Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

A reminder that tomorrow morning we will be hosting our annual talk at the British Library Food Season! This year, the subject is food photography and how it has evolved since the 1970s, from the gloss and artifice of early studio shoots, to the chaotic and online visual food culture we have today. To speak about this, we have assembled a panel of great food photographers: Jonathan Lovekin (who has photographed all of Nigel Slater’s columns and cookbooks for the last 28 years), Patricia Niven and Kenneth Lam. They will look at how photographers have defined the dominant food aesthetic across the decades, the ways desire and aspiration have been constructed through photography and look at how changing technologies have reshaped not only aesthetics but also who gets to make ‘good’ food images in a globalised social media world.

You can book a ticket for Vittles presents: From Aspic to Instagram here. If you buy a ticket you can also claim a free ticket for The Legacy of Edna Lewis on Sunday. Simply enter the promo code FSFREE when adding it to your basket.

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Today’s review by Louise Benson is about the low-key restaurant and bar called Tramps which was recently opened on the Old Street end of City Road by the artist Peter Doig and his partner Parinaz Mogadassi.

The only sign for Tramps Bar is hand-drawn in red felt-tip pen on an A4 sheet that is roughly taped to a black door with white masking tape. ‘Its Five star rating is here’, reads an addendum scrawled on a scrap of unused receipt paper taped below, followed by a doodle showing the promised five stars. ‘Sighned [sic] by a Co Customer’, it says below. Both notes appear to have been written by a child.

This is the first hint that the five-table restaurant and bar, tucked just off the Old Street end of City Road (behind the only McDonald’s drive-thru that I know of in Zone 1), is not only uninterested in pandering to Google Maps aggregators or walk-ins, but actively opposed to the type of establishment that might generate mass ‘five-star’ appeal. In this sense, it has more in common with some of Soho’s members’ bars hidden behind unmarked doors, like Trisha’s on Greek Street and Gerry’s on Dean Street, which sometimes loosen their door policies to allow non-members to enter as they choose. Tramps Bar is technically open to all, but you’d have to know where it was to find it and step through the door, which is always left slightly ajar.

Tramps was established by the Iranian art dealer and curator Parinaz Mogadassi in the former studio of her husband, the painter Peter Doig. The establishment is not to be confused with the couple’s much-publicised purchase of the derelict former pub McGlynn’s in King’s Cross for £3 million. Last autumn, the pair staged the first two exhibitions in the grimy former hotel rooms of the pub, with fantastical paintings by Iranian artist Behrang Karimi and illicit photographs of a brothel bathroom by Merry Alpern. These were hung against a shower curtain in the communal bathroom and in front of wardrobes and mirrors in the bedrooms. Tramps has operated as an itinerant gallery since 2011, with exhibitions in New York and Paris, and in London at the Micawber street address that now houses the restaurant and bar.

When I visit in May, a painting by Karimi of an incongruously large, veiny foot hangs behind the pots bubbling on two small induction hobs, which are tended to by a chef named Harry McKenzie. This newly installed chef previously spent six years at the River Café, where he was a peer and friend of Max Rocha, now of Cafe Cecilia just up the canal in Hackney. There is a throughline of confident simplicity in both men’s food and a studied nostalgia for home cooking that is enough to make you briefly forget that your own mum did not, in fact, cook anything that came close to the muted elegance of these dishes. In a chunky green salad topped with whole hazelnuts and translucent slivers of sheep’s cheese, the trick is knowing exactly where to stop.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Anonymous has written an essay about running the tea and biscuit table at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in London. If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – we highly recommend buying a copy. Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London is also still available for pre-order here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

A subscription to Vittles is £7/month or £59/year. Vittles is entirely subscriber funded, and your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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Anyone coming to the British Library Food Season and booking a ticket for Vittles presents: From Aspic to Instagram may also claim a free ticket for - The Legacy of Edna Lewis. Simply enter the promo code FSFREE when adding one of those events to your basket.

One of the first things I noticed about AA was the biscuits. Meetings most often take place in the supplementary buildings of churches, and the biscuit offering felt identical to that of a charity coffee morning. Large, institutional stainless-steel kettles were in use, and a variety of familiar biscuits – chocolate digestives, Jaffa Cakes and so on – were arranged on 1970s crockery. At my first meeting I was asked whether I wanted tea or coffee, and when I requested the latter I was told that ‘The only instant part of recovery is the coffee.’

I was initially bemused by the relish other attendees exhibited at the biscuit table; they debated the week’s offering and expounded the merits of Jammy Dodgers as opposed to Ginger Nuts. Fig rolls were met – unfairly, I thought – with horror. Prior to the more formal, and generally darker, sharing that happened inside the meetings themselves, the biscuit table was a conversational place. The kindness and care with which I was always offered a cup of tea and a biscuit surprised me too; I did not think I deserved kindness or a biscuit. I did not even think I liked biscuits.

Like many recovering addicts, I did not have a sweet tooth prior to sobriety – I was a crisps person – but suddenly, after giving up alcohol and drugs, I found that I needed sugar. I copied the other alcoholics and began to drink it in my tea – ironically, this felt illicit. I began to look forward to meetings, in no small part due to the biscuits; they were a pleasant and delicious thing which I was still allowed. I once watched a recovering addict who was trying to give up smoking light a cigarette – he held it up appreciatively and said, ‘The thing about one of these is it won’t make you wake up in a skip tomorrow morning.’ The same goes for a biscuit – I could just eat a Jaffa Cake and enjoy it and there would not be a vast and terrible consequence. That may sound extremely obvious and simple, but it was not. I began to imitate my fellow alcoholics and take a small stack of biscuits into each meeting; like them, I had poor impulse control and would finish the biscuits within the first five minutes.

One of AA’s many aphorisms is that ‘Service keeps you sober.’ Meetings run because people set out the chairs, organise the hiring of a space from a church or community hall and chair the meeting. These tasks are known as ‘service commitments.’ I was desperate to stay sober and obeyed every bumper-sticker suggestion I was given. At a monthly business meeting after my favourite AA group (imagine a parish council run by former wreckheads and you will get the idea), I learned that the meeting needed a new tea person; I put myself forward and was voted in. This is how I found myself in charge of serving the tea at a small evening meeting in Soho. The church in which the meeting takes place is a stone’s throw away from The French House, where I used to bartend, and the church’s bar – on which I served the tea directly – faced the bar where I used to serve wine to customers (but more often to myself).

I was unable to afford to buy nice biscuits. Every week I presented the alcoholics with knock-off rich teas and digestives from Lidl, and I felt terrible about it. Eventually someone told me that I was presenting the alcoholics with the sort of biscuit which the then Conservative government would deem they deserved. Still tender, I wept at my failure, not least because the criticism had come from two incredibly handsome men and I was worried that I would never find another boyfriend. I protested that I couldn’t afford to buy better biscuits, and they laughed at me and told me to get the money from the treasurer – I hadn’t realised there was one. The following week I had a budget of £15. I felt rich. I had to keep a receipt, which made me feel important and as though the other people in the supermarket would assume I had a job.

Perhaps my lack of other gainful employment explained the zeal with which I took to my tea commitment. I cleaned the church’s upstairs breakfast bar thoroughly before starting, I laid out the biscuits and sweets neatly on plates and in bowls, I designated a bowl for teabags and I decanted the sugar so that the church’s main supply wouldn’t become stained and contaminated by thrice-returning wet teaspoons – alcoholics frequently need at least two sugars. I became angry when the meeting just before mine invariably made the kitchen messy and encroached on my time when they tried to clean up, inexpertly, afterwards. The ineffective way they loaded the dishwasher enraged me.

Through trial and error, I discovered a formula for the biscuit selection: at least half should be chocolate; there should be one ‘posh’ or novelty chocolate biscuit, and the rest of the chocolate offering should be chocolate digestives or chocolate hobnobs. These should never be the dark chocolate kind – they do not provide enough instant gratification. There should always be a classic, like Jammy Dodgers or Ginger Nuts. Cheap biscuits, like I had learned, were frowned upon; Bourbons and custard creams were not considered worth staying sober for. Once, in an experimental mood, I bought Tangfastics. They were a great success, and the move to include fizzy sweets in the offering caught on across London.

The secret to good AA tea is the same as the secret to good bartending: you have the remember the regulars’ orders. There are people who, even now, I will see in Soho and recognise only as ‘Three cubes of ice’ or ‘145ml Côtes du Rhône’. The recovering alcoholics I was serving at AA were every bit as annoyingly specific about their orders as the regulars in the French. Some would insist on two teabags, while others had a fear of any caffeine. I would be told I had not left enough room for milk; I would be told I had left too much. I was asked for a slice of lemon in a cup, not a mug of Earl Grey. I would receive praise for the selection of herbal teas on offer, and I would be chastised for the lack of decaf options. One awful day the church’s kettle broke and, unbeknownst to me, the water was merely hot rather than boiling. An older man I did not know took a sip, looked to see if I was wearing a wedding ring, and told me that tea like that was why I was still single.

AA service commitments last for one year. After a year of making the tea, I had finished the twelve steps of recovery and begun to sponsor another woman. I passed my tea-making commitment on to her and she passed it on to my second sponsee. Both took the role as seriously as I had and it became a despotic ‘family’ tradition. Finally, after three years of unbroken control over the teas, the issue of succession reared its head. When two straight men I did not know took over, I was concerned. They started off strong: one, a former chef, bought Mulino Bianco biscuits, kept the blue roll handy and had a good sense of mise en place. In many cases – though it has not yet happened for me – recovery leads to great professional success. The former chef finished training to be a lawyer and so had to relinquish the tea service. I was happy for him, but worried that the remaining man would be unable to handle the tea alone. I was proved correct. A charming ageing skater, he made the sort of tea I was used to receiving from one of the Americans. He once asked if he really needed to buy milk. I disgraced myself in the next business meeting by speaking out of turn and protesting that we had suffered enough, the tea had gotten too bad and attendance was plummeting. Despite my blatant abuse of AA’s ultimately benevolent anarchist society, I was voted in as the tea person for a second term, three years after my first.

St Augustine once pleaded with God, famously saying, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet.’ I frequently plead to an ill-defined and murky ‘higher power’ (which I was told to believe in and which I do not interrogate too closely lest it collapse), ‘Oh God, make me good now.’ I mostly am good, but when it comes to making the tea at AA, I am cruel and controlling. I bark at the alcoholics who fail to clean the kitchen, I roll my eyes theatrically when I’m asked to list the herbal teas and I frequently want to strangle the nice old man who watches closely as I measure a half-teaspoon of instant into his cup. He is nervous because three years ago I gave him a coffee with my customary two. I once told him, nastily, that as his cocaine habit had failed to kill him, it was unlikely that my coffee would finish the job. The orders of the alcoholics I serve are undeniably specific and exacting, and yet, in my iron-clad grip on the meeting’s tea and biscuits, I am the most controlling of all. During the sharing portion of AA meetings, when those attending talk about their days and weeks and their recovery more generally, a recurring theme is that, while physical or chemical sobriety generally becomes easier with time, ‘emotional’ sobriety remains difficult. I have found this to be true, and yet while I am generally more or less emotionally sober outside of AA – a reliable and loving friend, the sort of person to relinquish a tube seat – inside it I remain a terror.

During my sobriety I have lived in house shares, squats, house-sits, and been a lodger; I have rarely had a kitchen where I can cook with ease and freedom. I treat the people with whom I share the AA kitchen in a manner that would be effective and acceptable in hospitality, but which is rude and hostile in a recovery context. In lieu of being able to host people comfortably at home, I make tea for alcoholics, and I do it horribly because it means too much to me. Similarly, the instability of freelance work and a long-term lack of sustainable employment mean that I have, on occasion, faced food insecurity. The only time I enter the supermarket without dread is when I buy the AA biscuits, when my sole concern is choosing what I think people will enjoy the most rather than considering what cheap thing will keep me full for the greatest length of time (generally porridge). While I have moved more times than I can remember in the last four years, I have found myself in the same kitchen week after week for the length of my sobriety. I forget that it is not really my kitchen at all – it is the church’s kitchen, it is God’s kitchen, and I desecrate it frequently.

*

In keeping with an AA tradition to remain anonymous in press and film, the writer of this piece has chosen to remain anonymous.

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Sing Yun Lee is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. You can find more of her work here.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review by Saira Banu is about the new Indo-Arabic restaurants of East Ham.

But first, we’re delighted to announce that this week we won Best Food Magazine at the Guild of Food Writers Awards for the two print magazines that we released in 2025! In addition, Nick Bramham won Best Cookery Writer at both the Guilds and the Fortnum and Mason Awards, while Yemisi Aribisala won Best Food Writer at Fortnum’s, in part for her brilliant essay on Nigerian cookbooks we published as part of our cookbook season.

In the six years since we started, writers for Vittles have won ten major food writing awards while competing with some of the biggest and well-funded publications in the UK. There is no big secret to our model: we try to give writers the time and resources to produce the work they love, and make sure all contributors are paid fairly and on time. To do this, we rely entirely on direct support from our readers through subscriptions to the newsletter, or sales of our print projects.

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I’ve spent only a little time scoping out East Ham’s high street on Citymapper, but a lot of time watching Malayalee food bloggers signpost the most ‘juicy’, ‘authentic’ and ‘worth it’ restaurants on YouTube and Instagram. The street is shared equally by London’s South Indian diaspora and a sprawling network of Romanian barbers and bakeries. Three of the most recent openings to pique the interest of those bloggers and me are Sulaimani, NavaRuchi and Malabar Hut. All of these have stated that they serve ‘Indo-Arabic’ food – either on the signboards in their restaurants or online. The openings have piqued my interest, as the Arabic tag has become the ultimate stamp of Malayalee luxury.

For the last five decades, migration to Persia (Iran), then the Gulf (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman) has reshaped Kerala’s economy and the palates of its communities. To move to these places is to enter a crucible of labour, cultural and religious capital, pride and, of course, tax-free wealth. You see this influence shape cities and towns in Kerala, with juice shops and bakeries selling Sharjah and Saudi shakes – banana milkshakes made of imported nuts and dates that glamorise (and sometimes weaponise) the immigrants’ bounty. When someone returns to Kerala, these premium imports, packaged tightly in bubble wrap, are distributed among friends and relatives as evidence of the proximity to Arabness and the wealth these lands hold.

In Anwar Rasheed’s 2012 film Ustad Hotel, the beloved patriarch, nicknamed Kareem Ikka, holds up a sulaimani – cardamom and lemon-infused black tea born from centuries of Arab-Malabar trade – as an essential symbol of rest and respite. He says, ‘Oro sulaimaniyilum orithiri mohabbath venam... athu kudichu kazhiyumbo lokam motham angane pathiye ninnu pokanam.’ (‘In every sulaimani, there should be a little bit of love… so that when you drink it, the world slows down for a moment.’) As a Malayalee who was born and raised in Sharjah, I see the Arabisation of our food as an attempt by the migrant workers to romanticise their struggle, as Kareem Ikka does. And why shouldn’t they? When 18-hour work days that fuel multiple generations across continents are the norm, there is no time to curate your own cultural capital. You borrow from Arab culture for its supposed superiority, but in the case of Kerala cuisine, you borrow so well that you forget mandi wasn’t always Malayalee, or that a Sharjah shake was actually created in Calicut and not Al Khan.

Last month, I went to East Ham wanting a whistlestop tour of Sulaimani, Navaruchi and Malabar Hut to look for the Malayali-style Indio-Arabic meals I grew up eating.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Misha Honcharenko writes about connecting with his mother – and Ukraine – via her handwritten recipe book. If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – we highly recommend buying a copy. Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London is also still available for pre-order here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

All the articles in Vittles Cooking are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Vittles is entirely subscriber funded, and your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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Recently I’ve been looking through my mother’s small recipe book again. Whenever she had any spare time, she would write down recipes and lists of random things to use up in the household. Everyone in the family knew about her obsession with buying cooking magazines (this was way before she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022, after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine). She never cooked anything from those magazines or revisited them after she bought them. The recipes she wrote down, though, were those she considered important enough to prevent her from losing herself. Food is something that one must always treasure, like a precious stone, she’d say.

