grey and Welsh rarebit. Both are perfect, the tea hot and potent, the rarebit a golden-toasted pillow of unctuous melted cheese on toast with just the right mustardy kick. Around me a mixture of New Yorkers and expats are devouring platefuls of faggots and fish pie and sticky toffee pudding.
I return, well fed, to the shop next door. Anita Naughton, Nicola Perry and I cram ourselves into the tiny office to chat. Perry was always enamoured by the idea of New York, she says. She'd been mates with the radio presenter Danny Baker when she was growing up, and he was the first of her friends to get there. 'He came back with all these stories and, well, I was obsessed.' She finally made it at the end of the 1970s (after a clearly formative stint as a tea lady at the London Stock Exchange) and spent years in Manhattan waitressing before opening the cafe in 1990.
The food, Perry says, 'is what I can cope with in a small space with just a two-ring burner'. If she had more room she'd do proper steamed steak and kidney puddings but she just can't. At first she did the cooking herself, with help from a guy she bumped into who had been trained at London's legendary Le Gavroche. A Brazilian soon took over and since then, as with almost all the kitchens in New York, the food has been knocked out by Hispanic chefs. 'They are really good with consistency,' she says. 'British chefs keep wanting to change things. But these boys are brilliant at doing the same shepherd's pie time after time.'
So this little slice of England comes courtesy of some hard working Ecuadorians? Perry nods. 'I've created my own England here,' she says. 'It's all the best aspects of England.' I'm intrigued by this, given the George and Mildred videos. I ask her what her view of Britain is. 'I think it just gets worse and worse,' she barks. 'Look at the state of the asylum laws.' And suddenly we're off on a rant of Daily Mail -esque proportions, about asylum cheats and people on the dole doing sod all.
I point out the contradiction: that she has thrived in America which was built by immigrants, where her kitchen depends upon them; and yet, she appears to believe immigration into England to be a Very Bad Thing. She doesn't have an answer save to say, a little later: 'I quite like old-fashioned stuff. Nobody who's worked for me has been up to the minute'. Anita agrees. 'Even the music here has to be old English pop,' she says, sardonically.
And that old-fashioned stuff continues to expand. Next door, in the fish and chip shop, where Capital Radio is streamed in over the Internet, they wrap the chips in newspaper. On the day I visit it's a copy of the Guardian . Perry snarls: 'We like to wrap it in the Sun if we can.' Among the delicacies knocked out here is that great Glasgow favourite, the deep-fried Mars Bar. They also do deep-fried Creme Eggs and Toffee Crisps. 'With British music and television we are probably a decade behind,' says Anita, 'but when it comes to putting confectionery in the deep-fat fryer we're ahead of the curve.'
Despite - or because - of these eccentricities, the Tea & Sympathy crew have become the focus of a whole expat community, among whose number are former New Yorker editor Tina Brown and her husband Harry Evans. When the cookbook was published recently they held the launch party at their home and Perry can recall word for word what Tina Brown said in her speech: 'We don't want our children to go without British culture and Tea & Sympathy has helped us to teach them about beans on toast.'
Perhaps that's what appeals to the celebs. Or maybe it's that Perry refuses to treat them any differently to anybody else. A few years ago, she devised a set of rules which include, 'Be pleasant to waitresses. Tea & Sympathy Girls are always right' and, 'If we don't need the table you may stay all day, but if people are waiting and you have finished your meal then it's time to naff off'. These rules, she says, apply to everybody no matter how many times they have appeared on the cover of Vogue .
Nicky's husband Sean, who runs the business with her, pops in, and we get to talking about what they now agree is a skewed vision of England. 'We drive around in a black cab, we've got an English bulldog and Union Jacks pasted up everywhere.' Sean hesitates. 'We're a sad parody of ourselves aren't we?' Perhaps, but they do make a great Welsh rarebit and a bloody good cup of tea.
· The Tea & Sympathy Cookbook is available via www.amazon.com for $19.95. The cafe is at 108-110 Greenwich Avenue, New York, NY 10011, USA. Tel: 001 212 989 9735
