Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we are publishing a graphic essay by Ella Bucknall about eating through childhood, and grief. We strongly recommend reading this version of Ella’s essay, which has been drawn and designed by Ella, in your web browser, but you can read it in standard text format below.

We have sold three-quarters of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

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As children, my brother Patrick and I were obsessed with sharing. When a big glass bowl of Angel Delight was deposited onto the kitchen table, we would carve a territorial X onto the sugary surface of the mousse and mark each butterscotch quadrant with our initials: C for Caroline (Mum), A for Aidan (Dad), P for Patrick, and E for Ella. Even so, the milky dessert could still become a battlefield if – at a certain angle – the convex backs of spoons threatened the delineated borders.

Aside from Angel Delight, Patrick often rejected food, a cause of great anguish for our Mum. She tempted him with vegetables through green bean races and blind pepper tasting games but, for the most part, he only wanted sweets. I often joke that I became vegetarian around the age of six because of The Simpsons – that haunting image of the little lamb bleating ‘Please Lisa, I thought you loved me’ – but I wonder now if it wasn’t also a bid for parental attention. As we grew older, my eating habits became more constrained, while Pat’s former fussiness turned into an expansive and indiscriminating appetite. He had seen my hunger win praise, I had seen his restrictions garner concern.

In any case, no one ever refused Angel Delight. It experienced a revival in the nineties after a promotional campaign featuring Wallace and Gromit. On Christmas Day in 2024, Aardman Animations released a new Wallace and Gromit film, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which Pat watched while working his way through a party-sized cylinder of Twiglets – one of several – which he always ate during the festive period. In the spirit of Wallace and Gromit, we also ate plenty of cheese over the holidays, dipping toast into baked camembert and sharing Waitrose fromagerie selection boxes.

We were no longer so scrupulous about equitable divisions by the time we were adults.

Just over a year earlier, Pat had returned from six years in Montreal and moved into a flat four doors down from me in my building in London. While we were living in such close proximity, I would frequently knock on with a leftover tray bake or a stew. I did not have a freezer, and have always struggled to cook for one, so I plied Pat with food, like he might waste away without my intervention. Spag bols. Enchiladas. Blue cheese, shallot and chard pies. In return, he would brew thick, melty hot chocolate with bars of Tony’s Chocolonely. He baked apple pies with apples scrumped from the tree next to the stairs of our flats.

That year, I was sad all summer after a relationship had ended. Still, Pat knew how to coax me outside. ‘Pick blackberries with me.’ We harvested the fruit from the bramble in the garden, and ate it with my banana bread, his golden syrup and yoghurt. As adults, food became a shared language when words failed us.

Pat and I did not always get along. In fact, we argued a lot. Usually, I think, the crux of these arguments was that we both sought some acknowledgement from one another: I matter too. I have suffered too. Sometimes, during a dispute, Pat would say, ‘Hm, either way’, an economical phrase to end a disagreement without conceding. It was infuriating. After one row, I left a box of chocolates on his windowsill, but he did not answer my texts for several days. The next time we saw each other, we went on a walk around Brockwell Park. Ordinarily, we would pretend that nothing had happened and never return to the argument, but this time I forced an excruciating conversation.

‘It hurts my feelings when you shut me out,’ I said.

The next time we fought, Pat turned up at my door after a few days with a tray of potato dauphinoise. On another walk towards the end of the year, he told me that he thought we could talk about anything with each other now.

As Christmas approached, we decided to put together stockings for our parents. Amongst other things, Pat gifted them a bee decoration, a ceramic apple each, and pots of honey. I bought them honey, too, as well as a t-shirt with an oak tree graphic on it (for Dad) and a journal with an oak tree illustration on the front (for Mum). Something about the stockings made Dad tearful.

After we returned from our parents’ house in Stockport to London, we saw each other a few more times, once on New Year’s Eve, when we lit sparklers and watched the fireworks in the garden with our neighbours, and once incidentally when we were both leaving for the shops at the same time.

Pat was very excited about a new shop which sold pistachio spread and organic veggies. Walking home, vegetables flew out of his overloaded backpack. ‘My leeks!’ He exclaimed, comically, hands raised to the sky, as he scrambled to retrieve them. I had bought a loaf of sourdough. When we got back to our building, we broke the bread in two.

Less than a week later, Patrick was dead.

Patrick died of a heart attack on 6 January 2025, completely unexpectedly. Since moving back to the UK, he had become especially interested in English and Celtic folklore, inspired by our joint English and Irish heritage. The day before he died, he had been drawing a Dara knot, which symbolises the oak tree, a gateway to the Otherworld. Celtic knots are intricate never-ending lines that represent eternity, the interconnectedness of life, and the cyclical nature of existence – a striking image for Pat to have etched just hours before death.

In retrospect, other things he had done in that last year started to feel like signs. His return to London, our birthplace. His insistence that we visit Glastonbury Tor, considered a gateway between worlds or a ‘thin place’, en route to our Granny’s funeral in October. Even the stockings for our parents – bees being messengers of the dead in Celtic mythology, apples the fruit of the Otherworld. It felt as if somehow, unconsciously, he was preparing.

I think that I had been preparing, too. The night before I discovered Patrick’s body, I picked up a book from my over-stocked bookshelves and read the first fifty pages. It was I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson, which charts the aftermath of a sister who receives a phone call saying that her brother has suddenly died. In an entry in my diary dated seven weeks prior, I had written: ‘I am terrified about Pat learning to ride a motorbike. I feel like I can foresee his death; it’s awful … I need to exercise patience and enjoy him for his quirks etc. while he’s here.’

In May 2025 after he died, I went to Wales with my friend Sophie over Beltane, a time in the Celtic calendar when the veil between worlds is believed to be thin. Having dreamt of Patrick in the night, I awoke with a sense of living half in reality, half in a dream. It was a beautiful spring day, and Sophie had made sandwiches which we took with us to a nearby lake. They were among the best I have ever eaten: fresh white bread cut into thick, pillowy slices, melting butter, sharp cheddar, tart and chunky pickle. We were hungry for them after a swim and ate quietly, drying off in the heat of the sun.

I broke the silence to tell Sophie that, since Pat had died, I had been fluctuating between a feeling of complete ‘what’s the point’ nihilism, and then feeling like I wanted to savour every bite. ‘Maybe it will always be like this,’ I reflected. Nevertheless, right then, in that moment, I felt joy.

I wrote in my diary that night on 1 May: ‘Intense dreams about Pat. Sad morning. Took delicious cheese and pickle (with lots of butter) sandwiches down to the lake and swam. I told Sophie, “this is what life is about. This is all we have.” ’

Ten days later, I was back at home scrolling through my phone when a suggested poem popped up on Instagram called ‘The Gate’ by Marie Howe. The poem begins: ‘I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother’s body made’.

I felt a chill as I reached the end:

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

I couldn’t believe it. The cheese sandwich. The demonstrative pronoun – ‘this’.

My parents have their own experiences of ‘cosmic coincidences’, as we have come to call them – Yeats poems, circumzenithal arcs, asking an oak tree for a sign, receiving a clap of thunder. There are different ways to explain this phenomenon. Psychologists might call it apophenia, the human tendency to perceive patterns in disparate information. A physical explanation might be entanglement, what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’. Entanglement is the idea that once two particles have become intimately linked, they will share a single quantum state, regardless of the distance separating them. In other words, they will continue to interact outside of space and time. Others might call this God.

However, the Celtic understanding of the world has suited me best in grief, the idea that time is not linear, that everything is interconnected. Through Patrick’s interest in our ancestral mythologies, it was as if he had unknowingly carved out a narrative to help us make sense of his sudden death.

We spread Pat’s ashes at the Drake Stone in Northumberland, somewhere we used to go as children, another thin place. At the Drake Stone, I placed an apple on a cairn. I drizzled honey over the rocks, the dandelion goo oozing slowly from the jar. Finally, as in the Irish tradition, I poured whiskey onto the ground.

After he had dispersed, we ate Tunnock’s Teacakes, his favourite snack. I took a bite. ‘I don’t actually want this,’ I laughed. ‘Give it to Pat,’ Dad replied, so I set the half-eaten confection down on the cairn, an offering.

It feels impossible to write about Patrick without guilt. I do not have his permission, and his is not my story to tell. When I wrote his eulogy, it felt absurd trying to flatten such a rich life into 2,000 words, but I wanted to transcribe as much as I could remember in case my brain could not contain it. I continue to feel this urge to record and catalogue. But I cannot write him alive again.

For Christmas 2025, our first without him, we ate our meals as a family of four, on a table set for three. He is never not in the room.

On New Year’s Eve, I moved out of mine and Pat’s old building and into a new flat with a freezer, where leftovers will no longer feel painful. I brought Patrick’s pans with me. Every time I cook, I think of him.

Credits

Ella Bucknall is a writer and illustrator based in SE London who specialises in graphic narratives. Ella is currently working on a graphic biography of Virginia Woolf and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at King’s College London. Ella’s clients include the FT, BBC, and TLS, among other publications.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we are publishing a graphic essay by Ella Bucknall about eating through childhood, and grief. Ella’s essay has been laid out as an image file. To read the essay in a standard text format instead click here.

We recommend reading today’s piece in your browser.

We have sold three-quarters of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

Subscribe now

Credits

Ella Bucknall is a writer and illustrator based in SE London who specialises in graphic narratives. Ella is currently working on a graphic biography of Virginia Woolf and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at King’s College London. Ella’s clients include the FT, BBC, and TLS, amongst other publications.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants!

A quick reminder that there are only three days left to apply for the Food Stories Fellowship Award. This prize will be awarded to someone who needs to use the British Library’s unique food collections to inform a piece of new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture. The winner will be awarded £1500 to facilitate use of these collections, have access to British Library curatorial support, be mentored by editors at Vittles, and have their finished article published in the magazine. If you have an idea for an essay, we urge you to apply for the award here by 27 April.

We’re back in the capital this week with the latest in our series of special Six of Ones, this time for a breakfast special. The enabling constraint for our writers was unexpected, which has brought forth some excellent examples of the most important meal of the day. Below you’ll hear from Taran Khan about lamb chops from a British caff cooked by the guy who used to run the breakfasts at the Wolseley; Tom Usher’s alternative to a protein shake; Sejal Sukhadwala and Naseer Chia on two versions of hospital breakfast (including a very unexpected live dosa station), and Panayiota Soutis and Ivan Kirwan-Taylor on unexpected Greek and Sri Lankan specials at two different British cafes.

Next week, look out for the latest episode of the Vittles podcast, when Adam will be chatting to Songsoo Kim from the Super 8 Restaurant group.

Till then, good morning!

1. Lamb chops at Deja Brew

‘Tell her I want rice with spinach, spicy, and she knows,’ my friend Ragu texted me when he found I was back in Deja Brew Cafe, his beloved local breakfast spot in Brockley. The ‘she knows’ referred to Szilvia, who runs the place with her husband, chef Toure.

The couple began the venture as a way to spend more time together. Before that, says their website, Toure was ‘in charge of breakfast’ at the Wolseley in Piccadilly, as well as at other central London spots like The Langham and the Savoy. This accounts for the easy virtuosity of his omelettes and breakfast spreads with eggs – in truth, Deja Brew would be a standout on these alone. But the real pull of the place for Ragu, and now for me, are the grills.

The first morning we visited together, we ordered lamb chops on a bed of couscous, imbued with a spicy ratatouille, as well as chicken kebabs that came with rice, also mixed with the ratatouille. On my next visit, I hit the kofte meatballs – a mix of lamb and beef mince – as well as the sea bass, which was crisp and delightful. The grills are on offer from 7am each day: Szilvia says this is because they get builders coming in early, looking for a breakfast that will let them work through the day without stopping for lunch. For a vegetarian option, I sampled Ragu’s rice with spinach, which came with a sauce spicy enough even for our Indian palates.

Deja Brew has red and black diner-style seating, and each person who walked in was greeted by the staff like an old friend, or at the very least a regular. A couple had their order called out as they entered and a runner training for the marathon was offered encouragement as he left. It’s a place where friends meet for lunch and fathers bring daughters for milkshakes on the way home from school. The soundtrack moved between the Backstreet Boys and Neil Diamond, adding to the feeling of being in a familiar place. In an area thick with pretty cafés offering vibes and mediocre food, Deja Brew is a rare find. Taran Khan

319 Brockley Rd, SE4 2QZ

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing Nick Bramham’s recipe for spanakorizo, a Greek spinach and rice dish that is regularly on the menu at Quality Wines.