My mother never showed her cookery notebook to anyone but me. Interspersed among the recipes are some brief thoughts, prayers for when you’re feeling low, instructions on how to bring luck into your life and even rituals for daily facial care. The notebook is full – 182 pages in total – and disorderly, although her handwriting is deliberately neat, without any crossings-out or mistakes. At the end, on the flyleaf, she wrote out information about different measurement conversions: grams, millilitres and tablespoons. There are spillages from coffee on several pages.

It felt like doom, but also life-affirming, to look through it after her death. I can kind of sense that it was meant only for her, but at the same time she entrusted it to me. I feel honoured to possess it.

The recipes in the book don’t just hold the trauma of losing my mother. They hold the memories of everything that was lost when we were forced to flee Ukraine in 2023, carrying only what we could. Not long after we arrived in Cork in Ireland, my mother’s cancer returned. It couldn’t be cured this time. I was living in a hostel room for people caring for relatives with terminal illnesses. When she died, I looked around the room at all the stuff I’d felt was important to bring with us, not knowing what to do with any of it. What do you unpack when the person you brought it all for is gone? My first instinct was just … blankness. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel anything clearly. But then I remembered her notebook. It held what I couldn’t – the details, the care, the pieces of her I was so afraid to lose.

The notebook has travelled through four countries since we left home: Poland, the Netherlands, Ireland, and finally the UK, where I live now. But it always takes me right back to our tiny kitchen in Poltava, to small, precious memories of my mother cooking my favourite dishes for me. Looking through it now, I realise just how much she valued simplicity in food. I love this about her, but it makes recreating her cooking difficult, because there’s nowhere to hide. Every attempt of mine to make one of her recipes ends in failure, because I can’t cook as well as her. Besides, what I really miss is her presence in the kitchen rather than the food itself.

Still, I keep on trying, hoping to feel a little closer to her. One of those recipes I return to most is my mother’s holubtsi. These cabbage rolls originated in rural Ukrainian farming communities as a cheap, nutritious and filling meal. I’ve always loved them for their rich flavour. Whenever I make them, I try to fill them just as generously as my mother did.

Lazy Holubsti

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Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef of Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney.

When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients.

Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts. A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

Thank you for listening, reading, watching and supporting our work. We'll be back again next month with a conversation between Adam and Will Gleave, the head chef at Sargasso in Margate, who will be talking about the early days of P. Franco, the role of Australians in London and getting out of the city. We’ll see you then.

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Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Shuko Oda is the executive chef and co-founder of Koya, grew up between London, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Koya was born from a lack of – and yearning for – genuine, high-grade Japanese cuisine in London.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – we highly recommend buying a copy.

Subscribe now

The Grand Trunk (GT) Road has run through the northern part of the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Referred to as Uttarapatha – or the ‘Northern Road’ – in Vedic and Buddhist scriptures, the GT Road runs from Kabul to Teknaf (near Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar). Today, it also connects connects Wahgah on the Indian border to Torkham (which crosses into Afghanistan), and in Pakistan, the highway also unites many of the country’s chicken-burger aficionados with their favourite British fast-food chain: Chicken Cottage.

Chicken Cottage started its life in Wembley, London, in 1994. Founded by Mohammed Khalid and Tahir Jamil, the brand offers halal renditions of the grilled and fried chicken dishes that are popular in chicken shops across the UK. Pakistan-born Tahir aimed to cater to South Asian and Muslim communities in the capital, and in 2004 the brand was franchised in Pakistan (which is now one of ten countries to host the chain, alongside Nigeria, Iraq and Malaysia, among others). While a number of the franchises have shut down over the years, there are currently ten functioning Chicken Cottage outlets in Pakistan. Five of these are situated in the mountainous region of Kashmir, a disputed region divided between India and Pakistan (Islamabad refers to Pakistan-administered-Kashmir as ‘Azad’, or free).

What is a British chain that is only mildly popular in Britain itself doing in the northernmost reaches of the subcontinent? In a country where chicken is popular on menus, and burgers so entrenched in the culture that they have become a nickname for an entire generation and class, what has prompted people to flock to this specific brand? Thousands of miles from its place of origin, Chicken Cottage is now the most popular fast-food franchise in Kashmir. In July last year, I went on what I could only call a Chicken Cottage pilgrimage – travelling to the Chakswari, Kotli and Sehnsa branches – to find out more.

Chicken Cottage’s popularity has some connection to the fact that approximately 70% of those who identify as British Pakistanis come from Mirpur, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. ‘Many [British-Pakistani] travellers from the UK make sure they break their journey at Chicken Cottage. In fact, even many of our international customers eat the first meal they have after landing in Pakistan [at the chain]’, Noman Tariq, co-owner of the franchise at Jhelum (a border town between Punjab and Kashmir), tells me.

On my way to Kashmir, it is the Jhelum outlet that I stop at first. It is 8pm on a Friday in July, and the restaurant is gradually being packed with customers eating plates of burgers, fries and fried chicken; others order takeaway wraps. Inside the mammoth two-story building, the walls are decorated with large paintings of Westminster, Piccadilly Circus, and the London Eye. Outside the window there is the rush of perpetual GT Road traffic, and inside, even as the dining area is fast filling up, the atmosphere is somewhat tranquil. At the entrance of the restaurant, a board reads ‘Top brand from UK’.

This ‘British ambience’, as Tariq calls it, is an integral feature of all Chicken Cottage restaurants in Pakistan. Aasia Ishaq, the franchise owner of the Kotli branch, tells me how recipes at the Chicken Cottages in Pakistan precisely follow the guidelines from the UK: ‘Hum chaahtay hain humaaray logon ko, khaas taur pe who jo kabhi UK nahi gaye, bilkul England waala zaaiqa aur mahaul milay [We want to give all of our customers, especially those who have never been to the UK, the authentic taste and ambience from England]’. This is why there are photographs of Piccadilly Circus. ‘We want to make everyone feel as though they are there’, Ishaq adds.

In the UK, the dishes at Chicken Cottage range from BBQ wings to grilled peri peri chicken and mozzarella dippers. In addition to offering items from the original British menu, the Pakistani outlets’ offerings include ‘Crispy Cottage’, ‘Spicy Chicken’ and ‘Mountain’ burgers. They also serve renditions of local specialities such as biryani, and pizzas with toppings that include tikka, barbecue and kebab. While the pizzas are hot sellers (‘Our people like bread’, Mohammed Bilal, the manager at the Chakswari branch, tells me), it is the burgers that hold the main appeal. ‘We started to come here when I was a baby, and now I am much older and it is still my favourite restaurant’, says thirteen-year-old Zainab Waqar – whose preferred dish is the peri peri burger.

After a couple of hours, during which I eat the chicken fajita pizza, I head off across the border of Punjab to visit the branches in Kashmir. At the Chakswari branch, Bilal demonstrates the cooking process, which is identical across franchise outlets: defrosted chicken is battered with seasoning and breading, then deep-fried. While the chicken and the bread are local, much of the seasoning and condiments used in the Chicken Cottage restaurants in Pakistan are the same ones used in the UK, Bilal says. ‘Unlike in other brands, which can only do desi variations of their Western offerings, in Chicken Cottage the recipes are authentically British’, adds Raja Zaheeruddin, general manager of Chicken Cottage across Kashmir. At the same branch, I meet Imran Khan, a chef who cooks at Saracens restaurant in Nottingham. He tells me he is a big fan of the chicken at the Chicken Cottage. ‘Aey sab ton changa aey [It is the best]. I visit every summer and regularly eat Chicken Cottage here in Kashmir’, he says, his accent a combination of thick northern British and Punjabi.

While the British origin and blend of South Asian flavours remain its unique selling point, Chicken Cottage also faces an existential challenge, rooted in the colonial British legacy of South Asia. The political consequences of the British partition of the subcontinent mean that the region’s favourite fast-food joint is affected by the volatility that disrupts life in Kashmir. In the months I visited, Pakistan and India were in a ‘state of war’, their deadliest clashes in over twenty-five years, when, following an attack by suspected militants in Pahalgam (in Indian-administered-Kashmir), India arbitrarily attacked Pakistan.

Since partition, the two nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four complete wars, along with numerous other skirmishes and constant crossfire across the Line of Control that always directly affects Kashmir. Even though businesses across Pakistan suffer every time there is cross-border turbulence, Kashmiri life is especially upended, and Kashmiris face the brunt of the crossfire every time the two countries engage in warmongering. The Chicken Cottage branches in Kashmir are no exception to this. Right before the Kotli branch was to be opened in May, Indian missiles began to hit the city, and the branch’s owners faced an agonising wait over the fate of their investment in the restaurant. One of the missiles even struck close to Zaheeruddin’s apartment. The Chicken Cottage branch at Khuiratta was literally in the line of fire and had to be briefly shut down. ‘We were a bit concerned when the war started, but this is unfortunately the reality of our region,’ Ishaq says.

The staff at Chicken Cottage also detail how branches reopened a few days after the clashes. ‘Most of us had vacated the area during the war, but we returned immediately once things calmed down,’ Zaheeruddin says. ‘Aik taraf se missile aa rahay thay aur duusri taraf se customers. [As the missiles were coming our way, so were the customers.]’, he adds. Others also tell me that the days around the clashes saw a rise in footfall at their Chicken Cottage branches. Bilal expected this, and he prepared his staff about how to provide comfort to customers during wartime. ‘Visiting Chicken Cottage brought respite to many locals who were naturally stressed by the unfolding events’, he tells me. ‘We are sick of the power play [between the Indian and Pakistani governments] and the blame games. We just want a regular life, and lasting peace.’

Neither the anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, nor the fact that these borders were drawn by the place where the brand originated, appear to have a sway on the clientele that flock to the Chicken Cottages in Kashmir. Even as restaurants across Pakistan undergo financial constraints and closures due to cross-border tensions, more Chicken Cottage outlets are being opened.

Before I left on my return journey to Lahore, I suggested that the brand consider a butter chicken menu item, given the dish’s current popularity in the UK. As I took off, I could not help recall the request of Zainab’s family: ‘We miss the British hash browns they used to give with the burgers. They used to go so well with the chicken. It would be great to bring them back!’ they had said, citing yet another popular food item associated with British cuisine that did not originate in Britain.

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Credits

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is the Pakistan correspondent for The Diplomat. His work has been featured in numerous international publications, including the Guardian, the Independent, Foreign Policy, Asia Times, Haaretz, Al-Jazeera, among others. He has written and reported on food and culture for NPR, BBC, America’s Test Kitchen, Texas Monthly, the Food Section, Philadelphia Magazine, and others.

Nida Mehboob is a Lahore-based photographer and filmmaker specializing in documentary and editorial storytelling. Her work has been commissioned and supported by organizations including the Magnum Foundation, Goethe-Institut, and Berlinale Talents, with projects published and exhibited internationally. You can find more of her work here.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

We’ll never know. But for completely unrelated reasons, I now think it’s a good time to take stock of my Q4 2025/26 eating. Regular readers of this column may have spotted that I’ve been on a break since last year – the restaurant critic’s equivalent of a rest after a torn ACL – but for the last couple of months I’ve slowly been working my way back into first-team training, revisiting old favourites and ticking off some long-overdue destinations. Here are the 25 of the best things I’ve eaten in that time.

Chocolate nemesis at The River Café Café

Everyone seems to have their own River Café hack to reduce the cost of a meal there, from ordering half portions of pasta to getting someone else to pay for you. My own hack is to just walk 20 metres past the main dining room and go to the Café Café. Ice creams are half the price of the restaurant. The cakes and tarts are around £10, which is about what it costs from any south London bakery these days. They are also the same desserts as the main restaurant: Ruthie Rogers is not baking two different nemeses a day for the VIPs. As Warhol said: all the nemeses are the same and all the nemeses are good. The President knows it, Wyclef Jean knows it, and you know it.

Embarrassingly, I had never actually tasted the nemesis until it was brought home to me, half squashed, in a takeaway container. What I didn’t quite realise until I had it is how shockingly acidic it is, from the dark chocolate in the cake to the lactic tang of the crème fraîche. The texture – more mousse than cake – is kind of miraculous. That you can now eat it like this has turned it from one of the least accessible of London’s legendary dishes to the most.

Seekh kebab at Raavi Kebab

I go through cycles of British Library-adjacent lunches, and these days it’s Raavi, which is my favourite of all the South Asian restaurants on Drummond Street. There will usually be a man in the window supervising a small, robata-sized grill, and if he’s there he will almost certainly be tending to a portion of seekh kebabs – three chubby, malformed mince kebabs that have blistered and blackened from the heat (please see the photo, it says more than my words can.) I do think good seekh kebabs are something of a lost art in London, with common crimes being heavy spicing, overworked meat and careless cooking - none of which apply here. This, a portion of dun-green saag, a ghee-slicked naan and all the fixings are a perfect quick lunch.

Red mullet at Oyster Shack & Seafood Bar

A month ago, I went on one of those perfect spring walks from Theydon Bois – where I was accosted by the local Reform candidate, who, with a hopeful twinkle in his eye, persuasively told me ‘We’ve got Suella, we’ve got Yusuf’ – through the wildness of Epping Forest and then down to Gina’s in Chingford (more on this later). In the middle, I stopped by at Oyster Shack & Seafood Bar, where the queue was about an hour long.

In the last few years, Oyster Shack has become the mainstay of hidden gem reels, but we shouldn’t hold this against it: it is genuinely brilliant, far better than it needs to be, particularly if you order well. The family that runs the shack are proper seafood people, and you’ll know if you make a good order because they’ll comment on it. Avoid any of the deep-fried frozen seafood (and also the bacon and scallop sandwich, which is nice but not really what you should be here for) and just go for whatever specials they have on: red mullet (‘lovely fish’), fat scallops swimming in spiced butter, razor clams, tranches of monkfish or whole turbot. The red mullet, perfectly cooked, with samphire, was not much higher than the price you’d get it for at a fishmonger.

Salt and pepper prawns at 148

I have a huge soft spot for 148, a Chinese restaurant and takeaway on Lordship Lane (Dulwich, not Wood Green). For one, it was the original location of Nico Ladenis’s Chez Nico, and therefore an important address in London food history. I also like that it does delivery in-house, and you must resort to the old ways: phoning up, placing an order, paying an old guy with a car cash in hand at the door. Everything here is good, but the salt and pepper dishes, with power chords of MSG, white pepper, chilli and garlic, are paragons of the form.

After the paywall: Honduran baleadas in Peckham, Iranian kebabs in Dulwich, Hunanese food in King’s Cross, Chinatown’s best noodles, my favourite London burgers and fish and chips, and recommendations across Hounslow, Nunhead, Clapton, Sydenham and more.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles. In today’s newsletter, Nisreen Fox talks to Fadi Kattan and Sara-Asad Mannings about working in hospitality during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the responsibilities of representation while running Palestinian food businesses in London. You can read Nisreen’s intro and the interviews below.

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In October 2023, Israel began carpet-bombing Gaza, beginning one of the largest genocides of the twenty-first century. Since then, Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank have faced starvation, torture, forced displacement and access to little humanitarian aid. For decades now – since before the Nakba in 1948 – Palestinians have experienced massacres, displacement and suffering. What we see in the news, and on our social media, does not encompass the entirety of the atrocities that have and are still taking place, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon, across the SWANA region and, more recently, in the US-led bombings of Iran.

Being the child of the Palestinian diaspora raised in Lebanon, I have experienced the inherent struggle in my family – and in my sense of self – as we grapple with these times. In the UK, Palestinians, Muslims, people of colour and migrants are facing increasing hostility which is upending their day-to-day lives while far-right anti-immigration protests have also been on the rise, with a Unite the Kingdom march in London only last week. All this has affected Palestinian, Arab and Muslim-owned food establishments in the UK. These establishments are part of Britain’s daily life and culture, but over the years I have thought about how Palestinians in hospitality may be working through increasing hostility and pain.

