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Tables were hard to come by last week at Desmond’s, the tony Upper East Side restaurant that opened last March. British expats and Anglophiles filled the stark, cavernous room, which was festooned with a giant Union Jack flag. The occasion? The executive chef of London’s haute Indian eatery the Cinnamon Club was in town.
Among the diners on Tuesday evening was Anna Titley, 27, who moved to the city from Yorkshire to work at St. George’s Society of New York, a charitable organization and fellowship society in Midtown. “It’s been a really big year for the UK,” she says. “The royal wedding, the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the London 2012 Olympic Games.”
She and colleague Samantha Hamilton, 35, who hails from London, can now add a roster of fashionable British restaurants to their list: “We’ve definitely noticed more places opening up,” say the duo, rattling off newcomers such as Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side, Whitehall in Greenwich Village, the Wren on the Bowery, the Churchill in Kips Bay and the Fat Radish on the Lower East Side.
NYC is experiencing a wave of Anglophilia — and yes, that now extends to once-dreaded British food.
“ ‘Downton Abbey,’ the royal wedding — it harkens back to a different time. A pub does that for people — it’s that kind of environment of good old England, sort of glamorized a bit,” says 42-year-old expat Jan Cohen, chief operating officer of digital creative agency King & Partners and a Manchester native.
For years, the collective view of British cooking was perhaps best summed up by W.M.W. Fowler’s 1965 description of English stew: “Stew being an unidentifiable lump of meat, hacked into bits — fat, gristle and all — combined with similarly treated vegetables, and boiled till a watery soup with bits of leather and rubber bobbing about in it was achieved.”
English transplant and food trailblazer Nicky Perry recalls being terrified when she opened Tea & Sympathy on Greenwich Avenue in 1990.
“Everyone kept saying to me, ‘Are you mad? English food is terrible!’ ”
But British chefs are now turning that old adage on its head — emphasizing seasonal veggies that haven’t been boiled to oblivion, meat that hasn’t been laid waste by fire and fresh interpretations that are anything but fusty.
Last year, a record-breaking 151 restaurants in the UK and Ireland received Michelin stars (125 of them in England), and the popularity of British TV chefs such as Jamie Oliver has helped to overhaul England’s once stodgy culinary image.
“Mocking British food is an easy stereotype, like bad teeth or being a prude,” says Kate McVeigh, 35, who works in media sales and moved to NYC 3¹/₂ years ago from southwest London.
“I would be the first to admit that our national food is deeply unsexy — a lot of stews, one-pot meals and sponge puddings. The problem with this type of food is, when it is done badly, it’s really terrible.”
English chef April Bloomfield helped to change all that when she introduced New Yorkers to the gastropub — “They probably thought it was some tummy ailment,” she jokes — with the arrival of the Spotted Pig in the West Village in 2004, which became an instant hit.
Suddenly, English food was vibrant, even sexy, propelling her and partner Ken Friedman to open two well-received follow-ups: the Breslin and the John Dory, both located in the Ace Hotel.
The latest wave of stylish British eateries offers a comforting whiff of Sunday roasts without falling into nostalgic shtick.
“I don’t believe people are looking for chichi food,” says Jones Wood Foundry chef-owner Jason Hicks, who is classically French-trained and previously worked at La Goulue and Orsay. (The recent failure of clubby London import Le Caprice attests to this.)
“[At French restaurants] waiters can be somewhat arrogant and make you uncomfortable if you pronounce escargot wrong. Here it’s the complete opposite,” says Hicks, who was born in Stratford-on-Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“The food isn’t complicated — we’re not trying to teach people how to eat, we’re not putting micro-greens on top because we can.”
A growing emphasis on local, seasonal ingredients has also added a new sheen to formerly muddy braises.
“Let’s not forget, for years and years after World War II, we couldn’t get sugar, bananas, all sorts of things — so you had all this food made with powdered milk, powdered eggs,” says Perry.
Clarissa Dickson Wright — one-half of the “Two Fat Ladies” and author of “A History of English Food” — places the blame even further back.
“[Victorian England] may have given us the Empire, but food-wise it did us no favors,” says Wright. “If it was out-of-season it really appealed to Victorians, who were all about conspicuous consumption rather than flavor.”
“This revival we owe entirely to America,” continues Wright, noting the influence of the American green-market movement and farm-to-table pioneers such as Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse.
That ethos certainly influences the Fat Radish, where English chef Ben Towill serves seasonal fare such as celery root and black garlic pot pie and beet crumble with hazelnuts.
“If English food is cooked the right way and attention is paid to the details, then yes, it can be amazing and comforting at the same time,” says Bloomfield, whose hotly anticipated cookbook, “A Girl and Her Pig,” comes out in April.
But while New Yorkers are increasingly receptive to British food, they have their limitations.
At sleek White-hall, named after the British Parliamentary district, chef Chris Rendell emphasizes “light, bright, simple, fresh cooking.” His appetizer of pan-roasted squid with spicy pork sausage offers hints of gentleman’s relish — the quintessentially English anchovy paste — so as not to “scare” off diners.
Meanwhile, Desmond’s chef-owner David Hart notes that “rabbit doesn’t sell; neither does kidney and liver.”
And even if he personally finds it a bit boring, the popular tuna tartare is staying on his modern British menu.
“Customers don’t come to the restaurant to be educated. The last thing they need is some pompous British chef telling them, ‘You should eat mackerel tartare.’ ”
Then he adds, rather wistfully, “maybe [that will change] in time.”
carla.spartos@nypost.com