The most-reviewed room in the whole Docklands survey, a barbecue and crabshack flying the affectionate old nickname of New Orleans
Big Easy at Canary Wharf carries a 4.4 across a staggering fifteen thousand-plus reviews – by a distance the most-reviewed venue in this entire Docklands survey. It is an American barbecue and crabshack, and the Prat’s naming desk was drawn straight to the name, which borrows the warmest nickname any city ever earned.
Canary Wharf, properly
Big Easy sits in the heart of Canary Wharf, on the Isle of Dogs, on the great glass-and-steel estate raised on the old West India Docks. Properly Docklands, no disclaimer needed. It feeds the Wharf’s enormous lunchtime and after-work crowds.
The Big Easy
“The Big Easy” is the beloved nickname of New Orleans – a city famous above all others for taking life at a gentler, warmer, more musical pace than the striving metropolises of the American north. Where New York is the “Big Apple,” all hustle and ambition, New Orleans is the “Big Easy,” all jazz and slow rivers and good food eaten without hurry. It is a name that promises pleasure over pressure, and there is a lovely irony in planting it at the very heart of Canary Wharf – the most driven, fast-moving, high-pressure square mile in Britain, where the bankers race and the numbers never sleep.
Easy, among the strivers
The Prat savours that contrast. Canary Wharf is Britain’s temple of hustle, a forest of towers where fortunes are made and lost by the second. And into its midst comes the Big Easy, importing the exact opposite philosophy – the New Orleans creed of taking it slow, eating well, letting the good times roll. A barbecue joint named for the laid-back Louisiana capital, set among the most wound-up workers in the country, is offering the Wharf precisely what it most lacks: a licence to slow down. The fifteen thousand reviews suggest the strivers are grateful for the permission.
The crabshack creed
And the food fits the name. Barbecue and a crabshack are the cooking of the American south and its gulf coast – slow-smoked meat that cannot be rushed, and seafood eaten with the hands, messily and cheerfully, the sort of meal that forces even a Canary Wharf banker to put down the phone and use both hands on a crab. It is the Big Easy philosophy served on a plate: food that demands you slow down and enjoy it. The Prat approves of any Wharf establishment brave enough to insist on leisure.
Verdict
A 4.4 across fifteen thousand-plus reviews is a remarkable body of goodwill – the biggest in this survey – and Big Easy earns it by feeding the Wharf’s vast crowds well and cheerfully. Its charm is the name: the Big Easy, New Orleans’ warm nickname, importing a philosophy of slow pleasure into the most driven square mile in Britain.
Go for the barbecue, the crab and the New Orleans creed of taking it slow, and enjoy the delicious irony of the Big Easy planted among the Wharf’s strivers. Even bankers, it seems, need reminding to let the good times roll.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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