Last year, I spoke to Fadi Kattan of Akub and Sara Assad-Mannings of Bunhead Bakery. In these interviews, Fadi and Sara tell me about the burden and responsibility of representation during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and how a food establishment can start to stand in for something more. Nisreen Fox

‘There’s injustice in Palestine that needs to be repaired, that’s the priority. We’re not going to make peace around a hummus plate.’

A conversation between Nisreen Fox and Fadi Kattan of Akub.

Note: This interview was conducted in August 2025

Nisreen Fox: Hi Fadi. How are you today? Can you tell me a bit about how you found yourself in the food business?

Fadi Kattan: I am Palestinian, born and raised in Bethlehem. I always loved food. I learned how to cook in my grandmother’s kitchen. My mother is an ongoing inspiration every day – I call her often when I am in Akub to ask for advice.

In the nineties, I worked in restaurants in Paris, then in London, after which I moved back to Palestine in 2000, where I started for the first few months working in a hotel. Then the hotel closed down during the Second Intifada, but I stayed in Palestine and joined my family business. In 2003, I organised the first Palestinian cooking competition, just at the end of the Second Intifada, and I saw that a lot of Palestinian chefs had been trained in the idea that only cooking non-Palestinian food was a sign of quality cooking. In France, there was a strong sense of the ‘local’, and I thought about why we weren’t doing this in Palestine.

Nisreen Fox: And why do you think that was?

Fadi Kattan: Our Palestinian kitchen is being erased by the occupation, it’s being appropriated, it’s being stolen. Plantations are continuously being destroyed by Israel. It took me the best part of fifteen years to figure out how to take the beautiful Palestinian food being cooked at home into the restaurant kitchen. In 2016, I opened the restaurant ‘Fawda’ in Bethlehem. I decided: I will not have a menu and [will] cook whatever is in the souk that day, and I will only have Palestinian wines [Fadi now co-runs Nabeeth, along with Anna Patrowicz, that brings Palestinian wines to a global clientele]. It worked well. Now, being able to cook Palestinian food in the West, what I really dream of is to be able to normalise Palestinian food. I want Palestinian food to be like Italian food, or Chinese food. That should be how it is. There is an exceptionalism imposed on nations that were colonised.

Nisreen Fox: Got it. And how does that kind of thing transpire in London today? Are people ready to be part of the conversation?

Fadi Kattan: Nisreen, if I were European, or only French, you wouldn’t be asking me this in an interview.

Nisreen Fox: You’re right.

Fadi Kattan: So that’s the point, precisely. Switzerland is just a boring place in the middle of nowhere, but they have fantastic food and wines. If a Swiss chef up in the Alps was doing a fantastic fondue in Gruyères, he wouldn’t have to justify anything. In the last seventy-seven years, what we have seen with food appropriation is – first, the colonisers were looking down at our food, then they were finding it exotic and attractive, then they simply stole some dishes. In parallel, there was the theft of the land and the produce, to shape the narrative that gives legitimacy to the occupation by linking food to the land.

Nisreen Fox: I find it interesting that you say, ‘We want to have it be the same as anywhere else’ instead of wanting to ‘represent’ Palestinian food. I guess what I’m asking is – how do we get to that point of normalising it? Having Palestinian food be just food?

Fadi Kattan: Well, first, we get rid of the dogmatic idea that we all need to be cooking ‘authentic Palestinian food’. I hate the word ‘authentic.’ I also hate ‘Levantine’, ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ because they are rubbish. But, authentic. What is authentic? For me, authentic is what my mother cooks. For my next-door neighbour, it may be the same recipe cooked differently. If you’re Palestinian originally and you were born in the UK and your parents were born in the UK, does it make you less Palestinian? No, it doesn’t. If you eat fish and chips, then add hummus, you’re still Palestinian. We shouldn’t be judgmental of this, because then what happens is we are falling into the coloniser’s orientalist trap.

When I hear people say, ‘Oh, but Palestine is a land of farmers’, I take a deep breath to not get upset, because Jericho is the oldest inhabited city in the world. No, we are not only farmers: yes we are farmers, yes we are cosmopolitan, yes we are diverse, yes the old city of Jerusalem has a Gypsy community, two African communities – one made out of Christian pilgrims and one made out of Muslim pilgrims. We have Sufi zawiyas that come from Tashkent and Bukhara. That is Palestine. We shouldn’t be tiptoeing away from that. Are we sixteen million people who have to agree on the recipe of falafel? La, I’m sure there are sixteen million different recipes of falafel.

But also, crucially, we need to reclaim what is being appropriated. We need to work towards more and more people’s awareness of what comes from where. It doesn’t mean others can’t cook it – I want everybody to cook Palestinian food. But they need to acknowledge Palestinian origin, especially today.

Nisreen Fox: And how do you see Palestinian food’s presence in the UK’s restaurant industry today?

Fadi Kattan: In the UK today, we see a lot of Israeli chefs who are being portrayed as cool Israeli chefs, but in reality, they are cooking Palestinian food. So – can you just acknowledge that this is Palestinian food? Say that batinjan battiri is from Battir and say that musakhan is Palestinian – don’t call it a national Israeli dish. Shakshuka is Tunisian, but then all of a sudden it is made Israeli? How? There are Israelis that come originally from Arab countries, including Palestine, and hummus is part of their cultural heritage, but it doesn’t make it Israeli.

Also, I don’t like it when people tell me that I, as a chef, am ‘preserving Palestinian food’. I’m not. It’s a cuisine that is alive, it’s alive in the diaspora, in Palestine, and it’s alive in Gaza also. Gaza is part of Palestine: it’s not a separate entity. Of course, I’m no fan of what I call ‘coexistence cooking’ because I think it’s bullshit. Like, we’re not going to make peace around a hummus plate.

Nisreen Fox: (Laughs.) Do you feel like we carry the responsibility of having to shine a light on the multiple aspects of Palestinian life? Do you feel like your restaurant, and cookbook Bethlehem, have the effect of introducing people to a broader perception of Palestine?

Fadi Kattan: I keep telling people: You know what a restaurant is about? Doing good food, serving good drinks and keeping our bathrooms clean. That’s what I should be doing – it shouldn’t be beyond this.

How many people go on holidays to Tuscany to learn how to make pasta? Why shouldn’t we see this with Palestine? Why shouldn’t we see beyond the horror of genocide and extermination and erasure? That energy and light are what also contrast the occupation’s darkness.

I have no pretence whatsoever to teach people, but I do think I have the luck with either the food that we do at Akub, [and] also with my book Bethlehem, to have people then ask themselves questions. And, for me, that’s good enough. However, in the time of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s been exacerbating a lot of this moralising posture or pressure on Palestinians, where we also have to be very careful with what we say.

Nisreen Fox: I feel like, especially since the genocide started, I’ve gotten a lot more work just for being Palestinian. I live in Brighton, and a lot of people will say, ‘Let’s go and support all the Palestinian businesses,’ whether they even think the produce is good or not. How do you feel about this wave of thinking?

Fadi Kattan: If somebody walks into a restaurant that is Palestinian or buys Palestinian olive oil online because they feel it should be part of what they can do to support Palestine, then OK. But, as Palestinians providing a service, we have to remember those parameters and be very humble with it. When I talk about Palestinian wine, it’s not just because it’s Palestinian, it’s actually because it’s very good wine. As for the olive oil we source – I know the farmers, and it’s very good olive oil. The sea salt we use comes from a family that is the last Palestinian family on the shores of the Dead Sea. I personally think it’s the best raw salt in the world. Our cooking and food production techniques come from a heritage that has been around for a long time, from processes that have always been practised by the people of the land. So, don’t buy from us because you feel bad for us – buy Palestinian produce because it is fantastic.

But that said, the reality is that there are hundreds of people being killed every day in Gaza, and across Palestine. When my book came out, it was shortly after the start of Israel’s genocide, but I had written it and it had gone to print before the genocide began. I was very confused about whether it was the right time or not. If I’m being honest, I’ll say that I know that there is a part of the sales because there’s a genocide happening.

I think that [for] every Palestinian – whatever our life journey is – if we can tell the story through our link to the land, our link to those recipes, our link to the transmission of how we cook, then it challenges that narrative of occupation. But do we have to self-flagellate for being Palestinian? I don’t think so. I think it goes both directions, this idea of being Palestinian, being a voice for Palestine and at the same time it’s important to have that balance and that humility. Here at Akub, we have a team of twenty-six people, from nineteen different nationalities. And they all serve Palestinian food.

Nisreen Fox: To end, do you think there is any kind of priority for us when it comes to Palestinian food in the UK today?

Fadi Kattan: There’s injustice in Palestine that needs to be addressed and repaired: that’s the priority. Once that’s done, maybe we could do hummus together.

‘It feels there is this pressure that looms to prove that we are deserving of life’

A conversation between Nisreen Fox and Sara-Asad Mannings of Bunhead Bakery.

This interview was conducted in August 2025

Nisreen Fox: So, tell me about how you started Bunhead Bakery?

Sara Asad-Mannings: I have worked a little in some professional kitchens, but not really worked in food before. Even so, I’ve always cooked, I’ve always baked. In 2020, during the pandemic, I made some buns and dropped them off at my sister’s house, and she suggested I should start selling them. I just went, OK! I guess I’ll start selling them. When I first started the bakery, I wanted to show a representation of all the parts of my life. I had a bun that represented my British side (lemon drizzle), I had one bun that represented my Palestinian side (rose and cardamom,) and a bun that represented my step-mum being from New Zealand (milo).

Nisreen Fox: I live in Brighton, and we have maybe a few outwardly Palestinian businesses in the city. I feel there is definitely a gap throughout the country. Did this drive you when you started?

Sara Asad-Mannings: Being Palestinian, I’ve always felt passionately about having spaces that truly represent us. When I was growing up, some places would say they were ‘Lebanese’ but then you’d talk to the owners and find out that they [were] Palestinian. But there was nowhere that I remember that was Palestinian and proud, so it was a very conscious decision for us to have ‘Palestinian’ on the shopfront. It also speaks to when I was growing up and people would ask me where I’m from, I’d respond saying Palestinian, and they’d either say, ‘Oh, you’re Israeli’ or ‘It doesn’t exist’. Palestinians have been forced to grow up in so many places, with London being one of them. It means our expressions of identity are so varied, so it’s important we are represented within the diasporas that have raised us.

Nisreen Fox: I often feel like I have to be the token ‘good Palestinian’. As your bakery is part of the hospitality business, do you feel pressure as a business to be a positive force in the community?

Sara Asad-Mannings: I think so. Part of the motivation with Bunhead is to present a joyful Palestinian narrative. But, I do feel a pressure to always be doing the right thing. I remember when we first opened, we had just done our first round of fundraising, and made T-shirts that had the watermelon, the bun and the keffiyeh. We posted a picture of me holding it up, saying, You can come and collect them. Someone commented on the picture saying – I’m not going to get this exactly correct, but something along the lines of, ‘You have these T-shirts, but you don’t even have one Palestinian flag up in your shop, it stinks of capitalising [on the conflict] to me.’ And I commented back, saying, ‘As the Palestinian who owns this business, what you’re saying is deeply offensive. You’re welcome to come into the bakery and see lots of pictures that my dad took in Palestine. Hope to see you soon.’

But, I do think it’s a slightly problematic narrative to push solely onto Palestinian businesses that it is our duty to raise funds. In some respects, I do agree, there is a responsibility that comes with representing our community which I don’t take lightly, but I also think that we are deserving of our success. Both things can and should exist at the same time. I do imagine it comes from a good place and people’s sensitivities are higher right now, rightly so. But for many people, it has been three years of witnessing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank – for us, this has been our whole lives.

Nisreen Fox: Right. And have there been any issues – which you are comfortable sharing – that have arisen due to having ‘Palestinian’ on the front?

Sara Asad-Mannings: Obviously, when we opened, I was expecting have a lot of pushbacks from Zionists and Israelis, but actually, some of the most uncomfortable situations that we have had are people trying to catch us out. The question that really just goes straight to my heart is: ‘So, what’s the connection to the Middle East here?’ or ‘What’s the connection to Palestine?’ and then someone or myself will answer that I am Palestinian, and they’ll go, ‘Oh, really?’ or, ‘Well, I never had any buns while I was in Palestine.’

I think a big motivator for me was to come into the scene and be known as a Palestinian business, saying who we are from the very beginning. To be able to achieve some form of popularity or success whilst being Palestinian felt like a big achievement. But it’s a difficult line to toe. We put in the offer for the shop in September 2023, so this has all happened alongside the genocide. It’s not lost on me that part of [our] success probably comes from that. This is painful, but it’s also more reason than ever to be loud about who we are, and make our mark.

Nisreen Fox: It’s like survivor’s guilt in a way. I don’t want to be exploitative, either, but it’s nice to hear that people other than myself are struggling with that. I feel like I see a lot of criticism against Palestinians or Lebanese people, saying that they are profiting off their own culture because they know it is ‘popular’ right now. But people who are not Palestinian have been profiting for a long time.

Sara Asad-Mannings: I guess there is pressure to share our culture, our food, something that isn’t scary to the world. So maybe, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that. There is a part of me that just wants to show people that Palestinians and Arabs are just people. But it feels [like] there is this pressure that looms to prove that we are deserving of life.

Nisreen Fox: Let’s talk about some positive experiences. Could you share any stories about how your customers or supporters have come together for your business during these challenging times?

Sara Asad-Mannings: There are the small things – like we do a strawberry sumac bun and a syrup with our matcha, and it’s just like, flown off. When people come in to ask what sumac is, I get to see my front-of-house staff (who are not Palestinian) explain it. It’s so great knowing that we are sharing ingredients and dishes with people who will then go away and know that they are Palestinian. On a personal level, just people who have come from Gaza, and they take pictures of the shop, pictures with me … and it’s just … very emotional.

I always think of this moment, where I was at the table working, and these kids came into the shop with their dad. He said, ‘My kids are half Palestinian’, and the kids were looking really happy – they were also looking right at me. I replied with, ‘Me too’.

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Credits

Nisreen Fox (@nissfox) is a social justice journalist who specialises in marginalised communities that mean something to them. Growing up as a Palestinian in the West is a ever difficult struggle with identity, and she uses her journalism to seek out familiarity with community.

Sara Asad-Mannings is the co-owner of Bunhead Bakery, alongside Georgia Wickremeratne.

Fadi Kattan is a Franco-Palestinian chef, the author of Bethlehem, and the co-founder of London restaurant Akub, and Nabeeth Wines.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s article, Emily Kenway asks why we feed our pets the way we do, encompassing everything from Victorian ‘cats-meat sellers’ to the current vogue for foods that reconnect cats and dogs with their wild roots. It’s an ideal bank-holiday read.

If you haven’t picked one up already, our second print issue on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ is still available. We highly recommend buying a copy.

Finally, we have already sold through 70% of the initial print run of Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London, which we announced last week. You can pre-order a copy here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

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It began as a joke. At half-eight in the morning, as the kettle was boiling, I retrieved a tin from the cupboard. ‘Beef today,’ I announced to my partner, spooning out slick flushed meat for our cat, Bear.

‘Very ancestral,’ he replied, pointing to the flyer that came in the subscription box from Untamed, which proclaimed the food the best for our ‘little predator’: human-grade, grain-free real meat. ‘But shouldn’t it be mouse or sparrow?’ Though Bear is gloriously strong and agile, he is unlikely to take down a cow in the wild.

As we laughed over ideas for more appropriate flavours – plump little wrens stuffed into pouches, mouse pâté, sparrow soup – I realised that I had never really questioned my choice of ‘ancestral’ food for Bear. Nor had I thought about the rise of a host of other brands, such as KatKin, Butternut Box and Blink, all similarly marketed on the basis of being ‘real’ food and linked to pets’ alleged wildness and animal natures. These premium food brands are taking an increasing share of the pet food market, but why are owners like me choosing them? And why, more broadly, do we feed our pets the way we do?