Recently we published our spring recipe supplement, featuring seasonal soup recipes from three of our favourite food writers: Melek Erdal, Ixta Belfrage and Songsoo Kim. You can access these recipes and dozens more with a Vittles subscription, which costs £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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You can also support us by buying Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, which is available here.

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Spanakorizo, which literally translates as ‘spinach rice’, is a traditional Greek dish that you are unlikely to find in Greek restaurants, even in Greece (believe me, I’ve tried). It’s typically made at home – an everyday chuck-it-all-in-a-pot-and-forget-about-it kind of a dish, the gold standard of minimum-effort, maximum-reward cooking. Spring onions and garlic are softened in olive oil, then joined by rice, spinach and water and left to simmer gently while you potter about doing something else for an hour. You’ll return to a silky homogeneous risotto-esque mass, which you then spike with copious amounts of dill, lemon and black pepper.

Spanakorizo is a total godsend during this mercurial hot–cold period before the truly exciting spring produce (asparagus, broad beans, courgettes) peaks, when you’re craving something fresh and zippy but also soulful and comforting. I’ve been serving it at Quality Wines around this time for the past few years now, with barrel-aged feta crumbled over the top, a good glug of olive oil and our crusty house focaccia. While this is enough to satisfy most, it does also work well as a garnish for roast chicken, grilled pork chops or steamed fish. I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: do not be stingy with the lemon.

Spanakorizo

Serves 2
Time ~1 hour

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Robin Craig writes about the role that food plays in his sex life, and the broader connections between food and kink.

In other news, there’s just one week left to apply for the British Library’s Food Stories Fellowship Award. The winner of this fellowship will receive £1500 to support them to use the British Library’s food collections to produce a piece of new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture, which will be published in Vittles. More details are available here (deadline 27 April).

Today’s essay is free to all subscribers. To support our work, 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 our restaurant coverage. You can also support us by buying Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, which is available here.

Buy Issue 2

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There is a pile of pad thai in front of me, ordered from a delivery app and hastily dumped onto a plate. It’s still hot – steam rises in tendrils, the noodles glistening, coiled and ready like snakes, in the low light of my bedroom. The sight makes my stomach churn. I petulantly turn my head away and say that I don’t want it anymore.

For a moment, there is silence. My palms are clammy and my breath comes in short and shallow; I know there will be consequences for my transgression. Slowly, my companion’s hand finds its way to the back of my neck, where it rests in a display of both care and domination. He sighs deeply, as though disappointed.

‘Eat it,’ he says. The hand on my neck squeezes slightly. Again I say ‘No’ and try to turn my head away, but the hand slides up into my hair and grips it tightly, then pulls me back towards the plate. He scoops up a forkful of noodles and pushes it against my lips.

‘Eat it,’ he repeats, and I relent, opening my mouth for him. The pad thai is salty-sweet on my tongue and slides easily down my throat. He watches me chew, and swallow, then raises another forkful to my lips for us to begin again.

*

This was a pre-arranged kink meet-up (also known as a scene) I did a few years ago, in which I had explicitly requested to be treated poorly. Specifically, I wanted to be fed – or rather, forced to eat – and my scene partner, whom I knew well, enthusiastically agreed. The scene was part of a wider dynamic of domination and submission: I willingly gave him power over me in exchange for a space where I could relinquish autonomy and drift, easily, on the decisions made by someone else. Within its confines, there in my bedroom, I could pass control of my life over to his competent hands for a few hours, including what to say, what to do – and, crucially, what to eat.

It was not the first time I had asked someone to control my food intake. Over the past decade, I have sought partners who have variously ordered for me at restaurants, held my hair back and forced me to down a pint of water, and tied me to a chair and fed me cake as part of erotic play. Each of these scenarios was requested and pre-negotiated, and each fulfilled a need in me: often, my partners have play-acted ‘forcing’ me to eat foods I like and enabled me to indulge in my desires. I have a relentless drive to give control of my food over to someone else – I have, in a sense, hungered for it.

My proclivity for being fed is defined as a kink, as sexual activity or desire that falls outside social norms. Kink is, however, difficult to define on its own terms: as soon as you land on a stable and steady definition, it begins to morph again into something new. (It is also relatively common: in a Canadian study, nearly half of the 1,040 individuals surveyed expressed an interest in an ‘unusual’ sexual desire like voyeurism or masochism, while a third had tried out an unusual sexual practice at least once.)

Of the many kinks that involve food, one of the better-known ones is feederism – sexual attraction and gratification related to fatness or gaining weight, often involving highly eroticised feeding sessions in which one partner feeds the other ‘unhealthy’ or high-fat food with the sole intention of inducing weight gain. Beyond feederism, food shows up across the kink spectrum in various ways, whether in softer acts of sensory deprivation (think: feeding a blindfolded partner erotically charged foods like whipped cream or strawberries), sploshing (being covered in gooey substances like pudding or pies) or as an element of pet play, in which one partner play-acts as an animal and may be fed treats for good behaviour. In my case, food is part of a Dom/sub kink dynamic I have enjoyed with various partners over the past decade, where food acts as a tool of control.

Since antiquity, food has been associated with sexuality, pleasure and carnality, with phallic gourds and sapphic figs cropping up throughout art history, and the connection remains strong in the contemporary imagination. So, the link between food and kink is not particularly surprising: kink takes the often unspoken associations, power dynamics and desires that are already present in culture and renders them visible, tangible.

‘Our cultural relationship with food is very complex,’ Anastasiia Fedorova, author of Second Skin: Inside the World of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire, tells me. ‘It’s a cornerstone of feelings like shame and desire, especially if we think of diet culture.’ Food also has ‘huge associations with control and agency, which can be eroticised by voluntarily and consensually giving that agency away,’ she continues. ‘It can be a way to let go of shame and control.’

Certainly, that is true in my case: food has personal associations with both shame and indulgence that, when forced upon me, are fertile ground for erotic enjoyment. To give control to someone else in this manner can be intensely vulnerable – they can do what they like with you, and letting someone else feed you is allowing them to put whatever they want inside your body. With this vulnerability comes intimacy and care: the person doing the feeding provides an almost parental act of nourishment. For my part, in a culture in which our worth is consistently defined by our bodies, our weight and our diets, giving over responsibility for what goes in my mouth can be blissful. The constant awareness of calories – and the imperative to make ‘good decisions’ and ‘healthy choices’ – slips away, and I am, for a moment, left to simply exist and eat. Playing at refusing to eat and then being ‘forced’ to, as with the pad thai, is merely a way of pushing at the boundaries and being pleasurably reminded of my place within them.

Feeding someone during a scene can bring just as much enjoyment. A friend of mine who likes baking for people as part of kink dynamics tells me that she enjoys the mixture of care and discomfort. ‘When someone is eating [something you’ve made], they’re in a very vulnerable place,’ she says. ‘You’re watching the person eat, watching their response, and making sure they finish it. It’s not an explicit domination, but it’s a subtle and quite powerful one.’ Gender factors into it, too: she describes her baking kink as a form of ‘empowered feminine eroticisation’ that takes a traditionally feminine role and reconstitutes it as a domineering form of care.

Fundamentally, this heady mixture of care, shame and control is at the heart of kink and our cultural relationship with food. To be fed is to be sustained, looked after and, often, to be loved. Kink hits many of the same notes. When I ask someone to feed me as part of a scene, I am seeking their attention and care just as much as their control. Truly comprehending what makes a person tick – and how to provide that for them, safely – takes significant effort. It’s an act of devotion similar to cooking a dish for someone that includes their favourite flavours. Certainly what Fedorova says about the importance of care in kink could just as easily apply to making a meal for a loved one: ‘You take your time understanding the person and they take time articulating their boundaries and desires. Then you care for them in a way which maybe they can’t be cared for elsewhere.’ That is, perhaps, all we can hope for from another person – regardless of whether they are feeding us, fucking us, or both.

Credits

Robin Craig is a sex, health and culture writer based in London. He has previously written for the Guardian, Huck, and Feeld, among others, and is currently working on his first book, Perverts: A History (John Murray Press, 2028). He runs the Substack Body Hunger and can be found on Instagram (@robin__craig).

Olivia Sterling (born 1996, Peterborough) earned her BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby in 2018 and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at Dirimart Pera (2026); East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts (2026); Meyer Riegger (2024); Goldsmiths CCA (2021); and Cob Gallery (2021); and participated in group exhibitions including ‘I’m so gay for you’ (miłość gallery, 2025), ‘Rage Comics’ (Huxley Parlour, 2023), ‘Out Here’ (Steve Turner Gallery, 2023), ‘Saints and Sinners’ (Guts Gallery, 2023), ‘The Object Stares Back’ (Tube Culture Hall, 2023) and ‘London Grads Now’ (Saatchi Gallery, 2020). Residencies include HQI Summer Residency (2020) and Extended Contexts, National Trust IIam, UK (2016). Olivia lives and works in London.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

• ‘Disaster Cooking’ by Robin Craig

• ‘Sweetness and Substance’ by Robin Craig

• Hannah Levene on the role of food in lesbian feminist literature

Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Today, we take a break from our London coverage to bring you the second instalment of Six of One’s sister column, Half a Dozen of the Other, where six writers offer recommendations in towns or cities that are reachable from the capital for a day-trip.

As with issue one, we do also hope that this guide is useful for those who live locally. Below you’ll find Hana Loftus telling you about one of the most mercurial ramen shops in the country; Shekha Vyas eats all the pies in Reading; Ruby Atkin and Alexandra Pereira both find themselves in Margate; Naseer Chia details the importance of the kopitiam generally, but specifically the one he found in Bristol, while Susannah Moody tells us about an excellent south Indian restaurant, run by an accountant and an urologist, in Cambridge.

We hope you enjoy today’s edition, and please also do always feel free to pitch to us with recommendations for outside of London and we will try to do these issues more often. AC

1. G.Neko, Colchester

I come across the former pub, painted a bilious blue and halfway to the Colchester suburbs, but it appears to be closed. I check my phone: no, this is the correct place. I push the door and find myself facing a sliding screen painted with a giant orange-eyed cat. Welcome to the dreamworld of G, a Chinese former accountancy student in love with Japan, and T, his front-of-house partner. To this half-Japanese eater who also has a half-dreamt relationship with her mother’s country, G and T’s izakaya G.Neko is about as perfect as it gets.

G describes his Hsinking beef noodles as a memory of his hometown, yet it is entirely his own invention. The rich broth is clear as water, with a deep spice that lingers in your throat and chilli oil pearls that coat the soft cubes of beef as you lift them out of the bowl. The outstanding springy noodles are made to G’s precise method by his father. A folded-skin tofu block is made from scratch by his mother and added to a milky soy broth along with ajitsuke egg, finely sliced black fungus and those noodles that mimic the mouthfeel of the fungus strands. The tonkotsu broth is elevated, surprisingly, with a roux made from chicken schmaltz. Instead of the traditional chashu curl, two freshly sliced wafers of Serrano ham are griddled for a second for deeper smoke before turning opaque in the soup, their fat dissolving on the tongue.

Beyond the broths, there are spare ribs that come as a nugget of bone surrounded by just enough fat to sizzle under a crinkle of batter, drizzled with aged vinegar and spring onions. The surprise is a sprinkle of dried rose petals and lime zest, an imagined leap to a shady Damascus courtyard. Then there are East Asian padrón peppers and pork scratchings, a beef tongue carpaccio with yuzu and charred green pepper paste and chicken wings with scotch bonnets that the couple grow themselves, so they can be picked slightly under-ripe, when they are at their most fragrant.

