For so long the punchline of the world’s food-related jokes, Britain’s food today has never been better. In the past few decades, it has tenaciously climbed its way to the very top table. Even the French are envious of its diversity, although they would, of course, never admit it.

Britain has seldom had better Italian or Indian or southeast Asian food than it does now – a glorious product of decades of immigration and assimilation. But mention the food of the United Kingdom to anyone halfway curious about the subject and a specific and even more homegrown school comes to mind. So-called Modern British restaurants began to thrive in the late 1980s and 1990s. Three London-based ones (Lyle’s, The Ledbury and The Clove Club) now occupy slots on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The conventional history of this change is one of abrupt rebellion, lines in the sand, eureka moments, chefs making the executive decision to do something fundamentally different and forge a brand-new path.

The real story is much more complex and much more interesting. It starts in the same place – the bad old days of British food that followed WWII. Fourteen years of rationing erased the sense-memory of cooking and eating good food from a whole generation. In parallel, the rise of the supermarket, convenience foods and improved distribution networks meant whatever regional specialities had survived the previous two decades faced a further existential threat. Restaurants in this period were fussy, formal and French, by and large, imparting gigantic inferiority complexes on diners everywhere. It wasn’t really until the 1980s that things started to change. To look at the country’s restaurants today – many of them the envy of the world – is to realise quite how far we have come.

But both the “Modern” and the “British” components of Modern British are very much up for debate. Something extraordinary did indeed happen to British food and drink after WWII, to be sure, and it certainly was animated by a rebellious streak. Chefs such as Mr Fergus Henderson at St John and Mr Stephen Harris at The Sportsman did something borderline anarchic (by the standards of the time) in abandoning opulent tablecloths, exquisite crockery, fawning service and prissy, artificial presentation. Mr Harris in particular has mentioned how influential The Sex Pistols and other icons of the punk revolution were on him as he grew up.

But to position the current Modern British ascendancy purely as the result of a few rebellious chefs sticking it to the French is to overlook both the colourful cast of characters involved in dragging British food out of the doldrums and the deep debt that almost all of them owe to the culinary traditions of continental Europe.

True Modern British food – the real food of contemporary Britain – is diverse, thrilling and constantly evolving. It is not so much about paradigm shifts as it is about accretion, different schools of cooks sharing their techniques and expertise, all the while receiving infusions of fresh blood from the continent and beyond. It is not so much a revolution – punk in 1976, The Sportsman’s Mr Harris in 1999 – as a culmination of the multifarious influences that have subtly altered the country over the decades. Ultimately, telling the true story of Modern British food is not a million miles away from telling the story of modern Britain itself.

We are a magpie nation, and in our cooking, as in our culture at large, we have never been shy of borrowing or at times outright taking, pausing only to rubber-stamp “British” on the end result. With the country on the verge of formalising its departure from the European Union, our near-total dependency on the wider world is more urgently obvious than ever. In a shrinking world, the ideological baggage of Modern British food – the border-walls it constructs between British and other cuisines – is profoundly limiting and an impediment to progress both on the plate and beyond it. If we are going to keep using the term, it clearly is in need of an update.

This, then, is an overview of the various strands of Modern British cooking alive and well today and an attempt to categorise its most high-profile exponents.

Modern British food is, of course, a modern invention, but the UK has been doing restaurants right for centuries. London icons such as Rules and Sweetings remain must-visits to this day. When most people think about “British” food in 2018, they are probably thinking about the restaurants that still tend this particular flame: Mr Shaun Searley’s The Quality Chop House, for example, or the much-celebrated The Marksman pub in Hackney, east London. Dishes such as mince on toast, beef and barley buns with horseradish, or gigantic seasonal pies for two suggest British food is purely about comfort and stodge, which is far from the case. At Quo Vadis in Soho, chef Mr Jeremy Lee is still cooking dishes with the wit and lightness of touch that made him such a key member of the British restaurant revival of the 1980s.

Key dish: smoked eel sandwich at Quo Vadis

Now in its third decade, St John in Clerkenwell continues to wield an outsized influence over what constitutes Modern British food. But unsurprisingly, given its age, this is more commonly felt these days in the work of cooks taking their inspiration from Mr Fergus Henderson’s temple to nose-to-tail eating but content, too, to put their own spin on it. At Black Axe Mangal, former St John head chef Mr Lee Tiernan knocks out immaculate, cross-cultural, Turkish-style flatbreads adorned with the most quintessentially British of toppings, such as a miscellany of lamb offal. Further across town at The Clove Club, Mr Isaac McHale and team take things in a different direction, borrowing from Asia and even local fast-food joints to create something truly distinctive. A contemporary classic dish of fried chicken with pine salt is the perfect encapsulation of this global-yet-local, high-meets-low-brow aesthetic.

Key dish: squid ink flatbread with cod’s roe at Black Axe Mangal

The rediscovery of great British produce is an overlooked element of the Modern British renaissance. There is no need for any fussy French technique, unctuous saucing or elaborate presentation if the raw ingredients are good enough. Some chefs have taken the pursuit of the best possible local produce to an almost maniacal degree – the Lake District’s Mr Simon Rogan is a perfect example – foraging and farming it themselves. Away from the countryside, Mr James Lowe at Lyle’s offers borderline-minimalist masterpieces that showcase obsessively procured ingredients with the least possible intervention. The food at Kiln in Soho, meanwhile, may be Thai by name but the domestically grown ingredients, heritage-breed meat and dayboat seafood from Cornwall are all as British as they come.

Key dish: Douglas fir milkshake at L’Enclume

The elemental joy of cooking over fire is having a moment, with chefs worldwide from Copenhagen to Melbourne to Tokyo and New York charring, grilling and at times deliberately burning ingredients in search of ever-more-intense flavours. The trend has hardly bypassed the UK. Tearaway wunderkind Mr Ollie Dabbous got in on the action years ago at his eponymous restaurant (now sadly closed). Among current exponents, Mr Tomos Parry at Brat can rightly said to be doing something exceptional, channelling as he is the philosophy of the Basque country, the best of British ingredients and the culinary history of his native Wales. Mr Jackson Boxer is an exponent of the wood grill too at newly opened St Leonards.

Key dish: Tamworth chop with mustard at St Leonards

As with British identity more generally, pretty much every facet of Modern British food can be traced back to somewhere or something beyond the UK. It’s just a question of how far back you look. St John, with its madeleines and burgundy, could easily be a local Lyonnaise bouchon. There is just as much regional Italy in our unadorned presentation as there is pragmatic John Bullish directness. In recent years, rather than politely paper over these contradictions, restaurants have started to embrace them, celebrating diversity and making a virtue of centuries of immigration and assimilation. At P Franco, a rotating cast of chefs cook over a tiny induction hob, knocking out miniature masterpieces that can encompass Italy, Korea and Japan, sometimes on a single plate. Meanwhile, at The Laughing Heart, a small commando squad of cooks from around the world produce dishes that tell our culinary history in all its complex glory.

Key dish: Vietnamese-style stuffed olives at The Laughing Heart