Part of the answer to this question is obvious: we feed dogs and cats with chicken, beef and fish because we farm and eat those meats ourselves. If the same were true of sparrows and mice, we would likely give those to our pets too. Historically, British pets ate rabbit and horse because we used those animals more, and a friend in Australia feeds kangaroo meat to her cat (which, she assures me, is perfectly normal fare for both humans and pets).

But that’s not the whole explanation. As historian Mary Elizabeth Thurston writes in The Lost History of the Canine Race, what we feed our pets ‘constitutes a kind of diary’ that documents the evolving nature of human–animal relations over time. And because our pets mostly lack gustatory autonomy – that is, because we, not they, decide what they eat – the choices we make on their behalf tell us about ourselves, too.

When we got Bear in 2023, we fed him run-of-the-mill supermarket cat food. Back then, I didn’t think much about these dubious brown slivers in equally dubious gravy. But, in April 2025, he was hit by a car. After two jaw reconstructions, a tail amputation and a period of being fed via an oesophageal tube, we wanted only the best for him and his tastebuds. By that time, the idea of healthier pet food had already been implanted in my mind by a steady stream of Instagram adverts (featuring peppy influencers explaining how their animals preferred these premium, unprocessed alternatives). These products are driving the global pet food market, which is projected to grow by over $100 billion in the next decade alone. I signed up to Untamed, becoming part of the growing anti-UPF movement – but for pets.

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‘I just want to give them the best,’ Mhairi – who owns two terriers, Toffee and Dexter, in Glasgow – tells me. For a while she made their food herself (stews of beef or chicken with rice and vegetables, a kind of slop-ified Sunday lunch), but now she opts for Butternut Box, which commits to being ‘cooked like you would at home’ and promises ‘human-quality’ food – that is, food that comes from the same supply chains as our own (rather than byproducts not fit for human consumption, which tend to be used in cheaper pet food). My cat-obsessed friend Alison, in Bradford, chose to go with Untamed like me. She tells me how happy she is when she opens the cans and sees recognisable strips of tender chicken or whole shrimp. ‘We could eat it ourselves in an apocalypse,’ she suggests.

These unprocessed pet foods can be understood as successors of the paleo diet trend, in which twenty-first century humans shunned grains and processed foods to mimic pre-agricultural practices – think lots of meat (sometimes raw) and moving boulders around in the great outdoors. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and where this concept transferred to pet food; various men claim paternity. These include Dr Ian Billinghurst, who created the Biologically Available Raw Food diet for dogs (BARF for short), and Will Post, a former US marine who claims to have launched the first paleo pet food in 2010 and believes that, when it comes to feeding our pets, ‘we need to go back to our ancestral roots’. After all, ‘Hollywood has really bragged about their Paleo Diets so why not our pets?’

While the language used has shifted, with ‘ancestral’ and ‘wild’ now preferred over ‘paleo’ by premium pet foods, the underpinning ethos remains broadly the same: pets are direct descendants of wild animals and should be treated as such. Indeed, if you spend enough time reading the websites of companies like these, you’ll encounter the idea that such diets are more authentic because dogs share 98% of their DNA with wolves, while house cats are 95% genetically similar to wildcats like lions and tigers. These DNA claims are ostensibly true, but essentially meaningless: according to one metric, humans can be described as 96% genetically identical to chimpanzees and 60% identical to bananas. Despite this, ‘super-premium’ pet foods are driving growth in the sector, with the most extreme end of this vanguard – raw food – forecast to double from its current market size by 2035.

This is a far cry from historical Western pet feeding practices. Before the twentieth century, dogs and cats were generally viewed as workers, strays or pests, and their menu was less considered (and less expensive) as a result. Dogs were fed table scraps, while cats were regarded as scavengers and left to hunt birds, mice and insects. In the UK, for felines whose owners had a little more income, horsemeat was the dish du jour, proffered by ‘cats-meat sellers’ – street hawkers who bought (and then boiled) maimed or elderly horses that could no longer be used for transport. One contemporary account describes cats rushing ‘frantically to the door’ when the cats’-meat seller appeared, then ‘running mewing toward him rubbing against his legs’.

Then, in the mid-1800s, an American lightning-rod salesman named James Spratt arrived at Liverpool docks. While disembarking his ship, he noticed dogs eating discarded hardtack (sailors’ biscuits). An idea struck him – and commercial kibble (or, in the words of his company’s advertisement, ‘Meat ‘Fibrine’ Vegetable Dog Cakes’) was born. These baked biscuits were made from 35% meat (animal not specified), beetroot, oatmeal and ‘other ingredients’. Spratt opened factories in London and New York in the late 1880s, and would go on to dominate the new pet food industry for decades to come.

His invention came as attitudes to domestic animals were changing. Whereas previously dogs and cats had been considered either working animals or problems, the Victorians began to view them as luxury items – and family members. Animals were groomed and trained to behave in ways that mimicked ideals of human decorum. Food was an important part of this discipline: according to Thurston, fresh meat was considered to ‘overexcite’ dogs and lead to ‘disgraceful bouts of nymphomania’. The dry, bloodless biscuits offered by Spratt, and others like him in the incipient pet food industry, were the perfect replacement for such hazardous victuals.

But the old ways remained: some people continued to feed pets with scraps and, surprisingly, cats-meat men existed into the early twentieth century. To oust these practices more fully, the commercial pet food sector used two tactics. First, it promoted the convenience of commercial pet food (aided by the advent of canned meats, which could be served alongside kibble). Second, it repositioned itself as the expert in animal nutrition – something with which scraps and sellers of horsemeat could not compete – and emphasised the risk of getting things wrong.

‘Now! A dog food with poly-unsaturates added!’ declared a 1962 Ken-L Ration advert, which also asserted that this ingredient (healthy fats) would enable pet dogs to lead unspecified ‘better’ lives. Businesses diversified into new pet food sub-sectors with discrete nutritional requirements, exemplified by Purina’s 1960s introduction of puppy food, which included the claim that it was ‘as carefully balanced as a baby’s formula’. The strategy worked: there are now several generations of people who would struggle to imagine a time before commercial pet food was the normal way to feed our animals.

But while much has changed, one thing has remained the same: the Victorian fear of pets’ animal natures. In 1974, market research conducted for Fidomeat (refrigerated ‘meat-brawn’) warned that food slogans focusing on energy and liveliness were disliked by pet owners. Likewise, the words ‘chase’ and ‘fetch’ were rejected by participants because they caused anxiety about ‘loss of control’. On the surface, this seems very different to today: the brand I feed Bear is literally called Untamed. After his accident and his months-long recovery, I wanted him to be as rambunctious as possible, even if it meant furniture was scratched and pot plants upturned. Similarly, Mhairi wants her terriers to be full of vitality and personality, not docile or mimicking genteel human behaviour. We don’t want our savage sidekicks to eat unnatural lab-concocted food and behave like ladies and gentlemen; we want real meat and real animal energy.

And yet when Alison’s cat had a meal of mouse on her bedroom floor, she texted me hysterically: ‘There’s a leg by my laundry basket!’ We might want our pets to eat ancestrally, but contemporarily that means something different to blood and bones. Our pets are predators who eat from cans and plastic pouches. Their food may be free from fillers and by-products, but it remains infused with commerce-driven nutritional notions too. It’s increasingly common for prebiotics, probiotics, glucosamine (for joints) and omega fatty acids (for fur coats) to be added to pet food, ostensibly to extend longevity, mirroring the growing human supplement market – not so natural after all. Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in relation to sex. It’s not a coincidence that this era of pet diets came after spaying and neutering became widespread – the marketing spiel focuses on wild ways, but you won’t find a single pet food company talking about libido or virility. Our animals might be little beasts again, but they must remain eunuchs.

In an era of polycrisis, this dualism makes sense. We live on the knife-edge of advanced capitalism, mired in its complexity and destructiveness. Alison’s observation that we could eat human-grade pet food in an apocalypse feels less like a joke and more like a premonition. For acolytes of the paleo ethos (and its offshoots, like these ancestral pet foods), pre-history seems to provide a calmer, simpler mode. But, just as finding joy in cosplaying people who are compelled to hunt and scavenge is conditional on the comforts of contemporary life, our pets are permitted their ‘wild’ natures only because we have domesticated them.

The irony of this seems to be lost on the premium pet food industry, with all its talk of predators and wildness. Or perhaps it’s not that the irony is lost, but rather that it’s carefully avoided. By feeding pets as if they were still wild, we conjure an intimacy with nature that has been forgotten, for them and for ourselves, too. They might be domesticated, and we might be enslaved to capitalism and technology and all the other ills of the twenty-first century, but a small part of us still believes in a shared and deeper wildness, captured in that brief moment when we decant ancestral meat mush for our sexless little carnivores.

Credits

Emily Kenway is a writer and sociologist based in Edinburgh. Her most recent book, Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Hachette, 2023), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants.

Today’s newsletter heads east with our third central London lunch guide, which covers the City of London, Liverpool Street, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Aldgate and bits of Whitechapel. As with our Oxford Circus and Farringdon 99s, this information is not intended as a destination dining guide. A lunch, for many people, is about speed, survival and the small wins you can achieve in the hour (or, more likely, the half hour) you have to turn a sad desk meal into something more fulfilling. For this guide, we needed someone who knows the area with an intimacy you can only gain from working there, so we’re delighted to hand you over to Shekha Vyas.

To view the whole guide and map, you can subscribe to Vittles below for £7 a month or £59 for the year, which gives you full access to the back catalogue of features, essays, recipes, reviews and restaurant guides — including our other two guides to lunch in central London (links below).

99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Shoreditch (That Aren’t Pret)

I’ve spent the better part of two decades eating around this area, through studying, various jobs and the general chaos of trying to exist in London. Even so, putting this guide together has taken months of revisiting and re-evaluating from the contributors, accounting for consistency over time as well as the constant churn of closures and new openings. What remains is a set of personal favourites that have held up, and that each of us has found ourselves returning to, often without much thought. After a while, you don’t just find a decent lunch, you find your lunch – the place that seems to understand exactly what you need at 1.17 pm on a Tuesday.

What follows is a highly subjective map of those places. Expect some of the best noodles, sandwiches and pizza in the capital, alongside Georgian khachapuri, Bengali curries and Japanese lunch sets. A decent lunch is easy enough to find. Your lunch is harder. Hopefully, this helps. SV

You can read our other lunch guides below:

Contributors:

SV – Shekha Vyas, JN – Jonathan Nunn, GCl – Gavin Cleaver, GC – Guan Chua, AC – Adam Coghlan, AH – Angela Hui, EZ – Elaine Zhao, MA – MiMi Aye, MA-C – Montague Ashley-Craig, JH – Joel Hart, RA – Riana Austin, BB – Barclay Bram, TMS – Tomé Morrissy-Swan.

St Paul’s and Bank

Porterford Butchers
A superb view of St. Paul’s will keep you occupied in the winding queue for this butcher’s shop’s lunchtime baguette queue, which showcases a frankly incredible amount of meat, often literally shovelled from the oven into the display cases. The pepper steak is the prime mover, but everything here is a) good and b) will require a post-lunch lie-down. GCl 72 Watling St, EC4M 9EB

Deli Box
Still open, in defiance of One New Change and the chains all around it, and still bashing out the cheapest katsu curry in central. Is it life-changing? No. Is it good for £6.50? Absolutely. And charming to boot. GCl 126 Cheapside, EC2V 6BT

Urban Food Court
Appalling name for what is actually a restaurant, albeit one that would have been difficult to name anyway, given its apparent goal of incorporating every cuisine on earth. While this lunch might give you the option of ordering spaghetti, dim sum and a burger at the same time, you should skip all that and just get the pad kra pao. GCl 28 Watling St, EC4M 9BR

Rustichino
Woefully overlooked by local lunch-eaters, I’ve been getting lunch at this Italian café for almost a decade, and it absolutely slaps. People might be put off by the very loud Phil Collins tunes blaring out of the stereo, but that’s just on so it’s less obvious that all the staff are constantly shouting at each other. The salt beef is great, but you can barely go wrong with any filling here. GCl Foster Lane, EC2V 6HH

Rosslyn Coffee
I was quite indifferent to coffee until Rosslyn opened outside my work. Now, probably the main reason I go into the office is to get a flat white from the London Wall outpost. On a sunny day, as a treat, you can get an affogato from a couple of its outlets, and the ice cream is treated exactly like the coffee – with the extreme seriousness it deserves. Superb. GCl 118 London Wall, EC2Y 5JA

Koya City
The Bloomberg Arcade location of Koya channels the quiet, intimate feel of Shuko Oda and John Devitt’s original Soho site. Udon and dashi are made fresh in-house every day, and the menu lets you customise your noodles and broth temperature, depending on mood and weather. The plain kake udon is one of the best-value lunches in the area at £5.40 for a half bowl, though I have a soft spot for the buta kasu-miso, where thin, creamy slices of pork sit in a deeply umami broth sharpened with fermented miso lees. SV 10-12 Bloomberg Arcade, EC4N 8AR

Traditional Pure
A very chaotic spot by Mansion House tube, Traditional Pure is staffed by one man with a huge salad bar and a lot of stickers, and one woman who is seemingly tasked with doing every single bit of cooking and assembly as the orders fly in around her. The genre-defying menu veers from jerk chicken to a doner kebab, but the Persian kofte with mint and yoghurt is a real winner. The queue can really build up, so it’s best to go early. GCl 51 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4SG

Stem & Stem
More of a business lunch spot, this will especially work if your lunch guest really likes flowers, as the restaurant is inexplicably also a florist. Nevertheless, the food, entirely UK sourced and cooked by the well-travelled Ed Boarland, is really quite excellent, and for now, while the place is relatively new, you can regularly get a table at lunch. GCl 12 Bow Lane, EC4M 9AL

Assenheims
Lebanese Grill, but for people who know about high-yield bonds. JN 25 Wormwood St, EC2M 1RP, 55 Ludgate Hill, EC4M 7JW, 63 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4UA

Sweetings
The City is a place for lunch restaurants, and Sweetings is the queen of them (and doesn’t even bother opening for dinner). There’s floppy, buttered brown bread as standard, which I usually augment with an order of fried whitebait, then a piece of grilled white fish if I’m feeling light, or a bubbling fish pie with steamed greens if I want something heavier. The best thing on the menu is a truly outstanding steamed syrup sponge pudding with the tang of suet, which you can order with a trio of cream, custard and ice cream if you ask nicely. JN 39 Queen Victoria St, EC4N 4SF

Barbican and Old Street

Whitecross Street Market
Actual chaos in the shape of the busiest lunch food market you’ve ever seen, as every office worker within a mile descends onto the small street outside a Waitrose. Based around the back of the Barbican, there are some very decent options here for lunch, but I’m a particular fan of Bibento (Korean/Japanese) and Karuna (Indian). GCl Whitecross St, EC1Y 8JL

Bap Foods
This Korean spot with a tiny menu will sell you a good-to-great bibimibap and some decent KFC for a reasonable price. If you don’t get the fried egg and homemade kimchi on top of your meal, you have entirely lost your way. GCl 52 Old St, EC1V 9AJ

Jiak
This ruthlessly efficient hole-in-the-wall Malaysian spot, positioned tactically close to the Barbican, does four things: a laksa, a rendang, a Hainanese chicken and usually something else vegan, which I’ve never ordered. Because of scarcity alone, I usually get the Hainanese chicken and scarf it out on a table or eat it in the covered area outside the Waitrose. A lifesaver if you’re nearby. JN 2c Whitecross St, EC1Y 8NX

Fish Central
A rare chippy that functions both as a neighbourhood spot that you would go to every week if you lived nearby, and a destination. Owned by Cypriot George Hussein, the fish and chips here is the highest expression of the London style, with blond chips and excellent fish. Eating in can be huge fun, but one of London’s great pleasures is to take the package outside, unwrap it like a Christmas present and eat the steaming chips while standing (or sitting) on the concrete. JN 149-155 Central St, EC1V 8AP