We drink Asahi out of dimpled aluminium cups, then try great sake, warm or chilled. G.Neko offers insane precision, wit and warmth at an affordable price (a meal for four was £90), so you’ll share the room with sixth-form students, big and small families, solo eaters, musicians. They say they won’t leave Colchester, and I hope they don’t break their word. Hana Loftus

94 Military Rd, Colchester CO1 2AN

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Good afternoon, and welcome back to Vittles. First of all, thank you so much to everyone who came out to the Food in Print Fair at the weekend to support independent food magazines. We hope you found a new favourite publication, or were inspired, perhaps, to start your own. A huge thanks too to FatBoy Zine and Pit who put it on with us. We’re already thinking about next year…

The fair means we have officially sold out of Issue 1 of our print magazine, but we do have some copies of Issue 2 left. If you haven’t got it yet, then make sure you don’t miss out.

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Unfortunately, today’s newsletter is about a subject that is becoming a running theme in London: evictions of small food businesses. Frankly, in the last ten years of writing about food in the city, we have never known it to be so bad. In October last year, we reported on the evictions at Castle Square, which included one of London’s best restaurants – Kaieteur Kitchen. Last month, it was Brixton Plaza. Last week, we reported from the protests at the Ridley Road Indoor Market.

Today’s newsletter by Zoe Suen reports on perhaps the biggest story of all: the proposed evictions at Queensway Market, which houses some of central London’s best restaurants, including many we have recommended over the past decade. What these evictions show is that, despite acclaim from food publications or hidden-gem reels, the survival of some of London’s most accomplished restaurants is dependent on precarious, short-term contracts and the whims of landlords and developers. There is a petition to sign here and at the end of this email, but do please support these businesses in person: both with your continued custom, and, when the times comes, by showing up for them.

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In 2024, Rafidah ‘Fidah’ Aslam left the West Midlands to set up Kampong Bites, a casual Malaysian food stall in London’s Queensway Market that serves nasi lemak, char kuey teow, and teh tarik. Ten years earlier, Fidah, a single mother, had quit her engineering job to sell Malaysian curry puffs from home, enabling her to spend more quality time with her sons. After selling her pastries in Aldridge and Nottingham, she wanted to try her luck in the capital.

She was drawn to the indoor market, which is at the heart of Queensway’s ‘Malaysian village’, partly because of its diversity (Queensway is also home to Greek, Russian, Brazilian and Arab communities) and partly by the low costs, which made it a hub for accessibly priced and acclaimed food. Inside its dense maze of ‘anything-goes’ vendors selling iPhone repairs and bargain haircuts, you can find beloved restaurants like Uzbek Corner, Brazilian House and Syrian spot Abu Maher. By opening in the market, Fidah was joining a winning Malaysian contingent headed by Cham Kampung Boy and, of course, Normah’s, which for years has been touted as one of London’s best restaurants.

Soon after Kampong Bites opened, Fidah began to hear rumours that the market might be in danger of closing. This was nothing new: the market has, for decades, yo-yoed between closure and a charmingly chaotic brand of business as usual. There were often investors sniffing around and contractors taking measurements, but nothing ever came of this interest, longtime tenants assured Fidah.

But in early March, the management team warned her in person that ‘the place 100% would close’. A fortnight later, on 20 March, traders were served break notices stating that their leases would be terminated on 23 April by solicitors acting for their landlord, Happybadge Limited (a company founded by Bourne Capital, which counts Ronnie Scotts among its property portfolio). Since the notices were served, a one-month extension has been granted, meaning that the market is now scheduled to close for good on 23 May. Most of the tenants are speaking to a solicitor, although management is offering to relocate those who do not do so to a stretch of stores around the back for four-to-six months.

When I spoke with Fidah last week, she was packing. ‘I found this place and put my heart into it,’ she tells me, scrolling through photos of the renovations she paid for with £30,000 in life savings. ‘It’s heartbreaking.’ Despite the substantial personal investment she made in the site, as a recent tenant, Fidah says that she isn’t entitled to much compensation.

The traders have learned since being served notice that at least a chunk of the market is destined to become a Whole Foods (the Amazon-owned retailer is on an opening spree, with another new outpost planned a ten-minute walk away in Notting Hill Gate; there’s already a branch within walking distance on Kensington High Street). A rumour is circulating that the remainder of the site will become a gym. The fate of Normah’s, Cham Kampung Boy, Riz Garden and Uzbek Corner – which have been written about extensively in this publication or elsewhere as being among the best food stalls in the capital – remains uncertain.

Queensway Market is the latest, and most high-profile, potential casualty in a wave of redevelopments targeting London’s most diverse and affordable indoor markets – from Brixton Plaza to Ridley Road. Located amid some of London’s most expensive real estate, the market is a curious anomaly – a ramshackle, suburban mall right in the centre of the city. It was originally part of the Queens Ice Club, the 1930s predecessor to Queens Skate Dine Bowl (which is now located next door), and was converted to retail use in the late nineties. For nearly two decades, it operated on a series of temporary planning permissions, which effectively placed it in a state of perennial limbo.

Consistent lease renewals helped Queensway Market to survive despite opposition at times from Westminster Council and some locals, while its temporary standing kept it affordable for independent traders. However, this lack of long-term security also left the site vulnerable when a wave of gentrification hit the area in the 2010s – a few years after the market was acquired by Happybadge in 2007.

In 2013, a consortium led by Meyer Bergman (now known as MARK Capital Management) and the Brunei-backed fund SIAHAF consolidated much of Queensway’s real estate, including the landmark £115 million Whiteleys shopping centre (now rebranded as The Whiteley). By the end of the year, the consortium controlled around 75% of Queensway’s properties, paving the way for large-scale redevelopment.

Now, opposite Queensway Station sits Park Modern, a £500 million apartment block, on the ground floor of which resides Jeremy King’s restaurant The Park. Although some hoardings are still up at The Whiteley, open businesses include a Third Space gym (somewhat ironically named), a gallery, a Guillam coffee branch, an Everyman Cinema and a branch of the five-star Six Senses hotel. The price of the luxury apartments in the upper floors of the former shopping centre – with one-bed flats going for £1.85 million a five-bed penthouse on the market for almost £40 million – gives a sense of the target customers for gentrified Queensway businesses.

‘We actually like the grit and grunginess of Queensway,’ Neil Jacobs, the former CEO of Six Senses Hotel Group, said in an interview with Spear’s last January. ‘Although the gentrification of the area will be well received, we don’t want it to change too much.’

The effects of redevelopment are also visible elsewhere. Along Queensway, other sites are in limbo; opposite The Whiteley, storefronts are boarded up, destined for demolition. Having lived in the area for years and eaten at its restaurants more times than I can count, I can’t help but see Queensway Market’s fate as a harbinger of the future for other independent restaurants in the vicinity, establishments that are increasingly anomalous in central London as VCs and developers mould more and more neighbourhoods into a whitewashed, palatable urban pockets infused with cherrypicked Euro-aesthetics for good measure (case in point: the Queensway Steering Group, which includes Bourne Capital, has laid out plans for pavement dining en terrasse).

The irony is obvious, but staggering: the virality and acclaim of places like Normah’s is proof that the very things developers are working to ape – culture, community, character – are most concentrated in the very sites they’re gutting. As Mohammed Ali Salha put it, Queensway Market is ‘a place that’s doing what The Whiteley or other developments and food halls hope to accomplish (and rarely do), which is to incubate unique, imaginative food talent’.

And though the market’s history of temporary planning permissions discouraged landlords from investing in the site, its vendors have done the opposite. Like Kampong Bites’s Fidah, Zafarjon Odinaev, who opened Queensway Market’s Uzbek Corner with his brother, invested heavily in his unit. He estimates that he’s poured over £100,000 into the kitchen and interiors. Zafarjon, like almost all the other vendors I spoke to, lives locally. ‘We built a community over ten years, and now we have to tell them we are closing. It is not enough time; it is not acceptable,’ he says. ‘As tenants, we should know what’s going on, but it seems we are the ones running after them.’

As I speak to vendors, I glimpse the market’s ecosystem at work, as well as its place in the wider organism that is Queensway. Fidah takes me to chat with Muna Noor, who for eight years has helped run the Sudanese spot Zanoor Café, the go-to for coffee, karak tea and basbousa for those leaving the market’s community mosque. Riz Garden’s Michelle – whose Cantonese desserts, such as red bean soup and black sesame soup, have sustained my cravings since she opened in mid-2025 – gets her screens fixed by fellow traders. Luai Gabani, who’s leased a spot for computer repairs since 2002, takes his family to Normah’s, Uzbek Corner and Zanoor Café. Mohamad, who has run the market’s juice stall since 2009, tells me his customers live near Joe & the Juices but buy his drinks instead.

‘You might be able to get better coffee elsewhere, but here, you aren’t a stranger,’ Khaled Heidar, a longtime customer at Zanoor Café, says. ‘You’re treated with care and love. It’s like walking into your own house.’

Though they have loyal friends and clients on their sides, Mohammad Zaiaznoorrul Shah, who serves Malaysian classics like nasi lemak at Cham Kampung Boy, echoes a common sentiment: the vendors aren’t equipped to fight the evictions. ‘I’m upset, but what can I do? I’m just a small potato. I have to look for somewhere else,’ he tells me.

Like Fidah, Michelle and Zafarjon, Mohammad has built a community of customers through word of mouth and social media. But also like the others, he’s struggling to hatch a plan that doesn’t entail high rents. Fidah paid £450 a week, electricity included, in her first year at the market, and £472 in her second – a fraction of what it costs to rent a commercial space in most of Central.

Amid the ongoing spate of evictions across London, Queensway was proof (perhaps most of all) that uncurated food spaces could exist in the heart of the capital and thrive, not in spite of their unglamorous locations but because of them. But as the other markets hang in the balance, some of the best restaurants in the city face the very real possibility of having nowhere to go.

‘There is no point if I have to sell a dish for more than £20 – people won’t come anymore,’ Mohammad says. For him, the market was always meant to be a stepping stone to a permanent space, but if he can’t find a reasonably priced alternative, his plan is to go fully online. It’s an option Michelle – who is looking for spaces in Queensway and Paddington, as she doesn’t want to lose her local clientele – is also weighing.

‘Some vendors say they’ll put money together and share a space, someone suggested renting a big space to all move to,’ she says. ‘But it’s all talk so far, all up in the air.’

A petition to stop Amazon from turning the market into a Whole Foods currently has amassed over 1,000 signatures. But as things currently stand, London is set to lose one of its most vital food and community hubs – one that is so its own suspended time and place that it couldn’t exist anywhere else. Once Queensway Market is gone, there won’t be anything like it left.

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Credits

Zoe Suen is a Hong Kong-born, London-based writer covering topics including fashion, beauty and food. You can find more of her writing on her newsletter Floss.

Zaineb Abelque is a photographer and artist whose work explores belonging, spirituality, ritual, cultural memory and identity. Through documentary photography, Abelque creates a visual record of people and place. Capturing moments from everyday life, she tells individual and collective stories, as personal observations meet shared experience.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today we have a longread by Dora Taylor, who reports from Jamaica on how food systems and farmers are faring in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa.

A quick reminder that we are partnering with the British Library Food Awards again this year on the Food Stories Fellowship Award. The winner of this fellowship will receive £1500 to support them to use the British Library’s food collections to produce a piece of new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture, which will be published in Vittles. The deadline for applications is 27 April. More details are available here.

Finally, we have sold the bulk of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

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How Hurricane Melissa Affected Food and Farming in Jamaica

Report by Dora Taylor. Photographs by Ailsa Jones.

It’s the week before Christmas in Hopewell, a small coastal town in the parish of Hanover in northwest Jamaica. The town is bustling, cars stacked impossibly across side streets, people yelling greetings across the road. In front of me, a man leans out the window of his battered pick-up truck, signalling to someone walking past. ‘How ya family?’ he shouts. ‘Nobody dead!’, the friend replies, beaming.

It’s two months since Hurricane Melissa, the strongest to ever hit the island, made landfall in Jamaica on 28 October 2025. In Hopewell, most businesses have only just reopened, though shelves are sparsely stocked, several stores have no power, and shops are only taking cash (with no functioning cash machines nearby). Nevertheless, life bubbles defiantly on. I smell frying chicken and the pungent ocean tang of fish tea from the nearby street-food vendors who have returned to business, but I cannot find ackee, plantain or soursop, which would be plentiful right now if the storm hadn’t stripped them from the trees. Most of all, I have been craving the fragrant burn of country pepper. So, when I spot a man selling the small, wrinkled bulbs in yellow and green, I am elated. I ask about the price: four thousand Jamaican dollars (~£19) per pound.

