What Are Jacket Potatoes, and Why Are the English Waiting Hours for Them?

It’s lunchtime on a bright and blustery fall day in Preston, in the northwest of England. Across the Flag Market, a vast, tree-lined plaza in the shadow of a colonnaded, Victorian museum, an ever-growing line of roughly 150 people wait patiently for their turn at a modest cherry-red trailer. This is the daily wait — anywhere between two and six hours.

Party music booms out from within the trailer’s steaming, open hatch, and selfie-seeking customers approach the counter with raised smartphone cameras and big, expectant grins.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that the foodstuff prompting this fervent excitement might be a hype-baiting favorite like a smash burger or birria taco, perhaps. But the little trailer is the flagship outpost of SpudBros, a family-run, phenomenally popular local business that specializes in that most lumpen, old-fashioned and outwardly unexciting dish: the baked potato.

Better known in the British culinary vernacular as “jacket potatoes” or “jacket spuds,” to denote the presence of a crisp-roasted, unpeeled skin, these hulking tubers were thought of as merely cheap, dependable and comforting, the fare of college cafeterias and grocery store cafes. But they also act as an endlessly adaptable vehicle for baked beans, tuna salad and all manner of other peculiarly British toppings.

A new generation of social-media savvy potato mongers has seized on an opportunity to make the spud cool again.

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