Dodam Korea
After experiencing the heat of the sauna at Ironmonger Row Baths nearby, I tend to keep it light with barley tea and either seaweed and oat porridge or its £10 lunch special of marinated tofu, black rice and banchan (side dishes) at Dodam Korea. In the evenings, it’s fun to go as a group and put the menu to work: vegetarian-adapted hotpot with tteokbokki, ramyeon, boiled egg, dumplings and gimmari, ugeoji-tang (hangover soup) of beef and preserved cabbage or four different versions of volcano fried rice. RA 131-133 Central St, EC1V 8AP

Devi Dhaba
This Rajasthani cafe used to be opposite Fish Central near the Barbican but moved to Old Street a few years ago, where it serves the type of ‘rice and three’ – rice plus three curries of your choice – that you often get in Manchester. The curries here are excellent, although I usually always try to get the lamb meatballs; one, because no one else does them and two, because I have never knowingly turned down a meatball. JN 39 Scrutton St, EC2A 4HU

Kennedy’s Barbican
A reliable chippy in the Square Mile to scratch that fish and chips itch. The cod and haddock are both decent – the batter is light and crunchy, the fresh fish still moist and flaky from a precise fry. Terrific tartare sauce, too. The lunchtime deal on fish and chips provides added incentive. GC 169 Whitecross St, EC1Y 8JT

Monohon Ramen
Thankfully, London lost its appetite for ramen restaurants – and the associated nerdery that comes with them – some time ago, but Monohon is one of the few that I still rate. The shouyu tonkotsu has the umami espresso intensity you want from tonkotsu, but none of the sickening feeling that you can sometimes get from ingesting a bowl of liquid fat. JN 102 Old St, EC1V 9AY

Banh Mi and Son
Banh Mi and Son’s owner Thomas Han, who takes his van to the market on Clifton Street during the week, previously worked as a chef for Alexis Gauthier in Soho and clearly knows about flavour and texture. Bánh mì here comes with pork striploin (two steaks, the portions are generous), heavily marinated in lemongrass with a healthy spread of duck pâté, or Chinese barbecue pork ribeye well scented by five-spice. All come with sriracha, pickled cucumber, carrot and coriander. ‘Salt, sugar, fat and gluten all included,” announces Han’s van. His jokes are killer, his bánh mi are even better. TMS

61 Clifton St, EC2A 2EA

Shoreditch and Liverpool Street

Dumbo
This Paris import arrived with a bucketload of hype, which at this point: shrug emoji. Now I know folks too embedded in the burger discourse who complain about the quality of the meat and/or the composition of the veg patty, but truth be told, this is just simple, lowest common-denominator new-wave fast food. They are good smashburgers that are faithful, both structurally and texturally, to their much more evil antecedents. AC 119 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 7DG

Leila’s Shop
I genuinely loved eating here when Alex Jackson was cooking, and although he’s left for The Garden Café, Leila’s is still very clearly putting out the food that it wants to cook, aided by excellent produce from the shop next door. The desserts and bakes by Stroma Sinclair are some of the best in the city. JN 15-17 Calvert Avenue, E2 7JP ​

Vincenzo’s
The hyperregionalisation of pizza in London has been a feature of the city’s dining scene in the post-Neapolitan era. We’ve had Crisp, All Kaps, New Haven apizza (from a guy whose talent for cooking pizza was matched only by his ability to snide every other pizzaiolo in London), Chicago tavern, Long Island grandma pies and more. Within this same timeframe, Tom Vincent of Vincenzo’s has been perfecting his interpretation of the New York slice at his spot in Bushey. Late last year, Vincent landed in Shoreditch, and for me he serves the best slices in the city. AC 122 Bethnal Green Rd, E2 6DG

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Ice Cream City will be published in June 2026. Pre-order here.

Back in 2023, in the first version of her Ice Cream Guide, Ruby Tandoh wrote that ‘London is not, on the surface of things, an ice cream city.’ That guide was written over the course of three months and hundreds of scoops to go beyond ‘the surface’ - lists and guides that regurgitated the same few gelaterias summer after summer - and celebrate the abundance of London’s ice cream culture: everything from artfully-constructed sundaes at Japanese cafés, to the skill of churned-to-order Afghan sheeryakh. And, of course, actually great gelato.

Three years on, the task of documenting London’s ice cream has become more complex. The amount of excellent ice cream in the city seems to get greater each spring, when makers start to emerge out of their hibernation. Corner shops that might have once only had a freezer full of Unilever products, now contain choc-ices and tubs from small-batch makers from around London. There is a strong feeling of play and collaboration in the culture: East London cafe Bake Street has hosted Ilford’s Watani Sheeryakh; this month, La Grotta Ices is putting on an event with Fink’s. It turns out London is an ice cream city after all.

Over the last few months, Ruby has been researching the new guide by revisiting every ice cream vendor from the old guides, and trying out all the new ones (by our count, over 120 makers in total). She also wanted to provide a way of navigating all these places without having to rely on using your phone. The result is a labour of love and our first ever guidebook in print: Ice Cream City, an eighty-page (genuinely) pocket-sized guide to London’s best ice cream. It starts where the previous online guides left off, with 100 completely new and up-to-date recommendations for gelato, soft serve, kulfi, booza, bingsu, sheeryakh, bastani, sundaes, choc ices and more across London, along with functional area guides, walking routes, gripes and grievances, cautionary tales and the ten most exceptional scoops of the summer.

You can preorder Ice Cream City here now and booklets will arrive in late-June in time for ice cream season. Note: this guide will not appear online and is print only.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay by Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a reflection on microwave conspiracy theories, and the sometimes-uneasy relationship with the device in her extended family.

If you haven’t picked one up already, our second print issue on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ is still available. We highly recommend buying a copy.

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About a year ago, an Instagram video about microwaves was posted in my extended family group chat. It was titled ‘Benutzt du immer noch eine Mikrowelle?’, with the English caption ‘never ever again 🚫⚠️’.

‘Never again’, a phrase with very specific connotations – particularly in Germany – was here being deployed to warn people against reheating food in the microwave. In the video’s opening sequence, a woman opens a microwave (I’m guessing not her own) and removes the glass plate to show the three little ledges that keep the plate in place. The hazardous radiation symbol then pops up on screen, revealing its uncanny resemblance to the ledges. The machine, it seems, bears a warning, buried within its own functionality. If this creative engagement with symbolism (akin to the close reading of bank notes for hidden illuminati symbolism) wasn’t enough, an unidentified doctor then appears to provide the hard science: using a microwave is the ‘best way to kill yourself’, he says, claiming that ‘everything out of the microwave is highly toxic’.

In short, Your machine is killing you, says the video, its caption implying that unsuspecting microwave users are the victims of a slow genocide they don’t even know is happening.

The video’s maker is, as far as I can tell, a white German woman. In her other videos, she argues that the arrival of migrants to Germany is part of a plan to destroy the country by 2030, warns of the dangers of microplastics and suggests that feminism is a ploy to coerce women into paying taxes. How had her microwave video found its way into this chat, which is populated with UK-based uncles and aunties and cousins of various African diaspora configurations sharing, mostly, birthday greetings and embarrassing photos recovered from an old Sony Ericsson? (For context, I am a London-born Nigerian-German living in Berlin.)

Somehow, the video’s appearance wasn’t entirely unexpected. Various well-intentioned, if naive, warnings have appeared in the chat over the years – a notice about razor blades being snuck into packs of Hobnobs; cautions about 5G towers. I sent back articles and videos, seeking to gently convince my family that the microwave is not actually a killing machine. And yet, despite my broad appeals to ‘facts’ and ‘science’, I understand, and often share, this suspicious disposition. To be Black in the UK (or in Germany) is to be in an almost perpetual state of vigilance – it can be hard to know what is actually dangerous to us when it feels like anything could be.

We are familiar with the racism of state and corporate institutions, and experience a proximity to precarity, to violence, embedded within the structures that order and arrange our lives. And yet we are told that these things that we see, feel and witness do not exist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this racism also presents itself when it comes to food: Black people in the UK are more likely to live in food deserts and experience food insecurity than white people, making it harder, more expensive and certainly more time consuming for us to get what we need. When our socioeconomic system feels like a conspiracy, it’s hard to have faith in such a system, or the technology that this system produces. In this context, the microwave has become a site for the projection of anxieties around food, health and power. But how has that come to be?

*

The heating capacity of microwaves (the actual waves, that is, rather than the machine) was accidentally discovered in the USA in 1945, during World War 2. When testing the microwave-generating magnetron tube – a radar technology originally designed to detect enemy planes and ships – engineer Percy Spencer discovered that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted (given that chocolate bars tend to melt in pockets anyway, more culinary investigation followed). Spencer filed a patent, and in 1946 the first commercial microwave, the RadaRange, was sold by Raytheon (yes, that Raytheon). The RadaRange was large and expensive, designed with restaurants and large canteens in mind. It wasn’t until 1967 that the first domestic, countertop microwave was released. Microwaves started to gain popularity in the mid-seventies in the USA and then the UK, and by 2013 80% of British households had a microwave.

It is strange to consider the relationship between the guided missile and the mundane process of reheating leftovers, yet perhaps this connection goes some way to explaining the suspicion that has surrounded the microwave since its introduction to the home. The microwave was a break with traditional cooking and heating methods which had, largely, gone unchanged for centuries. It was a modern technology, a locked box with the capacity to violently burst your beans. For some, the technology was (and remains) an unwelcome interruption of these more traditional modes of cooking, but, like it or not, it has fundamentally changed how we use the kitchen.

‘I don’t believe in microwaves – if my granny ain’t use it, neither am I,’ a friend told me. By contrast, I do believe in the microwave. As much as I aspire to worshipping food and flavour so much that I don’t use one, I just cannot bring myself to cook every day. I have learned that to remain fed, I must cook for a future version of myself, freezing my food and then defrosting and reheating it when cooking feels impossible. The degradation of texture and flavour is, for me, minor, and the moralising disavowal of the microwave annoys me.

Yet when I am met with a strong anti-microwave sentiment, I can’t lie, I still feel some shame (though clearly not enough). Fundamentally, oppositions to the microwave often hinge on the rejection of convenience. One of the comments under the Instagram video reads: ‘Anyone who uses a microwave has lost control of their life 😂’, the implication being that using a microwave represents a lack of discipline (something I’m intimately acquainted with).

But what happens, practically, when you are a Nigerian in North London? When not every shop has the ingredients you like to cook with, so you trek across the city on a Saturday to get the things you need to make the food that you and your family love, food that may even last a week? This is what my grandmother would do. The stew she’d make would sit atop the stove, from where it would be dished out in Tupperware to the stream of visitors who knew it was there waiting to be carried home, reheated, enjoyed. My grandmother always cooked for many, in part so that her family didn’t all have to. Her cooking anticipated its reheating – which, for many of us, meant using a microwave. Rather than cutting us off from tradition, the microwave facilitated the connection.

In this context, the centrality of the microwave in the diaspora is an exchange of one scarcity, or abundance, for another. In the UK, because Nigerian ingredients are harder to come by, we rely on the fridge, freezer and microwave to pace access to our foods. But in Nigeria, ‘believing in’ a microwave only really makes sense if you have a stable source of electricity (for said fridge and freezer) and broadly functioning state infrastructure. For many of my relatives who live there, especially those who do not have generators, there is absolutely no point in having a microwave because, in many parts of the country, electricity comes and goes erratically – an occurrence that almost has a divine quality.

Four years ago, on an extended visit in Ibadan, the house I was staying in (which blessedly had a generator) contained a microwave that had not been touched in years. I tried using it, only to hear the generator groan an octave lower, as if physically carrying the electrical load of the machine. It was almost like I could hear the monetary cost of my poorly considered decision. To use a microwave in a context like this is to be well resourced, or to invest belief that the state infrastructure will provide you with what you need. Such a belief is not available to many of my relatives in Nigeria. Neither is it available to many of my relatives in London.

*

Among my friends and family in Nigeria, the microwave is not given much thought, because it is functionally irrelevant – a fuel-sucking, mostly useless object. But among those of us in the diaspora, its extreme convenience, coupled with the mysteries of how it works, can draw suspicion. Even though the microwave occupies the intimate space of the domestic kitchen, its functioning remains opaque. When I asked my friend why she was reluctant to use one, she responded simply: ‘What even is a microwave?’ I’m not sure if this was an actual question or a rhetorical flourish, but it communicated the continued air of mystery that surrounds the device.

Microwaves have long been viewed as dangerous, with warnings about standing in front of them or near them while they’re on passed down through the generations, and their cooking process positioned as uniquely detrimental to the nutrients in food (even though over-boiling vegetables in a pot does the same thing, perhaps even more so). The relative who posted the microwave conspiracy video in the family chat expressed fear about microwaved food being ‘cooked from the inside’, which quickly became: ‘It cooks you from the inside.’

This concern – that microwaves cause some sort of nefarious, unspecified internal damage – reflects one of the long-standing anxieties about the appliance. Other modes of cooking all involve the application of heat from an obvious source to the surface of the thing being cooked. There’s a certain comfort to cooking that you can hear and see happening, that is manual and tangible: the flame is hot, the food is heated. By contrast, how microwaves produce heat remains mysterious. Waves are an invisible form of power: they can heat food, transmit information, make us sick or treat illness – almost entirely beyond our visual and physical perception. We experience the results of their effects, but we cannot see them working. As a result, it’s not obviously apparent how the food gets heated – and even the technical explanation of waves causing the vibration of particles in the food, producing friction and thus heating the food ‘from the inside out’ can seem more like a provocation than an answer. (While I do not, personally, fully understand the science, I understand it enough to comfortably eat food the microwave lovingly heats for me.)

In this regard, I can see the wave as a proxy for the often opaque structures that inform how we experience the world. In lots of ways, our material lives are arranged by architectures of power to which many will never have access, or even understand. I can easily see why the microwave, a box in which an invisible kind of power is at work, becomes a site of projection. But it is crucial that it does not remain so, as this kind of projection obscures the structures that actually endanger us.

When the video popped up on the group chat, only I responded. I guess on some level I was also defending my own relationship to reheating lentils or even coffee (gasp), while attempting to stem what I believed to be a tide of misinformation. After sending one final link, a video proving that microwaved water does not, in fact, kill plants, I concluded my defence, triumphant. No one replied.

Then another link appeared: ‘Man’s Hilarious Plane Crash Interview Goes Viral’. It seemed that everyone had moved on.

Credits

Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a keen microwave advocate, writer, and PhD candidate between KCL in London and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She researches Black diasporic temporalities as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant Project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. And she loves Arsenal.

Sandy Christ is a London-based illustrator, designer and professional daydreamer working across editorial, event visuals, murals, merchandise and self-initiated projects rooted in print culture, music and her multi-heritage identity. Through intuitive mark-making, expressive linework and texture-heavy compositions, her work explores themes of identity, emotion, movement and the spaces between clarity and ambiguity. Selected clients and collaborators include New Balance, Adobe, University of the Arts London, Where Are the Black Designers, Gurlz with Curlz and publications like The Wire, Vittles, Chutney, Synonym and Scary Boots.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Today’s Six of One has a slight twist - instead focusing on the places that our writers deem worthy of far greater attention, Recency Bias asks them to simply share with us the best and/or most unexpectedly delicious things they have eaten in the last two months.

We are delighted to present K Biswas earwigging on the BBC’s Chris Mason in Westminster over Milanese with spaghetti and gamberetti, Riana Austin diving into Korean newtro culture in Islington, and the long-awaited return of Rohan Jones who travelled to Southall for methi paratha. Also: Simran Hans on Georgian food, Gavin Cleaver on kebab rolls, and MiMi Aye on Bromley! You can look forward to more Recency Bias, as well as reviews and guides in the coming weeks and months. AC

1. Sapori

On Parliament’s first day back following the Easter break, I am summoned to discuss a plot to unseat the prime minister.* Wearing dark glasses and walking with a limp, a veteran Westminster fixer takes me for supper at an unassuming Italian deli on Horseferry Road. Sapori, situated in an area saturated by chain cafés, is a safe haven. The only nearby diner exhibiting signs of life at 9pm, it greets you with bright lights and cannoli chilling in cabinets close to its entrance. Inside, two dozen black cab drivers, their vehicles lining the street outside, talk over each other’s tables while watching a Premier League match, and BBC political editor Chris Mason clutches his papers at the counter with one eye on his iPhone.