I am joined by other shoppers when I exclaim in protest at this fourfold increase, but the seller remains firm. Beside me, Bernadine, who’s selling cabbage, carrot and scallion, is watching. ‘That will all get wasted because they’re selling it for too high a price,’ she tells me, ‘and people hungry right now. It don’t make no sense.’ Since the hurricane, food scarcity has caused prices to jump: cucumbers and yams have doubled in price; carrots, cabbage and scallion have all tripled; sweet peppers have gone from $100 to $1000 dollars per pound (~50p to £5). Because Bernadine has had to increase her prices, her offering is small; she doesn’t see the point in stocking crops like country pepper that people can’t afford.

The proportion of foreign produce in the market has also increased. Although Jamaica has long been heavily dependent on imported produce, around 60% of this has historically gone to hotels, restaurants and institutions; local markets usually stock a majority of of domestic crops, often sold by the farmers who’ve grown them. But since the hurricane, Bernadine tells me that ‘Our own onion mash up, our own potato mash up’ – she gestures round the market – ‘all the onions you see here are from Canada.’ None of Bernadine’s produce is imported, but another vendor shows me her fist-sized American tomatoes, which sit alongside the smaller Jamaican ones. She also has Canadian cabbages, which are light green and smooth, compared to the Jamaican ones, which are darker with wrinklier leaves.

Hurricanes are common in Jamaica, but the intensity of Melissa was unique – a direct effect of record-high sea temperatures. An estimated 279,000 people were displaced, and around 70% of people lost electricity, some of which was still out last month. The western part of the island was affected most severely, including the parish of St Elizabeth, which, known as the ‘Breadbasket of Jamaica’, produces more food than any other parish. The Category 5 hurricane’s 185 mph winds and heavy rains flooded fields and also toppled or destroyed trees. Over 1.25 million livestock died and staple foods were wiped out, with 90% of banana and plantain crops and 70% of yams across the island gone. In the immediate aftermath, communities relied on stockpiled goods and emergency aid and, as farmers rushed to replant or simply waited for floodwater to recede, shops remained closed for weeks.

My trips from London to Jamaica are normally characterised by my seeking out of favourite foods. But as I packed for my trip in late November, I knew that this would not be a normal visit. When I first heard from my brother-in-law after the hurricane, he said there were ‘no vegetables anywhere’; my sister asked me to bring ‘easy-to-cook foods’ in my suitcase. Requests from family for solar panels, water filters and clothing were added to pleas for seeds, which I stashed throughout my luggage: beetroot, pumpkin, cucumber, courgette, lettuce and chilli. I boarded the plane, deciding to find out more about what people were eating, and how farmers were coping, in the wake of the hurricane.

‘It was a crazy experience’

To eat Jamaica’s food is to learn the island’s history. In kitchens and restaurants, you will taste the movement of people, crops, animals and recipes that have been incorporated into the rich batter of Jamaican cuisine. Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and saltfish, pairs the fruit of the ackee tree – brought to Jamaica from West Africa – with salted cod, a food brought from the North Atlantic by colonisers to feed enslaved people. Jamaican curries are seasoned with scallions and country pepper, a chilli brought from Central America to Jamaica by the country’s indigenous Taíno people (who also originated jerk cooking, and who were almost wiped out by Spanish colonisers). Jamaica has continuously composted its histories of erasure and subjugation into vibrant and delightful dishes. The country’s motto – ‘Out of many, one people’ – could equally be ‘Out of many, one plate’.

However, long before Melissa’s disruption, the food system in Jamaica harboured many dysfunctions. Food is disproportionately expensive and import-heavy: in 2019, eating a balanced diet would cost someone on minimum wage 44% of their income, even when buying the cheapest available foods. The island also imports over 60% of its food. In an article in national newspaper The Gleaner, Carolyn Cooper writes, ‘Wi love foreign food too much. Coconut oil an powder did bad enough. From all bout: Trinidad an Tobago, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia an Sri Lanka. Now dem a import coconut water? From Guyana? Wa mek?’

This reliance on imports has always struck me as strange, but it is a feature of a colonial methodology that has its roots in the plantation slavery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Jamaican land was captured for the violent extraction and international distribution of sugar, while goats, chickens and preserved fish were brought from the Global North to feed those growing cash crops. While enslaved people and indigenous communities kept non-extractive food cultures alive in their homes, growing heirloom crops and sharing meals in their communities, the partial severance of people from the land restricted their agency and self-sufficiency. Layered onto this are unfavourable international trade agreements and an increasingly intensified global food system, all of which have caused food imports to increase steadily (while in 1950, food imports to Jamaica were a little over a third of the value of exports, in 2022, imports outweighed exports by four times). This means that Jamaica is heavily reliant on external markets, even more so in the face of disaster.

At the heart of this fragile system are farmers. A few days after I visit Bernadine’s stall, I drive to the parish of St Elizabeth – a thirty-mile journey from Hopewell that takes three hours on winding hilltop roads – to speak to Jessie, a cabbage farmer, about how she’s been recovering from the hurricane. She meets us on the roadside wearing wellington boots and a wide smile. The level of destruction is much more extreme here than in Hanover; most people’s roofs have blown off and been replaced by sheets of tarpaulin. Churches and schools are piles of rubble. Houses lie collapsed like stacks of cards, and flooding makes many roads impassable.

‘It was a crazy experience,’ Jessie tells me about the day that Melissa landed. ‘We had to evacuate the building through the window … and then when I go to the farm, I realise that I don’t even have a farm anymore.’ Before the hurricane, Jessie (who goes by ‘Farmer Girl Jessie’, but is Sherka Braham when she’s not in the fields) employed ten people and sold her produce wholesale in the local town of New Market. ‘It brings me peace to see my field just green and beautiful … Cabbage is a part of me,’ she says. Her field had 40,000 cabbages in it before it was flooded; all were lost. Following the hurricane, she replanted seedlings salvaged from the rubble of her greenhouse. On the day we visit, I comment that they are looking healthy, but Jessie corrects me. ‘There is some sort of residue left in the soil [from] the hurricane water,’ she says. Parts of St Elizabeth received a metre of rainfall, and the parish capital of Black River experienced storm surges of up to sixteen feet. Soils across the parish were polluted by floodwaters containing saltwater, sewage, chemicals and debris. ‘[It’s] burning the roots of the plant,’ Jessie adds.

An hour away, in Santa Cruz, Dean and Michelle’s plot has also flooded. They are permacultural homesteaders, cultivating crops to feed themselves and selling herbal remedies. ‘This whole area, it looked like a lake … [it] ran into the house, up to the knees,’ Michelle tells me. As we walk around, they list the trees that they’ve lost: annatto, mango, ackee, banana, breadfruit, coconut. ‘Our first thing was needing a chainsaw … because everywhere, the trees were down.’

Insufficient Government Assistance

The 70,000 farmers across the country affected by the hurricane have been provided insufficient help by the Jamaican Government. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining promised in November to ‘start the distribution of $40 million worth of seeds through our Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA)’; however, by December, this has not had a tangible impact. Jessie says she ‘received a few packs’ of seeds from RADA (‘It’s not much, but I’m grateful’), but she didn’t get to choose the crop. When I speak to Valderine Biggs, a farmer near Gutters in St Elizabeth, she tells me that ‘RADA don’t really give [her] anything’. Valderine lost three-quarters of her chickens after Hurricane Beryl in 2024, but this ‘didn’t warrant assistance’, RADA told her. 40% of the country’s egg-producing chickens were lost in Hurricane Melissa and 41,000 hectares of farmland damaged, but government intervention for farmers has fallen well short of what is needed. In its absence, NGOs like the Jamaica Organic Agriculture Movement (JOAM) have provided short-term assistance, lending machinery to help with clear-ups.

Government food provision was also inadequate. Valderine tells me that army vehicles delivering food missed out her community: ‘They just drive straight through.’ Instead, communities self-organised and charities, again, stepped in. People spent Sundays travelling from as far as Kingston to communities in St Elizabeth and neighbouring Westmoreland in order to help with rebuilding, purchasing water, rice and saltfish along the way. Jessie tells me her community ‘received help from many different organisations bring[ing] food items’.

Chefs have also played a key role – not just in feeding people, but in keeping morale high. International charity World Central Kitchen coordinated the delivery of a staggering 40,000 hot meals every day from the start of November (they would deliver over 6 million meals by the end of January). Menus were designed and cooked by local chefs, who were paid by the charity. Local cooks everywhere stepped up too. My friend Barry owns a cook-shop near Lucea, beloved for its traditional puddings and fried chicken. The cook-shop’s roof was lost in the hurricane, but with help from his neighbours, Barry was soon back to cooking, making just one pudding a day instead of his usual three. By offering smaller slices for a lower price, at times even trading his meals for other goods, he ensured that everyone could eat.

‘I can’t afford to lose my crop to pests due to going organic’

One hefty intervention that the government has made is a chemical one. After Melissa, agrichemical company Newport-Fersan gave $25 million of chemical fertiliser to the country, with the agricultural minister praising them as ‘one of … our most loyal partners in the agricultural sector’. Government policy promotes the most potent pesticides as a response to storms: ‘Once you are anticipating … increased rainfall, from your hurricane[s] or storms, you want to make the switch over to systemic pesticides,’ reads a 2024 statement from RADA.

When I ask Michelle about this, she tells me Jamaican food is ‘pretty, but it dutty. We don’t grow clean.’ Jamaica has long depended on agrichemicals manufactured and distributed by multinationals such as Syngenta and BASF. A 2019 report by the Caribbean Poison Information Network (CARPIN) and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) notes there have been ‘detected pesticide residues in soil and water since the 1990s’, including lethal levels of highly hazardous pesticides such as diazinon. ‘You go to the farm store. You get seeds that are treated, and chemicals. But if you ask for anything natural, them nah have it,’ says Michelle. Valderine echoes this: ‘Lots of farmers would want to go organic’ but ‘there is not enough organic products in the farm store’. So, she uses Caratrax and Sevin, broad-spectrum pesticides that harm life indiscriminately (Sevin contains some of the sixty-six pesticide ingredients used in Jamaica that are banned in other countries).

Pesticide manufacturers make profits at all levels of the food system: Jamaican company GraceKennedy – one of the country’s leading distributors of pesticides – is also an international food conglomerate whose products (ranging from beans to sodas) populate shelves all over the world. The agrichemical lobby puts overwhelming pressure on farmers to reach for chemicals to protect against disasters, despite their high price tag: Valderine tells me that ‘a small bottle of chemicals’ costs $5000 (~£25), just under a third of the weekly minimum wage.

Neither do the chemicals always work. ‘Sometimes we don’t get what we pay for. Sometimes our farms are infested totally by pests,’ Jessie says. Despite this, when I drive around St Elizabeth in December, many people are wearing knapsack sprayers, and Jessie tells me that she’s used additional pesticides in the wake of the storm. ‘I can’t afford to lose my crop to pests due to going organic,’ she says.

‘These are important skills’: Relying on Indigenous and Community Knowledge

When I’m back in wintry London in January , I phone Valderine. She is planning to plant melons ‘which the price is going to be good for soon’, but it is the dry season in Jamaica, so she is fixing her irrigation system, which will take ‘some weeks’. As she speaks, I am hoping that her price predictions pay off. As if reading my mind, she tells me there is a glut of cucumbers, tomatoes and cabbages, after a flurry of planting in November. ‘People are hungry, but vegetables are rotting in the ground,’ she says. ‘The government should be taking the extra and giving it to schools. They should be tinning up the tomatoes, but there is nowhere to process them.’

Though Jamaicans are at the mercy of dysfunctional systems, they possess a deep well of ecological knowledge, passed down from African and indigenous Caribbean cultures. ‘What the older farmers used to do, which would have been considered organic … [was] just using what was on the land, using ashes and different means to fertilise [their] plants,’ Latoya Panton, a farmer in Eastern Jamaica, tells me. In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, Latoya started ‘Seeds of Hope’, sending free seeds to farmers around the country. This was well received; in the second phase of the project, she is focusing on heirloom seeds and ‘teaching [farmers] to save the seeds, then pass them on … each one, teach one.’ These skills are important, she says: ‘should there ever come a time where we just don’t have access to the seeds or the fertilisers coming in, then what’s going to happen?’ At Source Farm in St Thomas, Nicola Shirley-Phillips teaches permaculture design, rooted in indigenous practices from Africa and Central America. Her focus this year is on supporting farmers across the island in rebuilding their farms to be storm resilient. ‘We found that farms using organic and permaculture principles fare better [after storms],’ she says.

