[seanhandley]

No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness.

It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode.

If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks.

Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.

[foldr]

Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).

[kelnos]

> it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.

Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.

[marliechiller]

We share a huge amount of culture.

[foldr]

There's a significant asymmetry, though. Brits consume far more US culture than Americans British culture.