From Sapori’s varied evening menu (which includes a ‘Taxi’s Special’: pasta and a drink for £15), I chose a chicken Milanese: two tenderised, breaded cutlets bigger than a rugby player’s hands, the accompanying spaghetti upgraded to ‘gamberetti’. My interlocutor, a hard-drinking product of the trade union movement, orders penne fresh tuna with capers, olives, cherry tomatoes and a loaf of garlic bread. An upbeat, Stakhanovite waitress, coming to the end of her 15-hour shift, brings over our massive plates within five minutes, along with two giant glasses of Sangiovese.

Following espressos and a cool slab of tiramisu, we file through the exit behind the cabbies, who are anticipating a stream of fares into the early hours. In search of a nightcap, our gossip not quite exhausted, we have a brandy at the nearby Marquis of Granby, outside which Westminster’s New Right are congregated. Braying hoorays and women with impossibly low voices chunter on about drone manufacturing, while fedora-wearing, moustachioed GB News contributors and unnerving Americans jostle for attention from Reform’s latest high-profile defection. On a screen through the window, Mason appears, harried and wan, delivering his Ten O’Clock News piece to camera, as I ponder a return to Sapori in the morning for breakfast. K. Biswas

60 Horseferry Rd, SW1P 2AF

*This entry was written three weeks ago. As of the time of writing Keir Starmer, just about, remains prime minister after attempts to unseat him. We will know soon whether this particular plot was successful or not and what role the ‘Granita Sapori dinner’ played.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles Recipes. Today, Javahir Askari writes about Biryani Tahchin — her vibrant, aromatic, and delicately spiced creation that combines Pakistani biryani and Iranian tahchin.

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Showstopper, Centre Piece

In Biryani Tahchin, saffron-spiced rice is layered with yoghurt-marinated chicken and potatoes and baked to form a golden tahdig. Recipe and images by Javahir Askari.

For my thirtieth birthday, I invited friends for dinner in my flat in London. When I brought the pot of biryani tahchin I had made to the table and inverted it onto a platter with a soft thud, the room fell quiet. A cloud of steam cleared to reveal a golden dome of fragrant rice, masala chicken and saffron potatoes crowned with glossy zereshk or barberries and fried pistachios. The scent of biryani filled the room when I cut into it. My friends filmed me, like I was a bride cutting her wedding cake.

Few foods offer built-in theatre like biryani tahchin. It is a dish of my own creation, a delicately spiced combination of Pakistani biryani and Iranian tahchin. Structurally, it is a classic tahchin: saffron and yoghurt-bound rice are pressed into the base of a pot, then layered with chicken and baked until the bottom crisps, forming the much-coveted tahdig (crispy golden rice layer). But the chicken, cooked with ginger, garlic, onions and masala, carries the soul of biryani (thankfully without the laborious hours of preparation and cooking usually required).

In my recipe, I also add sliced potatoes and lemons between the layers. This underlines the fact that, while this dish has its roots in two different traditions, it’s also happy to reinvent both.

My family is Pakistani; and before Partition, we settled in Mehmudabad and Faizabad in North India in the 1930s. But our roots trace back to Nishapur and Shiraz in Iran, a lineage that’s more common among South Asians than people in the West might expect. My grandfather spoke fluent Farsi, and passed down a love of Iranian food that still anchors our family table today. Like him, I’ve lived across different countries. That sense of movement shows up in my cooking; in dishes like biryani tahchin, which emerged out of attempting to bring the disparate parts of my background together in one dish.

Biryani Tahchin looks like a centrepiece, but it plays well with whatever’s on the table: kachumber salad, thick yoghurt, hummus, pickled vegetables, even potato salad. I’ve also made versions in which I swapped the chicken for leftover kofte, beef or oyster mushrooms. Some days I garnish with candied orange peel, fried onions and barberries, other days with mint and coriander. Using different garnishes opens this dish up to a wide range of flavours.

Biryani tahchin is a dish for rule-breakers and for those whose idea of home spans more than one nation or culture. I encourage you to make this dish as uniquely yours as it is mine.

Biryani Tahchin

Serves 4
Time 2 hrs

You can make this either on the stove or in the oven – I have provided the method for both below. A drizzle of kewra water, made from the Indian screwpine flower, is central to this dish: similar to rose water but fruitier, it adds a delicately fragrant note. You can find kewra water in Asian supermarkets or the world foods aisle of a big supermarket.

Ingredients

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If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – which focuses on the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy.

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I first heard about Mercato Metropolitano in the summer of 2017, only a few weeks after moving to London. A friend living in Elephant and Castle had mentioned it sold piadina, a flatbread from Romagna in northern Italy that I’d never seen in the UK. When I finally went, I found not the generic ‘Italian’ I’d grown used to in London, but an unprecedented breadth of regional variation. Inside a vast post-industrial hall with long communal tables and an apparently endless line of food stalls, I found pici from Tuscany, risotto al salto from Lombardia and proper Neapolitan pizza, alongside Venezuelan arepas, Caribbean jerk chicken and ramen. It called itself ‘London’s first sustainable community food market’.

Mercato felt like an easy entry point into a city I was just starting to discover – familiar enough to be comforting, but cosmopolitan in a way I’d never experienced before. At the time, it seemed Mercato was an island, completely disconnected from its surrounding neighbourhood – a mere coincidence that it existed in Elephant and Castle and not anywhere else in London. I saw it as a place where I could start figuring out how life in the city might look. During that first summer, Mercato was the place I took my English (now ex-) boyfriend to make him try ‘real’ Italian dishes, and where I went with visiting friends and family to show off London’s diversity.

While my first year in London was beginning to take shape around Mercato, a long-running conflict over space was unfolding just down the road. Traders and activists were organising against the property developer Delancey’s plans to redevelop the Elephant and Castle shopping centre – a project that threatened to close around a hundred businesses. The same area had already seen the demolition of the Heygate Estate, council blocks where around 3,000 people had lived until the last residents were evicted in 2013.

Over the next couple of years, as Mercato became established as a destination, it was increasingly framed as Elephant’s success story – proof that the area was ‘on the up’. But at the same time, businesses inside the Elephant and Castle shopping centre began to close one by one, weakened by falling footfall, rising uncertainty and years of neglect. Despite a traders’ and activists’ campaign against the redevelopment, by 2020, the shopping centre shut its doors for good, leaving traders facing an uncertain future. I didn’t question this contrast at the time, but it was clear that Mercato, having turned Elephant and Castle into a ‘food destination’, also helped shape the narrative of a new, shinier neighbourhood into which the shopping centre no longer fit.

Six years on, the cycle has turned again. In April 2025, Berkeley – the developer that owns the land on which Mercato is based – secured permission to build three residential towers on the site (one of them forty-one storeys high, with flats priced far beyond local incomes). In December, it was confirmed that the market is scheduled to shut its doors in late 2026, leaving more than forty traders facing the same uncertainty as those in the shopping centre before them. When I first heard the news, I was struck by the irony: something that had so recently been celebrated as new and exciting was being threatened by the forces which had initially helped bring it into being. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: what has happened with Mercato Metropolitano is only the latest incident in the ongoing story of London street food vendors, and their uneasy relationship with those who own and control the land.

Mercato Metropolitano started in Milan in 2015, when its founder, Andrea Rasca, opened a food market inside a disused warehouse on the Navigli, just as the World’s fair Expo Milano was drawing crowds into the city. The concept was unusual for the time: a market that mixed traditional traders – a baker, a fishmonger, a butcher – with street food vans and community events, all inside a vast, half-derelict industrial space. It was consciously rough around the edges and deliberately anti-corporate, a reaction to the Expo’s heavy sponsorship by brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Rasca’s simple idea was that a market could run on high-quality food, minimal advertising and a basic level of affordability.

I met Rasca on a Friday afternoon last July, inside an empty Italian restaurant in Mayfair. At the start of our conversation, he was quick to point out that Mercato is not merely a business to him, but rather a project shaped by two key influences: Adriano Olivetti’s vision of socially oriented enterprise and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement. Rasca talks about food as something that should be ‘adequate’ in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sense – nutritious, culturally grounded and accessible. In practice, this meant every trader in Mercato had to offer at least one low-cost dish (say, a €5 marinara), even as some stalls sold premium items. This framing helped set it apart from Milan’s existing food scene – it felt less like a street food market and more like an experiment in how markets could operate.

When Milan’s city council told Rasca it would only let him stay on the Navigli site until December, he decided to bring the idea to London. By then, the city had begun embracing so-called ‘meanwhile uses’: temporary occupations of land already destined for redevelopment, tolerated precisely because they were not meant to last. A disused paper factory in Elephant and Castle that had long been abandoned became the site of the first London Mercato in 2016. Most people around Rasca thought the location was a mistake, overshadowed by Borough Market to the north and isolated from footfall, but the scale and the roughness appealed to him. The result was a market with the same calling card as the original, with traders given room to build their businesses, minimal branding and an unpolished aesthetic that distinguished Mercato from the more corporate food halls emerging elsewhere in the city.

Rasca recalls that the negotiations with Peabody (the land’s owner before they sold it to Berkeley in 2020) were surprisingly smooth. Peabody had recently submitted a proposal for redeveloping what they named ‘the Borough triangle’, a piece of land including the paper factory, the London School of Musical Theatre and the 100-year-old Institute of Optometry. Confident that the planning application would go through, they granted Rasca a ‘meanwhile use’ for one year; they saw it, in Rasca’s words, as ‘a practical solution to a temporary problem’.

Eva Fino is one of Mercato’s longest-standing traders, running a cocktail caravan she brought to the Elephant and Castle site in 2016. She started her cocktail business in Milan after the wine bar she co-owned lost its regulars when the nearby Prada offices moved away. The newly opened Mercato on the Navigli offered the stability she’d been missing, and when the London Mercato opened, she followed, caravan and all. Like me, she arrived expecting postcard London and found something messier, louder, more familiar. She treated it as an experiment, assuming it would last a year or two at most. Instead, she put down roots. She learned Spanish first, from the Latin American traders around her, then English. Her business grew alongside Mercato; she hired staff, met her partner, and had a child. ‘I always say he’s Mercato’s baby,’ she tells me, laughing.

Fino remembers the early years, when only two caravans – her own, and another selling arancini – sat in the empty hall. The space gradually became a market as more vendors moved in, and Fino recalls Rasca’s attention to detail: there was a central team of around forty staff organising cultural and social programming (like a summer camp for local kids where families who could pay effectively subsidised those who couldn’t) and cooking classes run with Migrateful. Back then, she says, it really did feel like a community: traders helping each other out, management incubating new businesses. The success meant that the brand expanded, too: a Mercato Mayfair opened in 2019, then Canary Wharf in 2021 (plus a short-lived Ilford site in 2024, which closed after just six months).

In 2022, Rasca sold 75% of Mercato to Andrea Iervolino, an Italian film producer currently under investigation in Italy for alleged tax fraud, tax evasion and the use of false invoices linked to another business. From that point, Fino says, the atmosphere shifted. The central staff was cut from forty to four employees, the social programme thinned out and quality controls weakened. Footfall dropped, but rents didn’t. And only three years later, in 2025, Berkeley’s plans to build residential skyscrapers on the site were approved by Southwark council.

Mercato’s new owners have successfully won the bid to manage a temporary market that will be built under the railway arches while construction takes place. The catch is that this new space will host only twelve of Mercato’s forty-plus traders. Because of this, many of the traders I approached didn’t feel able to speak on the record, worried that saying the wrong thing could decrease their chances of being included (although some highlighted that Mercato deals with traders one by one, under different terms, with little transparency and no shared guarantees).

Despite being one of Mercato’s earliest traders, Fino was originally excluded from the project. The reason was technical: the current Mercato owners’ bid will give them exclusive control over beverages, arguing it’s the only way to keep the reduced site financially viable. Fino was offered £12,500 to relocate – nowhere near enough to cover finding a new space and fitting it out, or paying severance to her staff. She was determined to keep her cocktail caravan, but eventually had to accept that she could only claim a space in the temporary market if she changed her business entirely. She won’t be allowed to sell drinks, so she’s developing a fresh pasta menu instead. Though she will now have to reinvent herself as a food trader, what worries her most is the setting: the temporary market will sit inside a construction site for at least five years, and there is no clarity about what comes after. By then, the neighbourhood may have shifted again. Fino wonders whether there will still be space for her business at all.

To put what’s happening at Mercato into proper context, it is essential to go back to the origins of modern London street food. In the late 2000s, Petra Barran – who had been selling chocolate from a truck in the first half of the decade – had grown frustrated with how difficult it was for independent street food vendors to find space in the city. Her solution was simple: band traders together and negotiate collectively. What started as a loose network quickly became London’s first street-food consortium, KERB. By 2012, KERB had become the go-to partner for developers looking to animate underused sites. Barran remembers being invited to set up a market on a newly opened road in King’s Cross – the first new street built in London in ninety years – and realising how the gates had opened. ‘It was intoxicating,’ she told me. ‘Suddenly we were being invited to an empty car park in Peckham, the plaza under the Gherkin, spaces all over the city that we would have never dreamed of claiming as ours. It gave us a real sense of agency, as if street food could help us bend the city in a new shape.’

But these invitations weren’t a transference of power so much as a controlled release. Street food could make a newly opened road, an empty car park or a corporate plaza feel temporarily shared and open, even when the land wasn’t. A 2017 Guardian investigation, led by Jack Shenker, noted that many of these sites are ‘pseudo-public spaces … that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers’. What often gets described as ‘placemaking’ – creating shared public space with the collaboration of the local community – is ultimately a marketing strategy, a way of selling the idea that life is being brought to an area when, in reality, life is already there. What’s being ‘made’ is a version of place that’s easier to manage, market and redevelop.

Nowhere has that paradox played out more clearly than in Elephant and Castle. When Mercato opened, Elephant and Castle’s shopping centre still functioned as a dense ecosystem, where Colombian cafes sat beside Nigerian hair salons, Latin American butchers next to phone-repair stalls and bingo halls. It embodied what the sociologist Richard Sennett calls an ‘open city’: messy, porous, shaped by use rather than design. Yet with nearby housing disappearing and redevelopment plans taking hold – conditions for survival being steadily withdrawn – footfall thinned and anchor shops left. Mercato arrived with a different proposition: a curated, branded version of multi-ethnic food, legible to visitors, investors and developers alike. The two coexisted uneasily and, for a time, it was the older, messier space that was framed as obsolete.

When I spoke to Sophie Wall from the charity Latin Elephant, she explained that the comparison between Mercato and the shopping centre was more nuanced than it appeared. On the surface, the two served very different audiences: Mercato catered to aspirational newcomers, while the shopping centre was used by people who had lived in Elephant and Castle for decades. But from an organising perspective, Wall explains, the differences were largely cosmetic. ‘Once you strip away the branding, the businesses weren’t that different,’ she tells me. ‘They were small, often migrant-run, often women-led, and operating on very thin margins.’ This tallies with my own interviews with Mercato traders: many are refugees or migrants, and their stand is their first business.

The difference for Mercato was that it occupied a different space in the regeneration cycle. In 2016, Mercato was useful to developers: a signal that the area was changing, a way of attracting footfall and attention while the future of Elephant and Castle was still uncertain. By 2025, that work had been done. With endless lines of brand-new buildings, a new shopping centre about to open and foreign investors crowding in, Mercato was no longer needed as a promise of transformation. The land it sat on was now valuable enough to speak for itself.