Many still use these methods in their home gardens, even if they depend on chemicals for their farms. When I gifted Jessie some heirloom seeds that I brought from the UK, she said she would ‘plant these in my home garden’, which is ‘more organic’. Valderine, meanwhile, intends to build permanent beds, as she knows they are more resilient against floodwater. She is already making organic applications and saving seed from her callaloo plants. Despite the industrial and chemical-dependent practices being pushed by government institutions, heritage crops and techniques remain a cherished cultural value.

Jamaica is celebrated globally for its food, and its diaspora keeps versions of the cuisine alive. Yet food producers in Jamaica are barely surviving, and its inhabitants struggle to access food that is healthy, local and ecologically grown. These problems are entrenched within the global food systems that implicate us all. Like many countries in the Global South, Jamaica continues to be pushed towards the kind of development that the Global North has modelled, while neoliberal Western capitalism is already eating its own tail. In the midst of increasing wealth inequality and exacerbated climate change, vibrant food cultures – and the producers and ecosystems that sustain them – are slowly being asphyxiated.

At the start of 2026, communities are practising getting on without government support. Wealthier people are buying generators and becoming refrigeration hubs for neighbours. Those who have chickens left are gifting bowls of eggs. These acts of generosity and collaboration are crucial for survival, and provide hope in times of crisis. Farmers and communities clearly have the capacity to adapt to challenging times, but the food system cannot rely only on their resilience.

When reflecting on the hurricane back in December, Jessie said, ‘I’m grateful I have life and I can pick up the pieces. You have to keep moving, one foot and the next.’ But when she posts a video online a few months later, I sense her optimism is wearing thin: ‘There is always an issue,’ she says. Farming is a hugely risky livelihood in Jamaica. With the prospect of increased weather instability in the future, farmers require better infrastructure, more autonomy and long-term solutions that decentre corporations. ‘Being a farmer is a gamble not everyone can win,’ Valderine tells me. ‘But a bird doesn’t cry when he loses a feather, because the feather can grow back.’

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Support Jamaican Farmers

• Jessie’s Go Fund Me can be found here; her Instagram is @FarmerGirlJessie.

• You can find Michelle at @mitchelledawn on Instagram and Michelle and Dean’s farmstead and regenerative forest garden at @omowalefarmsteadjamaica.

• You can find and support Seeds of Hope on Instagram.

• Source Farm is on Instagram; you can also donate to them.

Related Reading

• ‘Bittersweet Waters’: How British dam engineering policies created food scarcity in Pakistan by Zubair Ahmed Pirzada

• ‘Sowing Solidarity: How Lebanon’s Wineries Remain Rooted’ by Farrah Berrou

• This is our Indigenous Food’ by Makepeace Sitlhou

Credits

Dora Taylor is a freelance writer and chef, and an activist working around social justice and sovereignty in food systems. She writes journalism and poetry, and makes podcasts as part of the Farmerama Radio team. She is based between Hanover, Jamaica and London, UK.

Ailsa Jones is a freelance photographer based in Negril, Jamaica. Her Instagram is @ailsajonesphoto.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A last reminder that the Food in Print Magazine Fair is tomorrow at St Giles Cripplegate. There will be more than fifty independent food magazines to browse, along with pastries from Lucky Yu Bakery. You can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend – no tickets needed. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Before we get into today’s newsletter, a quick update on the situation at Brixton Plaza. Evictions of small food businesses are happening all across London right now – we are currently working on four separate articles about them, including today’s newsletter on Ridley Road by Amel Mukhtar. However, there is a spot of good news. This week, the twenty-seven traders of Brixton Plaza have been granted an injunction from the High Court stopping their eviction until the landlord, Governside Limited, obtains a court order to do so. There is also hope that the traders’ precarious tenancies are protected under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, which ‘provides business tenants with statutory rights to proper notice, compensation in certain circumstances, and protection from eviction without a court order.’ For the meantime, Brixton Plaza will go on as usual – please do go down and give the traders your support and custom if you get the chance.

Today’s article is not paywalled, but to report on situations like Brixton Plaza and Ridley Road we rely solely on reader subscriptions. To support this work, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the entire back catalogue, including all of our restaurant coverage and guides.

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‘Certain food you get here, you can’t get anywhere else,’ says Wess, a trader at the Ridley Road indoor market. He’s been trading here for fifteen years, after arriving from Montserrat twenty years ago.

Inside Wess’s compact grocery shop sit sea moss packets, cerasee leaves, moringa powder and incense sticks. There are pops of colour from Sun Lolly boxes and packets of Kool-Aid and Shirley biscuits. In one of the fridges is a full shelf of malt drinks (Supermalt, Mighty Malt, Vita Malt, Malta Guinness); underneath are glass bottles of Fanta and Ting.

This market offers a taste of home for Hackney’s Afro-Caribbean community. Every so often, Wess is reunited with people he hasn’t seen for years. ‘I see people that left home twenty years ago … They didn’t tell you they’re coming here,’ he recalls. ‘We might’ve grown up together and when we come to England, someone might live in Birmingham [for example]. But then everyone comes to Ridley.’

Dinka, his friend keeping company by the register, a Rastafarian man with a grey beard and loc cap, adds: ‘People look forward to coming here, just to get a feeling – because then you’re among your own.’

The indoor market sits in the heart of Dalston, inside what was once a Tesco. The community that has been built there is a spot of sunshine in a country that often feels cold to Afro-Caribbean migrants – like today, 31 March, the day of the proposed eviction of traders from the market.

It’s a fate Wess and his fellow traders have been trying to come to terms with for the past two months, asking themselves what will become of their grocery stores, record shops, fabric and tailoring services, shoe shops and beauty and grooming outlets. Back on 17 February, Wess and the others were sent letters by the property owner, Larochette Real Estate, saying they had six weeks to vacate the premises, due to ‘antisocial behaviour’ in the market.

Yet there has been little clarity on the precise conditions of the eviction. Some traders are under the impression that it’s a temporary closure affecting them all, while others understand that only a select few will be able to return. Even if the eviction is only temporary, there’s still the question of ‘who’s going to pay for us in the months you plan to close it for’, Wess says. There’s no trust that the market will ever be reopened once it’s closed.

Since it purchased the market eight years ago, Larochette Real Estate has already attempted to evict the traders and turn the building into luxury flats twice, first in 2018 and then again in 2020. These proposed redevelopments inspired resistance from the community, and in 2022, Hackney Council stepped in and committed to take over the lease for fifteen years (at £306,000 per year rent) once Larochette completed a six-month renovation. But now, four years later, traders tell me that after being turfed out for long periods for the revamp, Larochette still hasn’t completed the work, and the council has done nothing about it. In fact, Hackney Council has not taken over the lease and has reverted to the position that the building is privately owned and therefore out of their control. ‘The council ain’t doing nuttin’ at all. [They’re] all in this [together],’ Dinka tells me.

The council’s offer to traders is that they can open a stall in the middle of the outdoor market, which does not work for most of the businesses. For Wess, with his fridges and boxes of confectionery and fridges that can currently be shuttered and reopened each day, an outdoor stall is not a feasible alternative: ‘Am I gonna put my stuff in the middle of the market, coming out and packing up every morning?’

As reported by The Londoner, the indoor market was bought by Larochette in 2016 for £6.5 million. Larochette, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, is owned by Guy Ziser and his father, Shmuel, who appeared in the Panama Papers. Together, the pair own or direct roughly fifty companies, including Rainbow Properties, which manages the Ridley Road indoor market.

Larochette and Rainbow have shirked basic responsibilities. Since the renovations began, they have not installed heating. Wess tells me that leadership has never met with him or other traders. There’s no on-site office or office manager – just security. ‘When you ask something, they don’t respond,’ he says. ‘I’m paying you for providing me with a service. You take my money every month and you haven’t come one time.’

Furthermore, the police have claimed that Larochette misrepresentated concerns about antisocial behaviour in the eviction notices it issued to traders. Although the police had issued a Community Protection Warning (which, as The Londoner reported, was due to ‘the continued failure of the building owner [to take] reasonable and necessary measures to address safety concerns’), they never suggested that the market should be shut down.

‘When you come in here you don’t find no issues whatsoever, just people trading,’ Wess says. He feels that the landlord is weaponising a stereotype. ‘Do the statistics and see how much Caribbean people have a business in here,’ he adds. Ever since the Windrush era, when Caribbean people were encouraged to come to Britain to fill labour shortages, they have been cruelly disenfranchised. Increasingly they’re being pushed out of areas that they’ve played a huge part in building (often via market stalls), areas like Hackney, Brixton and Notting Hill. ‘Then they want to come and tell us about Windrush, like we’re supposed to celebrate coming back into slavery after we were freed,’ Wess frowns. ‘We come back to build a white man’s empire when we can’t live in it. And we’re supposed to celebrate being Windrush? … There’s nothing to celebrate about it.’

The Ridley Road traders refuse to be kicked out so unceremoniously. On the planned eviction day, 31 March, a protest takes place. The ragtag group that forms outside the market is a microcosm of Hackney: women in wheelchairs, hijabis, queer fashion guys, purple-haired liberals, filmmakers in keffiyehs, club baddies, goth-lite guys, mothers with colourful braids, socialists in army caps, elderly couples, all united in mission. They hold up red flags and makeshift cardboard signs reading ‘Don’t Evict, Stop Greedy Landlords’ and ‘Protect Our Traders’. The Caribbean traders stand in front of the door, watching despondently.

By 4:30pm, the individual stalls are already shuttered. Outside, a protester asks: ‘Has the landlord been here? Has anyone seen the landlord? Has the Mayor of Hackney been here? Has anyone spoken to the Mayor of Hackney? Shame!’ A speaker outlines the demands of the protest: that everyone should be able to return to the indoor market, without exception, and that if the building closes, traders need to be adequately paid. A Caribbean man on the side yells, ‘This is Windrush market!’

Watching the scene with bemusement from the back are three massive security guards, who were sent as muscle that morning, Dinka informs me. One is vaping, smirking through fat clouds, while the ringleader wears a black fur coat. At 5:30pm, they spring into action, moving to shutter the doors. Protestors, led by Mariam Bafo, a British-Somali community organiser, head inside to stop them, saying that they plan to occupy the space until the landlord agrees to the traders’ terms.

When protestors stand directly underneath the shutters, fur coat tells the muscle to just pull the shutters down anyway. The protestors try to appeal to their conscience: ‘We’re all immigrants here.’ The guy with the vape in his hand chuckles and kind of nods – he appreciates the point. But fur coat calls the police, and a squad of four in fluorescents arrives, led by a blonde woman with hard eyes. She tells the protesters and traders to leave, that they can collect their stuff tomorrow. But they refuse: not without a written agreement. Not without any of their demands met.

One protester, a British-Caribbean woman, tells me that this is exactly how she was tricked into losing her livelihood. ‘We lost our site in SE16, and our landlord lived in the Costa del Sol,’ she says of PlushSE16. ‘Five businesses … All working, all popular. Twenty-two years on the ground. Part of a community.’ The landlords told her she could retrieve her stock the day after the eviction, but she was never able to get it back. ‘We’re still not trading, still not earning … That’s been two years now.’

A tsunami of shutdown attempts has hit small food markets in London. Shepherd’s Bush Market, Brixton Village and Plaza and Seven Sisters indoor market are also engaged in fights to continue operating. Others, like PlushSE16 and traders in Elephant & Castle, have already been shut down. These evictions have mostly affected ethnic minorities, with Caribbeans being hit hard. ‘They give us a very hard fight,’ Wess says. ‘We, the ones that went into slavery … they’re always fighting to get us out.’

