Famous food trends in British history Tea Today tea is so cheap and plentiful in Britain it borders on the mundane. But when it first arrived in Britain from China just before the Stuart restoration, it was so exotic and expensive that it was almost exclusively enjoyed by the fashionable rich. Samuel Pepys famously tried it in 1660, announcing in his diary "I did send for a cup of tee, (a China drink) of which I had never had drunk before."