Jed Holloway, a planning solicitor at Southwark Law Centre, suggests that the shopping centre’s fate mirrors what is now unfolding at Mercato. Given Delancey’s recent redevelopment of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, Berkeley already had a blueprint for how much they could get away with at Mercato. Initially, just like Delancey, Berkeley offered nothing to Mercato traders; when pressured, they proposed a business relocation strategy that closely mirrored that of the shopping centre. The difference was that, this time, an experienced activist network was already in place. Campaigners had learned how to navigate negotiations with the council and the developer, and they secured what looked like meaningful concessions: a temporary market and a £200,000 relocation fund – more in relative terms than traders at the shopping centre ever received.

But when you look closer, those wins are marginal. The £200,000 pot is to cover the collective costs of relocation for all affected businesses, in an area where fitting out a new unit can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds alone: Holloway mentions that one Mercato trader is facing costs of up to £800,000 for installing the kitchen, plumbing and electrics needed to operate their business. ‘Most of the businesses are going to struggle,’ Holloway tells me. ‘Most of them won’t be relocated or, if they are, they probably won’t survive.’ The temporary market raises further concerns: reduced footfall, rents comparable to Mercato’s but with fewer customers, and no guaranteed right of return. Again, the shopping centre looms as a warning. After its closure, some of its traders were relocated to Castle Square, a temporary, container-style space whose tenants now face eviction over a backdated electricity bill. Others are holding on to unprofitable units in the hope that staying visible and close by will improve their chances of returning to the new shopping centre. Years on, many still don’t know whether that right will come.

Nina Wessel, an activist and spokesperson for the Save Borough Triangle campaign, is also concerned about the fairness of Berkeley’s plan. She got involved after distractedly picking up a flyer about the redevelopment, and has since become a key link between Mercato and the council. She takes me around the building that will soon be replaced by Berkeley’s vision, telling me the market currently provides 450 jobs. ‘And then Berkeley comes along promising 500 jobs,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘But what kind of jobs? They say it like it’s a gift. But those jobs are imaginary, maybe in the future, probably in chain stores. What we have here, now, are independent businesses, real families relying on them.’ (This would not be the first time that a vision for the development is not followed through in practice – last month, Berkeley put in an application with Southwark council to reduce the ‘affordable housing’ at the development from 35% to 10%.)

Displacement is not an abstract process or a line in a planning document, but the slow unravelling of lives built around a place: shopping centre traders waiting years for relocations that may not come; Mercato traders forced to gamble on temporary sites with no right to return. Fino, who is one of the lucky ones, arrived in London without expectations, convinced she was only passing through; nearly a decade later, her life is bound up in a place that is now disappearing beneath her feet. As for Rasca, he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of Mercato’s London sites. He talks about the split obliquely, but it’s clear that his break from Mercato’s current sites was ideological as much as operational. Potential investors, Rasca told me, wanted to talk about returns; he wanted to talk about how people eat. At a certain point, those conversations stopped overlapping. He insists that what matters to him is the ‘movimento’, the idea of a metropolitan market built around decent food, affordability and social life. He’s already looking for the next location, and is writing a book to set out his philosophy. In his telling, Mercato was never meant to be permanent: it was a prototype, something that could be picked up and reassembled elsewhere.

Maybe he’s right, but the story of Elephant and Castle suggests a deeper contradiction. In a city where land is valued first and foremost for the wealth it can generate, markets like Mercato are only tolerated while they animate space and help tip a neighbourhood into its next phase. Once that work is done, their value is quickly reassessed. Mercato’s fate is the clearest proof that an ethical experiment that doesn’t reckon with the space around it cannot remain protected from these forces. However carefully designed, it is still caught in the same regenerative currents it helps to set in motion; eventually, it will get carried away by them too.

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Credits

Caterina Urbano is a writer based in East London. Originally from Italy, she is interested in cities, food, and the changing politics of urban life

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, Jonathan Nunn is back from his sabbatical with a review of Impala, the new restaurant by Super 8. Last week, we released a podcast with Super 8’s head of sourcing and development, Songsoo Kim, which you can listen to here.

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Every restaurant opened by Super 8, the group that has done more to define the style of modern London dining than perhaps any other, is built around a particular structure. The original Smoking Goat had its horseshoe cocktail bar. Kiln, a crucible of a Thai restaurant, is heated by a series of red-hot claypots and burners. Both versions of Brat and Mountain are based around the expanse of the grill. At Impala, Super 8’s sixth restaurant, it’s the oven, a gorgeous, almost futuristic design whose thin opening resembles a concrete visor, or a brutalist floppy-disk drive. Out of it comes aish baladi, Egypt’s staple bread, puffed up to the size of a whoopee cushion and baked until the bran on its crust starts to catch. The first time I saw it come out of the oven I had to suppress a smile. Super 8 has made its name by being at the cutting edge of what’s about to be popular in London, and has often done it by going back to basics. In Impala’s case, it has raided the newest trends of 3000 BC.

The bread is a calling card of Meedu Saad, Impala’s genial co-owner, who has the air of a trusted capo who has just been made. Saad was once head chef at Kiln, but you always heard rumours there might be a proper Meedu restaurant on the horizon – not Thai but something that might play into his own Egyptian and north London heritage. Impala is indeed a Meedu restaurant, but before that it is something much more fundamental. It is a Super 8 restaurant. The place it has most in common with is Tomos Parry’s (and Super 8’s) Mountain, despite there being no overlap in cuisine. It shares all the ticks that have become part of the group’s template: a buzzy dining room – imagine a Turkish ocakbaşı set in The Tanks at Tate Modern – an eclectic, almost overwhelming menu that scampers across any defined borders of national cuisines, luxe-progressive assemblages of carefully sauced vegetables and descriptions of protein that convince you to spend far more than you anticipated.

It now feels you can now talk about a ‘Super 8 restaurant’ like you might talk about an ‘A24 film’, as if the group itself has auteurist tendencies. Each restaurant shares a core philosophy set down by owners Brian Hannon (the group’s accountant, and producer) and Ben Chapman (who serves as the restaurant’s creative director), plus a group of regulars that includes head of casting sourcing and development Songsoo Kim (who is, full disclosure, a regular Vittles contributor). I don’t make the comparison with A24 lightly: both have spent the last decade appearing to be at the avant-garde while also being ruthlessly successful – Impala, for example, is already being described at the hottest table in the city despite having no menu on its website, choosing instead to list the regenerative producers which supply it. It’s this contradiction that so many restaurants around the country try (and often fail) to ape: if you have been somewhere pairing an on-trend cuisine with impeccably sourced British produce and a Fela Kuti playlist, then you are ingesting the legacy of Super 8, whether you know it or not.

Impala, then, could be read as more of the same but new; a restaurant made by committee for a dining scene that craves novelty in a controlled setting, opened by a group that has distilled success into a formula. But the question I have is this: can Impala resist being just another Super 8 restaurant, and instead create something truly great on its own terms?

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s cooking essay, Nell Whittaker writes against the depoliticised romanticisation of communal cooking, which seldom acknowledges that many of us live communally out of financial necessity, not choice. Nell shares a set of five unconnected recipes cooked simultaneously on one hob, reflecting the often pedestrian reality of jostling for kitchen space in a house share.

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There’s an Instagram influencer of sorts who has made a career from cooking for the six people she lives with in a warehouse in East London. Her videos are filmed with her phone, presumably propped on a table. The fact that she lives in a warehouse with five other people is carefully mentioned at the start of every video. Apron on, she talks the viewer through whatever she’s making (tomato, caramelised onion and red pesto galette; chicken noodle soup), against a backdrop of painted brick and shelves bearing various large jars, likely filled with beans and seeds. Visible tabletops are scarred. Although not stated explicitly, the implication of the influencer’s content is that domestic cooking at this scale is ideologically aligned with the commune, even if it shares none of its politics. The emphasis is on hippie-ish, wholesome vibes rather than a radical embrace of communality.

When I was younger, I found it hard to imagine living in any form other than the communal. I have lived with no fewer than three other people for my whole adult life, and peaked in my late twenties with an eight-person house in East London (six bedrooms, two couples). It was a tall Victorian house with a vast fig tree whose green fruit tasted of nothing. Some enterprising landlord had once converted the house into offices, so on the wall next to every room was a phone to buzz open the front door. Someone – I always assumed the same landlord – had concreted over the garden so in the rain it became a kind of waterway for slugs, who at night sailed from side to side as fast as mice, and ate whatever I tried to grow in the dank, shaded flower beds.

My housemates and I all got on fine, and often very well, but we very rarely deliberately cooked and ate together. Instead, we grappled for hob space as we prepared totally different dinners, skidding around on an adamantine floor that was almost permanently slicked with oil.

Fetishising food’s communal aspects and ability to bring people together is an all-too-common trope in food writing. I hope that we’re becoming bored of uncritically exalting the value of collectively breaking bread as if it automatically improves one’s political conditions, but part of the conversation that still seems to be missing is that most people living in non-familial units regularly cook and eat in an involuntarily social way – not finding communion around the table but, rather, wishing that someone else wasn’t also in the kitchen monitoring a pan of tomato sauce. Logistically, it’s a nightmare, while socially it requires a degree of politeness and jollity that can be difficult to dredge up after a long day at work.

I ended up in an eight-person house because everywhere else, a room cost around £1,000 – at the time a vast sum that has, nevertheless, now become the average for a room in London in a shared house. The material reality of spending more than half your take-home pay (even if you earn the London Living Wage) on rent is antithetical to the louche, spontaneous energy of enjoyable bohemian cohabitation and the kind of emancipatory horizons envisaged by commune founders of the twentieth century. Living in a rowdy house is good when you’re in a rowdy mood, but generally communal cooking of the sort many do is undignified because our living situations can be undignified – watching the black mould creep up the shower curtain, continually wet from eight showers a day; grimly moving someone’s mouldy tin of tomato paste back onto their overstuffed fridge shelf. Communes and other kinds of collective living are defined by the idea of intentional community – and for many, there’s not much that’s intentional about how they’re living.

Nevertheless, in such circumstances a new culinary framework can be born – one that’s chaotic, resentful, sometimes funny, sometimes formal, often deeply familial. Inspired by the kitchen wrangling of a collapsing housing market, here’s a recipe for cooking eight people’s dinner at once. While I was writing this piece, the influencer announced that she and her housemates have been unceremoniously evicted from the warehouse, though they’ve since managed to find another place to live. The fell sword of London’s housing market comes for us all.

• Ash reshteh, made by housemate one

• Anchovy, chickpea and celery pasta, supposedly invented by housemate two, made for her and her boyfriend (housemate three)

• Saag paneer, for couple housemates four and five

• Marcella Hazan’s tomato pasta, for half-ill housemate six

• Linda McCartney sausages, peas and greens, a favourite of housemates seven and eight

Ingredients

for everyone

4 garlic bulbs

for the ash reshteh

300g dried chickpeas
100g dried white kidney beans
100g dried haricot beans
1 onion
1 tbsp butter
sunflower oil
3 tsp turmeric
6 tsp dried mint
1 vegetable stock cube
a handful of dried green lentils
1 large bunch each of parsley, coriander, and dill
4 spring onions
½ bag frozen spinach
125g spaghetti
a big spoonful of kashk, plus extra to serve
juice of 1 lemon

for the saag paneer

2 packets of paneer (~400–500g)
2 tsp ground turmeric
2 tsp chilli powder
½ tsp fine sea salt
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp sunflower oil
2 tsp cumin seeds
½ bag frozen spinach
2 shop-bought naans (or, failing that, flatbreads)
2 tbsp plain yoghurt
salt
juice of ½ lemon

for the anchovy, chickpea and celery pasta

1 onion
3 celery sticks
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1 x can anchovies in oil
salt
187g spaghetti

for the tomato pasta

1 onion
1 x 400g can chopped tomatoes
125g butter
salt
pepper
187g spaghetti

for the vegetarian sausages, peas and greens

1 pack vegetarian sausages
olive oil
⅓ bag frozen peas
½ bag wilting anonymous greens (kale, cavalo nero or spring greens all work), shredded
1 tbsp butter
a spoonful of cream
the end of a bottle of white wine

Method

1. The day before, add dried chickpeas, white kidney beans and haricot beans to a big bowl, cover with cold water, and leave to soak overnight. Slice the paneer into fat cubes. Use a fork to make holes in each cube, then rub with ½ tsp turmeric, and ½ tsp salt. Add 2 tsp of chilli powder (the label says it’s very hot, but it has become mild and dusty due to long exposure to the cupboard). Leave to marinate in the fridge overnight.

2. Designate housemate two to make a vast heap of minced garlic.

3. Take three onions. Slice two into crescents and halve the third, keeping the root base on so it holds together. Finely slice the celery. Sauté one of the sliced onions and the celery in sunflower oil over a low heat, and the other in butter and oil in a separate pan. Place the third onion in a big pan – bigger than you think you’ll need – and tip in a tin of tomatoes, half a block of butter, salt and pepper.

4. When onion two is translucent, add a quarter of the minced garlic, 1 tsp turmeric, and half the dried mint, and cook for a couple of minutes. Drain the soaked chickpeas and beans and add to the pan along with three mugs of water and a vegetable stock cube. Continue to cook.

5. Check on the pan with the onion and celery – they should be becoming jammy. Celery takes longer than you think, so don’t just test with the tip of a knife: fish it out and try some. Once collapsing, add some of the garlic and the anchovies along with their oil.

6. On the remaining ring of the hob, fry the paneer in about 3 tbsp veg oil in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat. Once the paneer has browned, remove from the pan and set aside on dirty tea towel. Shout at all other housemates that the pan is hot. Go to put the paneer packaging in the bin and find that housemate three has not replaced the bag.

7. Now, heat some more oil in the same pan over a medium-high heat. When hot, add the cumin seeds and stir them around in the oil for about 30 seconds. Add the rest of the chilli powder and turmeric. Add in some of the minced garlic and fry, stirring constantly so that it doesn’t catch and burn, for a couple of mins, then add the frozen spinach to the pan along with a splash of water.

   [While you’re waiting for things to cook, engage in lively discussion about the neighbouring house, which is undergoing a £1 million renovation and has been a building site for a year and a half. Six of the current housemates lived there before moving into this house, and the rent was cheap because the owner was keeping it occupied while obtaining planning permission. There was one bathroom with a shower that didn’t work, so you shared shallow shivering baths in the morning before work for about five months. Reminisce.]

8. Once the chickpea and bean pan has been cooking for about 30 mins, remove about 3 tbsp of chickpeas and set aside. Tip in a handful of dried green lentils and continue to cook.

9. Temporarily remove the tomato sauce pan from the hob and quickly fry the rest of the dried mint in plenty of oil in a small frying pan, then transfer to a small bowl. Return the tomato pan to the heat.

10. Rub a packet of vegetarian sausages with olive oil, arrange on a tray, and put in the oven at 180°C fan. Finely chop one large bunch each of parsley, coriander and dill and four spring onions. Set aside (you have run out of bowls, so use a dirty warm pan from earlier).

11. By now, the anchovy and celery mixture should be soft. Add the reserved chickpeas from the ash reshteh and stir to coat with oil and heat through for a couple of minutes. Remove the pan from the hob and replace with a large pan of salted water.

12. Add the chopped herbs and spring onions and the other half of the bag of frozen spinach to the reshteh.

13. When the salted water boils, add 375g spaghetti. Break another 125g spaghetti into pieces, then add to the reshteh pot.

14. The tomato pan should now be molten, ketchup-thick, and spitting red flecks all over the backsplash. Remove from heat.

15. Remove a mug from the full and dirty dishwasher. Wash briskly and use to scoop out some of the pasta water. When the spaghetti is cooked, put half of it into the celery pan and the other half into the tomato pan. Mix vigorously and serve, in two separate bowls.

16. Add the frozen peas to the pan of starchy pasta water and cook for a few mins.

17. Add the final remains of the browning minced garlic to a pan and cook gently in some butter. Open the oven and slide two shop-bought naans alongside the sausage tray, taking care not to touch the oven’s filthy sides.