The irony – or, really, the precise way such inequality and corruption is able to function – is that in some of these cases, the shadowy property developer threatening eviction is incorporated in Caribbean tax havens. While the maligned face of immigration painted by parties like Reform is working-class Black and brown people who have made hotspots like Hackney attractive and valuable (the inverse of the so-called no-go areas that figures on the right portray them to be), the people who are truly making the city unliveable are the often-invisible wealthy ‘expat’ and non-domicile property developers. While they gut the city’s pubs, cinemas and markets to replace them with luxury flats, they feel none of the dearth left behind. The luxury flats often sit unoccupied, while housing prices skyrocket. London gets hollowed out by people who do not care that they’re turning the city into a ghost town.

In the end, the police decide that it’s a civil dispute and leave. It’s around 6:30pm, and the muscle is getting antsy too – as long as the protestors are occupying the building, they cannot do anything, it seems. After such a bitter battle, this is a big win. The traders and protestors are galvanised. Dinka is laughing and smiling. ‘Security a-run out!’ he says, beaming. ‘We ain’t going nowhere!’

Wess is laughing with another trader. ‘We really appreciate the support,’ he says, a new light in his eyes. The protestors speak over the loudspeaker of their plans to occupy the space. People volunteer to stay overnight along with the traders, while they push for their demands to be met. When I return at 10pm, groups of protestors sit chatting cross-legged on the floor, playing Vybz Kartel on a mini-speaker, and some traders stand together to the side. It’s good energy, festival-style, but with a touch of growing fatigue.

It doesn’t feel right that these Ridley Road traders essentially have to sleep on the street to protect their businesses, to suffer so much to receive the bare minimum. The next day, 1 April, the same security forces return, waiting for people to tire so that they can swoop in and shut it down. All this to guard a fraction of the assets of a multi-millionaire. The landlord has been sending intimidation emails via Rainbow Properties to local Green councillor Zoë Garbett – who has been on the frontlines for the traders’ justice – aiming to bully traders without any terms nor agreements made. (‘We are unable to progress with future plans given the illegal occupation that will have to be dealt with via lengthy legal proceedings before we can consider reopening the market. The Save Ridley Road campaign, together with other agitators who claim to be acting in the best interest of traders are, in fact, doing the exact opposite,’ Larochette Real Estate wrote.)

But it’s not just the muscle who return. More and more protestors have been arriving each day. In a group chat, over 100 locals mobilise to bring vegan and gluten-free food for all, sleeping bags, cushions, blankets. Mitchum deodorant and snacks. A sound system to play reggae, and microphones for traders and protestors to say their piece. People paint huge signs: ‘HANDS OFF OUR MARKET. We are one community.’

Most of these people were strangers tothe traders. But this is the point of a neighbourhood, and the beauty of local trade, where you can see and feel each others’ contributions and kindness, even when you haven’t formally met. It’s a reminder that the worst form of antisocial behaviour is that of the developers seeking to replace the love of thy neighbour with barren flats that are only home to corrupt money. You can’t share dal in an empty city. This is a London worth fighting for.

Editor’s note, with an update from the Save Ridley Road campaign.

Some traders along with the community peacefully resisted attempts by security to close the market on 31 March. The landlord has now cut the power, so the local community has been supplying power banks and generators. Traders now have weeks to prepare and finance a court case for their right to stay. A community occupation is helping them keep the space running.

A community fundraiser will allow traders to take their fate in their own hands, by defending their tenancy rights in court, and supporting and sustaining the community occupation. To donate, you can follow this link.

Credits

Amel Mukhtar is a freelance writer for Vittles, Vogue, 72 Magazine, Dazed, Crack Magazine and more.

All photographs courtesy of Save Ridley Road community.

Vittles Restaurants is edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. This article was sub-edited and fact-checked by Odhran O’Donoghue.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A quick reminder that the Food in Print Fair is just four days away - you can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!

In today’s special newsletter, we are partnering with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) on a story about the non-payment of employment tribunal judgments in London restaurants, and why this is rife in the UK hospitality sector. In particular, this newsletter covers one restaurant that had twenty-one employment tribunal decisions go against it between 2021 and 2025 and didn’t pay out on a single one.

We’re delighted to be partnering with TBIJ, which has been one of the best investigative outlets in the UK over the past fifteen years, especially on the subject of food – from delivery work to agricultural labour. In 2022 and 2023, TBIJ journalist Emiliano Mellino led a series of nationally significant investigations on seasonal and migrant workers on British farms, which uncovered exploitation, terrible living conditions, wage theft and illegal fees. This reporting led the UN special rapporteur to say he feared there was forced labour on British farms. As much as we urge you to read today’s article, we also hope you check out the back catalogue of TBIJ’s work on food and labour, which you can find at the end of this piece.

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The restaurant chain that lost twenty-one tribunal claims – and didn’t pay a single one.

Tayla Lewthwaite had £1.90 in her bank account on the day in 2023 that she was evicted.

She should have had a lot more. Lewthwaite worked as a duty manager at a restaurant in Kew called Antipodea, a self-defined ‘Aussie brasserie’ that opened in 2017, capitalising on London’s obsession with brunch culture. Lewthwaite tells us that, while working at Antipodea, she endured several months when she was paid less than she’d earned. Exasperated at her treatment, she eventually quit. After she left, most of her final month’s wages never appeared.

For weeks, she chased it up with the owner, an Australian businessman called Jason Wells. At first, he told her she’d get her money ‘the next day’. Then he stopped responding altogether. With her wages not forthcoming, Tayla was kicked out of her rental property and ended up homeless; she needed the help of a charity to get back on her feet. Before she quit, Tayla, 32, had confronted Wells. ‘I very clearly said, “If you do not pay us, I’ll just take you to court,”’ she tells us. ‘He laughed in our faces and said, “Fine. Then take me to court.”’ To this day, Antipodea has not paid her the more than £2,600 it owes her.

Wells’s reaction might seem reckless, but it appears he already knew he could get away with non-payment of wages. Between 2021 and 2025, the company that ran his Antipodea restaurant chain lost twenty-one claims at the employment tribunal. We understand that the company hasn’t paid any of the sums ordered by those tribunals. This is alarmingly common in the UK: last year, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported that more than 5,000 people who won tribunal claims have not been paid what they are owed – even after turning to the government for support. Since 2016, the government has been asked for help in recovering awards and settlements totalling more than £46 million, over three quarters of which remains unpaid.

The non-payment of tribunal awards is particularly common in the hospitality sector. ‘It’s the wild west,’ says Bryan Simpson, the hospitality lead for Unite, the UK’s largest private sector trade union. ‘It’s the lowest paid, the most precarious … of any sector by a country mile.’

Government data shows that hospitality is the sector with the highest number of breaches of minimum-wage law, and Simpson tells us that Unite has spent thousands trying to get bosses to pay what they’ve been ordered to by tribunals. TBIJ’s own reporting backs this up – most people who spoke to us as part of our investigations into the tribunal system worked in restaurants, cafes or bars. The employers we heard about included the director of Peckham Levels, who sacked a whistleblower, a restaurant-owning Reform councillor in Portsmouth who lost three tribunal claims without paying a single one, and the director of the Crussh cafe chain who openly gloated that he would not be handing over the £30,000 payout ordered by the courts. Meanwhile, in September of last year, The Londoner reported on Victor Garvey’s Michelin-starred restaurant SOLA, which did not pay out £16,000 to a former employee after a tribunal decision went against it.

All of these employers have benefitted from a failing enforcement system that allows hospitality owners to break the law repeatedly and simply ignore their punishment. ‘I was quite naive in thinking the tribunal system would work,’ Mark Leonard, the father of a former Antipodea employee, tells us. ‘Only in digging further have I discovered that the system is broken.’

In 2009, Jason Wells moved to London from Melbourne and soon after founded the Brew cafe chain, which quickly grew to several branches around South-West London. Six years later, together with Marc Shimmel, a former WeWork investor, he founded Antipodea. (Schimmel has not been an Antipodea investor since 2019.)

Antipodea was regularly featured in the press, including Time Out, The Londonist and Eater London, while Wells appeared in magazines showing off his home in Richmond or sharing insights into where he draws inspiration from as a successful businessman. ‘I’m ... driven by my staff,’ he noted in an interview with hospitality trade publication The Caterer. ‘Being able to treat them well is very important to me.’

But interviews with several of his former staff and analysis of hundreds of pages of tribunal and company-insolvency documents tell a different story. They show that, over the years, Wells has withheld tens of thousands of pounds that he owed employees. Furthermore, he pocketed hundreds of thousands from businesses that eventually went insolvent. One chef formerly employed by Wells alleges that, after the pandemic, he worked for three months without a day off. When he eventually resigned, the company failed to pay his last month’s wages and his unused holiday allowance. This was a common practice at Wells’s company, according to a former senior manager: ‘[Wells] knew that if he didn’t pay people, [he’d get away with it]. That’s why he was so comfortable doing it. The company culture was just really toxic.’

One of the reasons for this is that even if a worker wins a tribunal claim, they have no guarantee that their bosses will pay up. Since 2023, Mark Leonard, 64, and his daughter have tried everything to get the nearly £3,000 the employment tribunal ordered Antipodea to pay her. When the company refused to pay, Mark and his daughter approached a government enforcement scheme and their local MP, Munira Wilson. Wells dodged every attempt to enforce the judgment. Mark wasn’t ready to give up, so in early 2024 he started picketing the Kew and Richmond branches of Antipodea, handing out flyers that read: ‘[Antipodea] has a history of not paying its staff … My daughter has been waiting over a year for her final month’s wages.’

Antipodea called the police on him, but what Mark was doing was completely legal. As he told the police, it was Wells, not he, who had broken the law. Mark felt that Wells had stolen money from his family. ‘I didn’t believe that was right or fair,’ he says. ‘My overriding thought was he shouldn’t get away with this.’

At one point, Mark spoke to Wells on the phone, hoping to convince him to pay his daughter. ‘He ranted for some considerable time trying to tell me that he was the injured party and everybody else was at fault: the government because of their Covid regulations, his staff who were ripping him off, banks … it was quite something,’ Mark says.

Mark and his daughter also hired high court enforcement officers (a role akin to that of a bailiff, but with greater powers), but soon discovered that the company that owned Antipodea, STR 48, held no assets that could be repossessed. A report by one officer describes how they went to a couple of Wells’s restaurants to enforce an award, only to be shown documents detailing how the leases and physical assets were owned by other entities: STR 49 and STR 50.

Michael Jackson, a veteran high court enforcement officer, tells us that strategies like these are particularly common in the hospitality sector, which has a higher proportion of smaller companies. In the vast majority of cases, it is not possible to bring a tribunal claim against a director or owner, which means that claims tend to be made against companies instead. However, there are several strategies that companies use to avoid paying.

One strategy is known as phoenixing, which describes the process by which a company is either liquidated or dissolved and then reopened under a different name. In many instances, phoenixing is completely legal, but it can be used as a way for owners and directors to evade accountability. TBIJ spoke to a woman who won a 2025 tribunal claim for nearly £700 in unpaid wages against Flows, a cafe in Llandeilo, Wales. Three weeks after the ruling, the company was dissolved, leaving the woman with no way to claim the money. But the cafe had continued to operate: the woman discovered that the owner had registered a new company less than a month after she had started legal proceedings. This company had the same directors and owners as the previous one, and the cafe kept the same name throughout. Although it’s unclear whether this company was started because of the legal proceedings, it means that, since the cafe is on paper now run by a different company, high court enforcement officers couldn’t repossess any assets.

Another legal way of working around tribunal decisions is to employ workers through companies separate from the ones that hold assets or cash. This is what Antipodea did. Government records show that Wells held a web of companies, with names ranging from STR 44 to STR 54. Most of these companies filed dormant accounts, so their purpose is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that from 2018, Wells’s companies racked up more than £10 million in debt as well as a string of insolvencies and tribunal claims. In total, businesses owned by Wells have lost twenty-four employment cases. Company representatives did not turn up to any of the hearings to defend themselves against the claims. We could only confirm one instance where the company sent a written response to a tribunal on time.

