Dame and Lord's Chef Ed Szymanski’s Future Plans Include Sticky Toffee Pancakes and Black Pudding Burgers

This London-born chef’s modern British cooking has made Dame and Lord’s two of the hottest tables in New York right now.

At the age of 11, Ed Szymanski decided that he was going to be an investment banker. He spent his childhood in South West London studying mathematics, eventually finding himself at the prestigious London School of Economics. Bored, Szymanski, a self-described foodie, decided to get a job working in a professional kitchen when one of his favorite restaurants posted a tweet looking for help. Little did he know, that tweet would change the course of his life. At the time, he had no cooking experience. “I didn’t even know how to hold a knife,” he says. But the restaurant agreed to let him work for free, so Szymanski learned to pull pork and mash potatoes when he wasn’t in classes at university. When graduation time came, he knew restaurants were his future: “I fell in love with the culture of the kitchens and the energy.”

At 21, Szymanski headed for New York. “It was my dream to cook at Eleven Madison Park because a lot of misguided 20-somethings think that three Michelin stars is the only form of cooking,” he recalls. He spent the next few years working at The Spotted Pig, Cherry Point in Brooklyn, and The Beatrice Inn (where he met his future business partner and wife, Patricia Howard), as well as in Mexico City at the revered fine-dining restaurant Quintonil. When he returned to Cherry Point as executive chef, Szymanski overhauled the menu, which earned him a two-star review from The New York Times. He left to work on a restaurant project in Manhattan that failed and found himself working in the kitchen in the dive bar near his apartment.

In early 2020, Szymanski and Howard decided it was finally time to open their own spot. Their business plan was clear — the restaurant was going to be an homage to modern British cooking with a focus on local produce, à la London’s St. John — but fundraising was difficult, and even more so once COVID-19 hit. Instead, they launched a set of pop-ups, including one called Dame Summer Club, meant to help raise funds for causes that support Black Lives Matter, with a three-item menu (including an extra-crispy fish and chips, made with a rice and vodka batter, that now anchors the menu at Dame). “I thought we’d do maybe $200 in revenue a day,” says Szymanski. “That first day, we did $4,000.” They ended up donating over $20,000 in profits to charity.

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In 2021, Szymanski and Howard were able to lease the petite space next door to their pop-up, which had room for exactly 10 tables. That May, they threw open the doors to Dame, a high-end seafood restaurant with British leanings and a mom-and-pop sense of hospitality. Howard took on the bulk of the design work, and Szymanski tackled the menu, a tight lineup of a dozen or so dishes. The food at Dame reflects Szymanski’s approach of honoring ingredients without being afraid to push the gas pedal on flavor. The stars of the menu include a plate of perfectly grilled oysters topped with a caramelized green Chartreuse hollandaise that imbues the bivalves with a gentle alpine flavor. They are best followed by an order of squid, grilled on a skewer with scallion pieces knitted in between, floating in a pool of a sharp parsley sauce. Few tables skip the tuna tartare, which is tossed in a zippy fish sauce with olive oil and served on toast with a mustard sauce and shaved bottarga.

The couple opened Lord’s a few blocks away in 2022 with a menu of reimagined meaty British classics. There, Szymanski and his team transform lamb shoulder into a flavor-packed lamb sausage spiced with a Madras-style curry spice mix, which they mold around a soft-boiled egg to make the restaurant’s beloved deep-fried Scotch eggs. For the pig’s head terrine, Szymanski breaks down a whole pig’s head to braise overnight with wine, garlic, onions, and bay leaves until it’s supremely tender. The braising liquid is then reduced into a gelée, and the meat is folded in and set into a terrine before being breaded and fried until the inside is “gooey and semi-liquid,” while the outside remains pleasingly crisp and crunchy. “It’s the bestselling item on the menu,” says Szymanski. “People go wild for it.” The menu is rounded out with rotating seasonal savory meat pies, a side of “proper English chips,” and a whole fish like turbot.

Whether you are dining at Dame or Lord’s, save room for dessert: Szymanski’s way with traditional English desserts might be the best thing about his cooking. His sticky toffee pudding, for example, is tender and moist instead of dense and stodgy. (The secret is soaking dates and prunes in Mexican Coca-Cola before folding them into a brown sugar sponge and basting the cake while it is baking with a salted bourbon caramel sauce.) Szymanski is particularly talented at desserts requiring several textures. Take the rhubarb and Campari trifle at Lord’s, for example: The dessert is crafted from layers of silky egg-yolk custard; a dreamy, light vanilla Chantilly whipped cream; Campari-poached rhubarb; jiggly cubes of poaching liquid gelée; and a white chocolate crumble for crunch.

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Szymanski has his hands full with the two restaurants and is toying with the idea of what brunch might look like. “I have this idea of doing sticky toffee pancakes and black pudding burgers ...” he begins, as his mind drifts to the future. He would love to open an English breakfast spot in the near future. It would be “a proper greasy spoon, inspired by the working man cafeterias that you’d find in parts of London,” he says. The to-do list includes a proper English bakery and maybe a higher-end counter concept, too. “I want to forge our own path, open different restaurants with different perspectives,” he says, while still telling the story of modern British food. “This is the stuff Patricia and I stay up at night and dream about.”

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