18. Once the ash reshteh has had another 20 mins or so of cooking, add a big spoonful of kashk, squeeze in some lemon juice, and leave on the hob for another few minutes. Ladle into two bowls, then top with the fried dried mint and another dollop of kashk.

19. Check that the saag paneer spinach is fully defrosted, then stir in 2 tbsp yoghurt, some salt, and some lemon juice. Serve with the warmed breads.

20. Drain the peas but keep back a bit of water. Add to the garlic and butter pan with a spoonful of cream, the greens and the end of a bottle of white wine. Simmer for 10 mins, then serve topped with the vegetarian sausages.

21. Serve according to preference, but most likely all in bowls. Turn on the TV.

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Credits

Nell Whittaker is a writer and editor based in London. The images in this post are by Nell, Barnaby Duff and Iona Gaskell.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s article, by Chris Jones, is a history of the squat cafe scene in London at the end of the twentieth century – a tale of skip runs, vegan wars and dubious recipes with titles like SquatSlop (International). It also features a host of original imagery from the era – mostly event flyers and posters, all of which are archived at 56a Infoshop in Elephant and Castle.

This essay is taken from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – which focuses on the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy.

Buy Issue 2

You’re standing in front of your new home and you’re happy. There are a few things to think about, though. First, you have to break in to secure it and, second, you’re gonna be evicted at some point. Oh, and third: you’re also going to have to learn how to cook for thirty-plus strangers. But, hey, it’s your new home, a beat-up, closed-down community centre in Tottenham, and you’ve found the perfect recipe in some battered anarchist cookbook:

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

From 1968 to, let’s say, 2012 – when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act finally criminalised squatting in residential buildings, ending six centuries of English law enshrining a squatter’s right to occupy – there was a visible London counterculture of squatting empty houses, pubs, warehouses and embassies, often as part of a wider movement challenging housing conditions like high rents, mouldy interiors and a lack of council housing for those who needed it. When you’re ‘sharing’ other people’s empty buildings, it doesn’t take a great mental leap to extend that sharing to others in need. You might start cooking for all your squatmates but then find yourself opening your place up to strangers for a regular cafe night. All you needed to do was make a cool flyer and let it circulate for a bit.

These cafes could often be found in places like Brixton, Euston or Dalston – areas that would be gentrified by the late 2000s. We can still enjoy some of the squat cafes’ names anyhow: Molly’s Cafe, That Tea Room, Demolition Diner, Kollaps Kafe, Big Plates Cafe, Bar Sate, The Radical Dairy, Use Your Loaf, House of Shango, House of Brag, ACAB Cafe. From a look over the archived collection of flyers and minutes at 56a Infoshop in Elephant and Castle, where I volunteer, it’s possible to learn about a fun range of subcultural ways of being, doing and eating – ‘Good vibes. No Rules’ (Eton Mission squat, Hackney Wick), ‘Heavy Metal Cafe. Chicks ’n’ Booze, Tattoos and Food’ (56a Infoshop), ‘Slop Shop, Good Cheap Vegan Food’ (The Nevill squat, Hackney) and ‘Marco loved his mother, loved her home-cooked liver casseroles … but he always dreamed of a better place’ (Arlingford Road squat, Brixton).

It is hopefully not a useless exercise in nostalgia to look back at what that long arc of squatting, and the associated squat cafes, brought to London. In fact, the point is to be inspired. People always come together to create alternative ways of life in moments of abundance or scarcity. In our current time of food crisis for many, can these tales – of DIY culture, mutual aid, and squatting communities sharing wasted food to feed themselves and others – provide some hope and vision?

Running a communal cafe is where putting a free roof over your head meets the desire to share it. How that is done – and what problems it brings up – is a part of the thing itself. Some squat cafes were more about socialising, and people often opened up empty places solely to run events; food could be accompanied by DJs, bands, puppet shows, cabarets or film screenings. There were no chefs, just squatters learning how to make enough food for everyone who might come. A good plate of classic squat cafe rice, veggies, fake meats and salad, served on found plates and portioned up to everyone when it was ready, might cost a diner two or three quid. Or it might be pay what you can.

Archival minutes of meetings from the cafe at the 121 Centre squat are fun to read, and can clarify these moments of political expansion and personal contraction. In August 1991, there was talk of advertising the cafe ‘in hostels, dropin homeless centres, local tenants’ centres, unemployed centres, libraries’ to truly make it a resource for all who needed or wanted it – any profits from the cafe nights would go towards campaigns and political groups. We can also read, however, that the cooker broke in November of that same year; the minutes report that it took until February 1992 to mend it. ‘Fucking crap day. Everyone got nicked on the veg run,’ one entry says. ‘But the cafe goes on.’

Squatters were always pretty pro at getting food for free. The back of supermarkets were a good game, jumping into massive skips to recycle and repurpose all that trashed food. Cafes were also great late at night for the retrieval of chucked-out bags of pastries and bread. The million skip runs taken over the years to the free food paradise of New Covent Garden Market in Nine Elms have worn a rut in certain back streets of South London. Avoiding the security guards was a useful skill to learn, and if you evaded them then you could haul thrown-away boxes of bog-standard vegetables – and the occasional tub or punnet of something exotic – home with you. Coming back to your squat with kilos of skipped Jerusalem artichokes, pomegranates, chanterelles, celeriac and mandioca would certainly circumvent the typical London equation: that ‘high prices = good food’.

Conversely, the ‘SquatSlop’ recipe that opens this piece is sadly no joke. At a squat in 2000s South London (which I won’t name), I was not allowed to add onions or much curry powder to the curry I was preparing because the other ‘chef ’ didn’t like them. The coup de grâce to this curry was the ton of cornflour they poured in at the end to give it ‘some flavour’. Despite this atrocity, reports came back to us that it was ‘delicious’.

More often than not, you’d hit the local squat cafe on a Friday night and there would be a huge pan of bog-standard lentil stew with white rice on the menu. Someone might come running in from a ‘skip run’ beaming at their foraging of a load of Iceland Hot Cross Buns. Someone else might be scraping a bit of mould off some peppers, which would remind you that when you are cooking with people more hungry or strapped than you, your standards of what’s edible might not be the same as theirs. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.

Squat ‘chefs’ also had a range of different ideologies. As someone who squatted in London for ten years and organised many cafe nights, I can tell you that The Vegan Wars of the 1980s and 1990s were real (turning up to a vegan cafe night in a leather jacket in 1985 was a real nono!). On the other end of the spectrum, cooking meat at squat cafes in the early 1990s became a weird fad way to prove you were working-class and ‘for real’. Back then, if you wanted meat substitutes, there was really only the awful and dry Sosmix or Burgamix powder or clumps of textured vegetable protein. Soya milk at this point tasted terrible. Sadly the real winners of The Vegan Wars were not the advance guard of plimsoll-wearing punks righteous about animal rights but, as ever, capitalism; these days a million ‘plant-based’ products abound in supermarkets, at hefty prices.

Overseas influences brought fresh hope, although the squatting scene was, against the grain of London at the time, very white. In the 1980s, Italian squatters brought pizzas. In the 1990s, French squatters brought piquant soups and freshly made bread. In the 2000s, Polish squatters brought… well, you get the idea. The best document we have of this shift is the vegan anarchist cookbook Grime and Nourishment, whose recipes for succotash, Pennsylvanian chowder, Argentinian stew, vegan escargot, Brazilian rice and colcannon detail the passing of many peoples through London. By 2005 (the year of ‘Kinky Korma, Salad Kudos, Avocado Krushin’, Mint Tea Klash and Mushroom & Kale fry up, 1 Kwid all in – no blaggers’ at 56a Infoshop), the days of squat slop were being banished for good. Cafe Ramallah at the Bacon Factory squat in Bankside provided people with ‘posh food and Palestinian music’, while the infamous Sex Cafe at 121 Centre served ‘HOT mexican tostadas with beans, salsa, salads and soya sour cream’, promising that this would be such ‘a sensual feast no cutlery will be provided’. If I remember, people were also directed to feed each other. A handwritten sign at the Sex Cafe jokingly advertised ‘Blow Jobs – £5. Round The Back’, but when a live sex peep show was enacted in the basement, it raised zero money from the shy nerds in attendance.

Though 2012’s law change did inevitably send squat cafes into decline, there is a culinary legacy of squats that can still be seen in London today. Most notably, Alara Wholefoods – once a 1970s food co-op squat in Euston’s Tolmers Square – is now, for better or worse, a multi-million-pound muesli business. Fareshares Food Co-op, who occupied the empty grocer’s shop in 1988 and still share a building with 56a Infoshop, characterised their squatted wholefood emporium as ‘not a shop [but] an experiment in community’. A Fareshares newsletter from 1991 reads, ‘Decent food, like housing, is a basic necessity and ideally shouldn’t cost anything at all. Fareshares is a small practical gesture in that direction’. That’s a great pithy encapsulation of what a somewhat lost ‘politics of food’ means!

Some squat cafes continued, showing an alternative way of consuming. During the 2010s, the squat Colorama 2 centre, near Elephant and Castle, ran a ‘People’s Kitchen’. On its blog, it wrote: ‘We live in an extremely rich, wasteful, and expensive society, we think that using food which has been thrown away but is in a perfectly fine condition is a really good alternative of providing cheap meals and undermining consumerism on a daily basis.’ Detailing a typical meal, made from skipped vegetables, at the People’s Kitchen, the blog continues: ‘We chopped vegetables for a curry, spiced and boiled beans for a bean salad, herbed and garliced nearly 40 portobello mushrooms for grilling, toasted rolls and made a large green salad.’ It was always cute to see the handwritten sign on the wall of Colorama 2: ‘Chaos in the Streets. Order in the Kitchen’. The implicit message was: Go to your protests and riots but please keep the cooker clean and do the dishes.

Of course, these encounters of squatting and serving and being served food are not free of social tensions, hierarchies of class or different privileges, abuse and crap behaviours, but no experiment is pure. Back then you could be middle-class and dress up as if you were poor in your squat in Brixton or Dalston. These days you can be middle-class and actually be poor in your shared rented home in Brixton or Dalston. Walking around London now, can you imagine how you could live more easily, more playfully? A reflective article in Camden News Journal by former squatter Jeremy Worman captures the utopian feeling of the early squats:

My visionary hope was to join a collectivist libertarian community (the squats had been going since 1974). For the first week it felt blissful. There was a cosy squatters’ cafe at the bottom of Hornsey Rise, providing wholesome food, magazines to read, chess and backgammon boards, people to chat to. This place exemplified my hippy dreams where no one was judged by their backgrounds but only by where we were trying to get to – a place beyond the destructive capitalist world.

Although a flyer from less than ten years ago (for ‘Scum Dine With Me’, a cafe run by ‘Squatters Against Gentrification’) promising ‘a free dinner every Thursday with your local squatters’ now seems from a Golden Age, it’s clear that the criminalisation of residential squatting has not killed things off forever. In April 2024, Gordon Ramsay’s closed-down York & Albany Hotel was ‘liberated’ for use as the Camden Art Cafe. The squatters’ communique says, ‘We aim to open our doors regularly to anyone and everyone … we provide free food, drinks, and a space [for people] to display their art’. The Daily Mail was outraged, of course, condemning the squatters but publishing a few lovely photos of the food.

Elsewhere, the Autonomous Winter Shelter crew have held spaces that function as free homes for homeless people. They say: ‘To open an empty space in order to provide food and clothing is to act in a meaningful way in this time of social emergency.’ According to one report, residents with no money to their name sometimes came with bags of food to share, having negotiated donations from neighbouring shops. Both go beyond satisfying individual housing needs, placing you in the beautiful social solidarities that squatters enact against contemporary London poverty and alienation.

So, here we are in 2026, and we’ve finally caught up with ourselves. Notions of how it was better in the past serve no one. Many of the things we might still enjoy in this currently cursed London come out of those historical energies, which have been transformed into existing wholefood co-ops or community cafes, bookshops, music venues and art spaces, women’s refuges, queer cabarets and Black community supplementary schools. These tales of squat cafes are only meant to point people towards the possibility of trying it out. The question is: what kind of life, in what kind of city, do you want? What kind of radical challenge can we make to the ever-increasing ghost towns of high streets, given over only to the buying of overpriced coffee and pastries? What deep hunger inside you drives you towards something different? Could you occupy yourself and others with a bit of squatting? Could you expand the glories of the glorious Food International? Could you and your mates be the rupture that breaks the impasse? It’s up to you, you good, good people!

Forward to, and beyond, SquatSlop, forever!

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Credits

Chris Jones is entering another decade in London Town, mostly at Elephant and Castle, within its recent ruination from regeneration. Chris volunteers at radical social centre 56a Infoshop and Archive and writes pamphlets about Southwark histories. He also writes other stuff and believes ‘better must come’ if we all put our minds to it.

All images courtesy of 56a Infoshop. Thanks to Egle Trezzi for her help with scanning them.

Thanks to Caterina. This piece is dedicated to Squatter Saul (RIP 2025).

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group.

As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording.

Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then.

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Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Songsoo Kim is based in London. She works for Super8 Restaurants (Kiln, Smoking Goat, Brat, Mountain) as head of sourcing and development. She has worked as a chef, and on farms for many years in South Korea, India, and the United States, which has led her to her work in a niche role in the restaurant industry. She is an advocate for farms and farmers and believes that cooking and the idea of deliciousness originate from the land.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Today’s review of a new Iranian-Iraqi café bistro in London Fields is by Hester van Hensbergen. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.

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The first time I encountered the chef Ziad Halub, he was apologising. It was the end of a hectic lunch shift at the newly opened Logma in London Fields this January and the sandwiches – gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine – had all sold out. A couple of the last orders had lost their customers and now some stragglers had muscled their way forward, hoping to get lucky in the confusion. Beneath the lacy, latex curtain of the kitchen, Halub’s partner Farsin Rabiee was quietly drizzling kashk, a musty fermented yoghurt, across the verdant bowl of ash-e-reshteh I’d ordered. It wasn’t yet 2pm, but they both seemed exhausted.

Logma’s ‘soft opening’ in late 2025 never really happened. Instead, owing to a gift for storytelling and appealing to the fashion and art worlds as well as to the online food community’s love of landscape-scale things between bread, the Iranian-Iraqi kitchen was catapulted into the ranks of some of London’s most ludicrously popular sandwich shops before it even had furniture. These are the kinds of places that are united by their sandwiches of boisterous size, their rainbow cross-sections and their signature breads: wood-fired, submarines, doorstop sandwich loaves, focaccia. They are the spots that get anointed by Eating with Tod, become known for their 30-40 minute lunchtime waits and soon outgrow their original sites to expand across the city. It’s a London sport. By joining the likes of nearby Dom’s Subs, which serves its footlongs out of Rasputin’s, a dive bar on Mare Street, and wood-fired sandwich shop Rogues in Bethnal Green, neither more than 15 minutes’ walk away, the arrival of Logma has cemented Hackney’s place on the leaderboard of sandwich neighbourhoods.

This all seems far from what Logma was supposed to be. After a year of supper clubs, Halub and Rabiee took on a lease on the shop in this quiet patch of Goldsmith Row, just north of Hackney City Farm and a few doors down from the Palestinian falafel bar, Zeytoona. Rabiee, who is Iranian-American and Swedish, and Halub, who is British-Iraqi, aren’t professionally trained chefs, so instead of a restaurant they’d envisaged a café-bistro inspired by the 20^th-century café culture of cities like Baghdad and Tehran: spaces not just for drinking but for dissent, and for the playing out of the cultural and political life of the city. The gap between the mid-century coffeehouse public sphere and mid-2020s TikTok-endorsed sandwich virality – mass mobilisation absent of social or political bonds – is, to say the least, sizable. But it’s also a classic problem, especially for first-time proprietors: the mismatch between a fantasy and the emergent chaos of its reality. Whether or not they could have predicted the effect of their pitas on a city filled with a small army of sandwich influencers, Logma clearly had potential. As I sat down in the park and took off my winter gloves for my first spoon of curative soup, I wanted to know what they would do with it.

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