When his Brew chain went insolvent, the administrators discovered that Wells had personally borrowed nearly £600,000 from the company that he hadn’t paid back. Liquidators working on the ongoing insolvency process of STR 48 – the second time the Antipodea chain has gone through administration (the chain had previously been owned by Antipodea Operations Ltd, which went insolvent in 2019) – have also said they suspect there could be ‘an overdrawn director’s loan account’ and ‘potential misuse of government-backed support schemes’, although no findings have been made and the liquidators’ investigation continues.

Those insolvency proceedings, which kicked off in June 2024, brought some good news for workers who had brought tribunal claims against Wells’s companies: the government’s redundancy service paid some, though not all, of the money they’d been awarded (there are caps on the wages or holiday pay they cover, while compensation isn’t covered at all). In some cases, this pay out came years after employees had won their original tribunal claims, but to date, only twelve former Antipodea employees, who won cases as far back as 2021, have claimed money this way.

The liquidation of STR 48 seems to be the end of the road for Wells, even though his wife continued to briefly operate one of the Antipodea branches under a different company. Fittingly, she also faced a tribunal claim in September of last year for unpaid wages – and lost. All branches of Antipodea have now closed. In July 2024, Wells was banned by the government from being a company director for his conduct in relation to a construction company he owned, Ironbark Design and Construct. This was followed by a bankruptcy order in February 2025. Wells is now listed by the government as a tax defaulter to the sum of £150,000, a fraction of the total debts his companies have racked up.

But the question remains as to why the system allowed Wells to spend years running businesses that persistently underpaid staff and ignored court judgments. A government spokesperson told us in a statement that they have already allocated ‘£25 million in funding to tackle the misuse of phoenix companies’. The money will be given over the next five years and will fund a fifty-person taskforce in the Insolvency Service to investigate directors who liquidate companies to evade debts. But it’s worth emphasising that this approach will not ensure that workers, such as those at Antipodea, are paid when the company is solvent but holds assets elsewhere.

A group of MPs led by Labour’s Andy McDonald and also including representatives from the Green Party and Your Party has recognised these gaps in enforcement and are now calling for changes, including giving the government the power to pursue company directors whose companies ignore tribunal judgments.

For Bryan Simpson from Unite, the problem within hospitality runs deeper. The government, like society more broadly, treats the sector’s workers with neglect – even Unite has only started organising hospitality workers in the last decade. But it is starting to see results, he says, winning millions of pounds for workers through campaigns and strikes, and helping to strengthen laws around tipping.

‘I have absolutely no faith in the legal system to achieve what is needed to win even individual rights for hospitality workers,’ he says. ‘But there is a major enforcement mechanism which wins – and it’s called unionisation.’

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What Next?

• In March, more than thirty MPs signed an early day motion calling for ‘a more proactive and transparent [tribunal] enforcement regime’. If your MP has not signed the motion, you can get in touch and ask them to add their name to it.

• Today, the government launches a new labour-enforcement body called the Fair Work Agency. Among other things, it will have the responsibility for enforcing tribunal awards. However, questions remain around its funding and powers.

• If you won a tribunal claim against Antipodea and are still owed money, you can contact the Redundancy Payments Service.

• If you have any more information on restaurants avoiding tribunal payments, please get in touch with Vittles (vittlespitches@gmail.com) and TBIJ (emilianomellino@tbij.com)

Further Reading

• Thousands of Rogue Bosses Have Failed to Pay Tribunal Awards: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-10-02/revealed-thousands-of-rogue-bosses-have-failed-to-pay-tribunal-awards

• How British Farms Run On Exploitation: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-03-27/they-treat-you-like-an-animal-how-british-farms-run-on-exploitation

• Migrant Fruit Pickers Charged Thousands of Illegal Fees to Work on UK Farms: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-05-27/migrant-fruit-pickers-charged-thousands-in-illegal-fees-to-work-on-uk-farms

• This is How People Picking Your Vegetables Have to Live: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-04-13/its-almost-the-same-as-living-on-the-street-this-is-how-people-picking-your-vegetables-have-to-live

Credits

Emiliano Mellino is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in migrant and worker rights. His investigations have uncovered widespread exploitation of gig economy, care and seasonal agricultural workers, as well as the failure of the state to enforce employment rights.

Ero Partsakoulaki is a reporter and fact checker. Her work has appeared in outlets across the USA, the UK and Greece.

To help you to navigate this shift, we asked three of our favourite recipe writers to come up with recipes that reflect the duality of the season. Almost immediately, we landed on ‘soup’ as a connective thread for this first Spring Recipe Supplement. Although more usually associated with winter, soup captures something of the anticipatory ambivalence of spring: light and vibrant enough to embrace the potential for change on some days, yet hearty enough to encourage slowing down on others.

Our three recipe writers – Melek Erdal, Songsoo Kim and Ixta Belfrage – all have different ideas of spring. ‘We often speak of the power of breaking bread together, but nothing seeps into you like soup,’ writes Melek in the lead essay of the supplement. In it, Melek explores her attempts to recreate a düğün çorbası (lamb and rice soup) made for her by legendary chef Musa Dağdeviren. Her version of this rich, unctuous soup has one foot in tradition and the other in experimentation, capturing the push and pull of building from the past to forge into the future.

In her recipe for rapini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup), a comforting, deeply umami broth bursting with seasonal greens, Songsoo writes that to eat spring vegetables is to mirror ‘the act of blooming itself … the first push of life at the start of spring’. For Ixta, meanwhile, spring is a bright, red bowl of spicy fish soup, lifted by a hot red pepper rouille. Her vibrant take on the classic French bouillabaisse draws inspiration from Italian, Turkish and Mexican flavours and is bursting with the vitality of the new.

Some of these recipes can be pulled together quickly, and make for a perfect quick al-fresco meal; others require a bit more time bubbling away on the stove, ideal for Sundays with loved ones. All are very straightforward to make, requiring little more than time and patience. These recipes are worth it though: as spring shows us year after year, good things come to those who wait.

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Melek Dreams of Soup

Melek Erdal recalls her attempts to recreate düğün çorbası (‘wedding soup’), a lamb and rice soup prepared for her by master chef Musa Dağdeviren.

‘As I sit with Luis, I think about the fortifying power of sipping soup together. The many people I’ve made soup for or who’ve made soup for me. I think about the corbacıs (soup canteens) that punctuate the working day back in North London, serving affordable, sustenance to the people who make the city run: soup to ease people into the day and to ease them out … The soup was transportive: the depth of the broth with thin strands of lamb, thickened by rice but still with a fluidity; the smoky heat from the pul biber, and slight acidity from a subtle touch of lemon.’

Rapini Doenjang Guk (Flowering Spring Greens Soup)

Songsoo Kim shares a comforting umami soup made with Korean fermented soybean paste and verdant seasonal produce

‘In Korea, there are many genres of – and many different names for – what in the West is all broadly categorised as ‘soup’. This recipe sits within the guk (국) category, which can easily be translated as broth, and is often served as an accompaniment to a meal … In this guk, doenjang-massaged greens are paired with a deeply umami soup made from dry seafood stock, which complements the dark chlorophyll and sweet flavour of the greens. The result is a deliciously balanced, comforting dish.’

Ixta Belfrage’s Spicy Fish Soup with Rouille

For this bright, zesty riff on the classic bouillabaisse, Ixta Belfrage draws on bold Italian, Turkish and Mexican flavours

‘French cuisine tends to be bound by rules of what ingredients can and cannot be used in a classic dish … These recipes hold no national or cultural allegiances, borrowing inspiration from Italy (the tomato-rich base), Turkey (the red pepper paste) and Mexico (guajillo chilli, cinnamon, lime). The moment I most look forward to is when you’ve just added the rouille to the hot soup: the two begin to meld into each other, but both elements are still distinct, marbling. Add a squeeze of lime, and it’s a party.’

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Spring Recipe Supplement, comprising three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. This fresh, clean soup, by Songsoo Kim, is based around doenjang, a Korean fermented soybean paste (a cousin to red miso) that perfectly complements the vibrant spring greens. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

• Melek Erdal’s lamb and rice dugun çorbası

• Ixta Belfrage’s spicy fish soup with hot red pepper rouille

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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In Korea, there are many genres of – and many different names for – what in the West is all broadly categorised as ‘soup’. There is jjigae (찌개), a rich and thick soup with chunky elements suspended within. There is tang (탕), which can be written with the same Chinese character (湯) to describe long-simmered medicinal soups. And then there is guk (국), which can easily be translated as broth, and is often served as an accompaniment to a meal.

The soup I’m sharing a recipe for here sits within the guk category. It is made with rapini (spring greens). In March and early April in the UK, spring may seem abundant, but don’t be deceived – while the promise of what’s to come is there, little is ready to be eaten just yet. Instead, nature offers what it can in lean moments: nettles, wild garlic – and greens like rapini.

Rapini, like kale shoots, collard shoots, spring greens and flowering brassicas, is most common in the UK as a byproduct of commercially grown crops. Although these greens rare appear in supermarkets or standard shops, they are delicious and versatile in their own right (but you’ll have to head to the farmer’s market or specialist stores to find them). In Korea, we believe that eating vegetables like this carries their energy into us, mirroring the act of blooming itself – the first push of life at the start of spring.

Rapini is excellent simply steamed or lightly sautéed, but its sweetness comes alive when massaged with doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that is a cousin to red miso. In this guk, doenjang-massaged greens are paired with a deeply umami soup made from dry seafood stock, which complements the dark chlorophyll and sweet flavour of the greens. The result is a deliciously balanced, comforting dish, perfect for spring.

Rapini Doenjang Guk (Flowering Spring Greens Soup)

Serves 2
Time 45 mins

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Spring Recipe Supplement, comprising three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Ixta Belfrage draws inspiration from a bouillabaisse she ate in Marseille but infuses it with the flavours of Italy, Mexico and Turkey. The resulting fish soup – and complementary garlic-heavy rouille – are full of vibrant flavour. To read the rest of the Spring Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Melek Erdal’s lamb and rice dugun çorbası

• Songsoo Kim’s rampini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup)

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille

Last year, I ate a bouillabaisse at Restaurant Michel, a classic Marseille establishment where the menu is reassuringly small and the waiters who’ve worked there for decades buzz around the room as if electrified by nicotine (and possibly cocaine). It wasn’t the best fish soup of my life, but I had a wonderful time: the artistry of the presentation, the brilliant hospitality and the raw-garlic-heavy rouille were impossible not to love.

French cuisine tends to be bound by rules of what ingredients can and cannot be used in a classic dish. Traditionally, bouillabaisse and soupe de poisson are made with fish, shellfish, fennel, saffron and orange peel, with fresh tomato being used only sparingly, for a hint of colour and acidity. In my humble opinion, fish soups that are more tomato-paste heavy (like the ones you might find in Italy) are far more exciting. While some chefs may consider the use of tomato paste to achieve deep flavour to be ‘cheating’, I use it with reckless abandon in my own recipe for spicy fish soup, which I’m sharing here.

The stock for this soup relies on the power of aci biber salçasi (Turkish hot red pepper paste), tomato paste and spices to form the flavour base. The result is a rich, tangy and slightly sweet soup. Some sticklers may protest that this is more a soup with fish in it rather than a fish soup. Fine.

To my mind, a fish soup is incomplete without a rouille, specifically one with unsociable amounts of raw garlic in it. So, I’m also sharing a recipe for a hot red pepper rouille that perfectly complements the dish. Like the soup, the rouille contains aci biber salçasi, along with saffron and lime juice to make it pop.

These recipes hold no national or cultural allegiances, borrowing inspiration from Italy (the tomato-rich base), Turkey (the red pepper paste) and Mexico (guajillo chilli, cinnamon, lime). The moment I most look forward to is when you’ve just added the rouille to the hot soup: the two begin to meld into each other, but both elements are still distinct, marbling. Add a squeeze of lime, and it’s a party.

Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille

Serves 4
Time 50 mins

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A quick reminder that the Food in Print Fair at St. Giles Cripplegate on April 11 is just three days away - you can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!

Today, we are publishing a recipe from our Spring Recipe Supplement, which comprises three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. In this lead essay for the supplement, Melek Erdal recalls her attempts to recreate düğün çorbası (‘wedding soup’), a lamb and rice soup prepared for her by master chef Musa Dağdeviren. You can read the other recipes here:

• Ixta Belfrage’s spicy fish soup with hot red pepper rouille

• Songsoo Kim’s rampini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup)

All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

Melek Dreams of Soup

Were you born in the UK? No

Have you travelled to the US before? No

Have you travelled to Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen or Libya in the last ten years? Yes

What’s the reason for your visit to the US? To make soup

I was sure I wouldn’t be let in, but my visa to the United States got approved days before my flight. I’d been invited to the annual Worlds of Flavor conference in November last year to demonstrate how to make yayla çorbası – a shepherd’s soup – in Trump’s America. The conference was held at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, California; the furthest I’d travelled for work before then was Sandwich in Kent. And I would be cooking with the culinary anthropologist Musa Dağdeviren: I would be making the most classic Anatolian soup in front of the master.

A few days before the conference begins, I go to La Tapatia Market, a Mexican grocery store in town with a small canteen at the back. The place feels so familiar and welcoming it reminds me of the Kurdish community centre back in London. I sit in the only seat available, next to a man named Luis, a retired tradesman who still lays the occasional patio, but mostly spends his time drying candied pumpkin in the sun. Luis is eating Menudo, which has a deep terracotta seal of oil on top and large squares of tripe that appear each time he stirs the bowl. It’s a hangover soup served only on Sundays, he says. I tell him it reminds me of a soup called İşkembe (which tends to be made with lamb tripe rather than beef). Luis goes to the counter and orders me a ‘sample’ of another soup, the pozole, but they send a full-sized bowl. It comes with shredded cabbage, diced onions, fresh coriander and lime. I smile when I take a sip – all they need to see before turning away, satisfied.

We often speak of the power of breaking bread together, but nothing seeps into you like soup. As I sit with Luis, I think about the fortifying power of sipping soup together. The many people I’ve made soup for or who’ve made soup for me. I think about the çorbacıs (soup canteens) that punctuate the working day back in North London, serving affordable sustenance to the people who make the city run: soup to ease people into the day and to ease them out. About how these çorbacıs have also become the go-to destination to recover after the chaos of a 1000-person Kurdish wedding in a converted Argos warehouse in Edmonton, the late-night workers sharing space with groups dressed in gowns, with up-dos held in place with 1000 hair grips and half a can of hairspray, all sipping soup and catching respite.

Soup is so substantial for something so formless. It forms around you: you become its container and in turn it seeps into you and alters your state temporarily. It’s a momentary escape – when eaten with others, it offers a form of elopement. I dream of the ocean at times in my life when big decisions or events are approaching; before this trip, I dreamt of soup. In my dream, Hasankeyf, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Kurdish towns, had not been washed away by the building of the Ilısu Dam. Instead it had been sealed in soup. An underwater city, forever preserved.

*

Chef Musa arrived in the conference’s test kitchen unassumingly and got straight to work making elaborate dishes that he was adamant were as authentic as possible – recipes that had travelled thousands of miles and as many years. I’ve never been to Çiya Sofrasi, his restaurant in Istanbul, but I imagine it has the buzz of an Edmonton çorbacı. With a name meaning ‘mountain table’ in Kurdish, his restaurant, which he opened in the late eighties (the same time my parents left), preserves the traditional rural food ways of his hometown of Nizip in Antep and wider Anatolia. His episode of Chef’s Table is my favourite. I remember thinking it was a love story: between him, his wife and the atomically charged era of Istanbul they met in, and between him and the master bakers, makers and workers he grew up around and learned from. He was meticulous and romantic, his pace slow and intentional, his voice gentle and earnest. I had long wanted to meet this master magician.

Musa immediately started sending me on side quests to source missing ingredients or find makeshift tools to enable him to keep recipes as close to how they would be made back home. I was both student and interpreter. When making katıklı dolma – dried squash stuffed with lamb and goat meat, cooked in broth and served with garlic yoghurt and chilli butter – he dispatched me to find ‘ice, a bowl and two wooden mallets’, then invited me to ‘beat the mincemeat’ with him.

We dipped our makeshift mallets (rolling pins) in the ice before beating the meat in synchronicity (much to the amusement and dismay of the rest of the kitchen). ‘The beating makes the meat mousse-like and the ice prevents the meat from bruising – but we must do this in rhythm,’ he explained. Learning from Musa felt like listening to folklore: you are told a compelling story, the reasoning of which is not always immediately apparent, but it will come to you in time.

Gentle nudges in the right direction without providing all the coordinates seemed to be Musa’s way, along with an insistence to keep going, to repeat something until you get it right. On the day of the demo, I made my soup. As the audience applauded, Musa leaned over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Well done, you did a great job. But this is not how you make yayla çorbası. Rice is the only thing you need to thicken.’ My mama had always added egg and flour, which emulsified the soup and gave it a silky texture. ‘That is a cheat’s way to thicken,’ Musa explained.

When I told Mama, she responded simply: ‘It’s not Musa’s soup, it’s mine.’ Torn between these two masters, I thought I’d revisit the question at a later date.

On our last day, Musa got up early and used the leftover ingredients from the week’s cooking to make soup for everyone. Of all the elaborate dishes made in the test kitchen by chefs from all around the world, this seemingly simple lamb broth with rice was the only one that made everyone pause for a moment, gathered around the stove. ‘Düğün çorbası’ (‘wedding soup’), Musa declared, stirring the large, still-bubbling cauldron, before ladling small bowls for everyone.

The soup was transportive: the depth of the broth with thin strands of lamb, thickened by rice but still with a fluidity; the smoky heat from the pul biber, and slight acidity from a subtle touch of lemon. I was reminded of the ‘Stone Soup’ folk tale, in which a wise new visitor to the town uses donated ingredients to produce a soup no one had ever heard of, but that was the most delicious thing anyone had ever eaten.

In the taxi journey back to the airport, I was already dreaming about making Musa’s soup. I wanted to recreate the taste and feeling of working with him and the others in the kitchen, but much like the fabled stone soup, it was a mystery how exactly he had made his düğün çorbası. (I was briefly snapped out of my reverie by the driver asking why my Uber rating was so low: ‘I swear if this was night time nobody would pick you up.’ Why exactly my rating had declined so much was also a mystery.)

As soon as I got home, I got to work trying to recreate the soup. If you look up düğün çorbası online, you will find recipes in which yoghurt is added to the broth. Musa had explained that his regional version was similar to a beyran (a lamb soup). Yet his cookbook contains recipes for both a lamb rice soup and a beyran, neither of which seemed to be the soup he’d made.

Beyond the basics – lamb, stock, rice and, obviously, onion – I guessed there was garlic in it. And there was definitely pul biber, which Musa treats as religiously as I do (he’d given me a batch from his hometown as a parting gift, and I treasure it as if it were expensive saffron). I begin my attempts by braising lamb neck in a pressure cooker, before adding water and slow cooking for three hours. Separately I cook down onions and then garlic, and then add the pul biber. I want to add some salça, but I message Musa and he is adamant there was none in his soup. I add a teaspoon anyway, along with some chopped sundried tomatoes. I strain in my lamb stock, then add pudding rice and simmer. I add the lamb meat and some lemon juice. The result is nothing like Musa’s dish – it’s too red and the rice is too thick, giving the soup a porridge-like texture.

The next time, I don’t add sundried tomatoes but add dried reyhan (purple basil). It’s a rogue addition, but I love the perfume it brings. Maybe the colour is still too dark from the salça – maybe he really didn’t use salça? The rice still isn’t right either, so I go out to buy more. I realise that ‘cracked (or broken) rice’ and ‘pudding rice’ are different things – the soup needed cracked rice! I’ve cracked it, I think.

I continue trying to make the soup almost every week for three months. The days get longer, indicating that spring has arrived on the doorstep. It brings fresh hope that I will perfect this soup in time to celebrate the season’s lamb.

On the first sunny day in what feels like months, my attempt at the soup finally feels right. I send Musa’s wife Zeynep a video of the soup first, to ask if she thinks Musa would approve. ‘He’ll say it has too much rice,’ she tells me. I message Musa. ‘It has too much rice’, he replies.

I decide that I’m OK with this. He is the teacher, but I am the interpreter. So, here is a recipe for lamb soup with too much rice – and a smidgen of salça.

Düğün Çorbası (Wedding Soup)

Serves 4
Time 2 hrs 30 mins

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. If you missed last week’s podcast with Joké Bakare, you can catch up with it (and all previous episodes) here.

Also, a reminder that the Food in Print Fair is just eight days away! We have released more information about the 50 publications you’ll find at the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!

Today’s essay by Simran Hans is about new goings on in one of the most important restaurant neighbourhoods in central London: Soho. 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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On the corner of Great Marlborough Street and Poland Street, a queue was already forming. Admittedly, in sanitised, social media-friendly Soho, you’re never more than a few paces from one, whether that’s a line of people eager to get their hands on a smashburger or the latest drop from Supreme. That afternoon, it was about forty-five minutes before dinner service and the sky was turning golden. I surveyed the line, which featured a cross-section of outfits and ages united in their excitement for 50 per cent off the bill. I found the scene romantic, and so, with no plans later that evening, I joined it. As I edged closer to the front door of Tamila Soho, a girl in a blazer slid in behind me, tugging her friend’s elbow and thanking her for saving them a spot. “It’s from the same people as The Tamil Prince – it’s an Instagram place,” she explained to her friend.

If a ‘TikTok spot’ can be defined by a single viral dish, one that’s usually decadent, oozing and excessive, an ‘Instagram place’ sells a lifestyle. Take It’s Bagels or Yard Sale or Jolene or Top Cuvée: with their sans-serif logos and instantly recognisable branding, they inspire loyalty, tribalism and tote bags. They are neighbourhood spots in the sense that they conjure images of a certain kind of local: affluent, and wearing a baseball cap. Islington’s The Tamil Prince is, apparently, an Instagram spot, at least according to a friend of mine from Birmingham who requested we have lunch there on a recent London visit. An elevated desi pub with impeccable branding that opened in 2022, it has spawned a second outpost (The Tamil Crown) and three spin-off restaurants under the Tamila brand in Clapham, King’s Cross and now Soho. And it’s not the only Instagram-forward small plates restaurant that’s planted a flag in one of the city’s most densely packed dining ecosystems. This spring also sees the arrival of the ‘Italian-ish’ Forza Wine Soho, which serves fritti, not bhajia, with its cocktails, and no-reservations fast-pasta pioneer Padella. This is the third outpost of each restaurant: the owners of Forza run a successful rooftop restaurant in Peckham (and another at the National Theatre), while Padella originated in Borough Market and has a second location in Shoreditch.

You could call this process ‘deSohofication’. Back in 2020, Jonathan Nunn described the phenomenon of ‘Sohofication’ as ‘a kind of homogenisation’ where a certain type of restaurant would open in Soho, courting a certain type of customer, varying its cuisine but sticking to the same set of rules. The pandemic saw this model falter, with shuttered offices, reduced footfall and rising rents making this particular pocket of W1 an increasingly unsafe bet for restaurateurs. Yet the last couple of years have seen the gradual return of both culture and capital to the area. The Elizabeth Line, which opened its doors close by on Tottenham Court Road in 2022, provided a fast new route from the city’s outer boroughs right into the heart of Soho. The same year saw the arrival of Outernet, an enormous entertainment complex on the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Legendary watering holes have been revived, including Trisha’s bar and The Colony Room Club (which closed in 2008 and was rebooted in 2023 as the Colony Room Green, a bar inside restaurant Daisy Green). The Devonshire, a refurbished Irish pub a few steps from Piccadilly, has become a bona fide destination. Within a ten-minute walk from The Devonshire, you can now find inspired, offbeat restaurants including Rita’s, Osteria Vibrato, Impala and Moi. Soho is once again becoming a neighbourhood of multitudes. So the question now is: is it the algorithm funnelling people back into the city centre, or is it something else?

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today’s piece by Alice Slater is the latest in our Cooking from Life series, a collection of essays that offer a window into how food and kitchen-life work for different people in different parts of the world. Alice writes about how she found her way back to the martini, a drink she first made as a child for her late father.

Issue 2 of our print magazine is still available to purchase. Buy your copy here.

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My father knew what it felt like to hold a beating human heart in his hands (‘like a fistful of worms,’ he said, due to the writhing junction of arteries and veins). When he arrived home from the hospital, an antiseptic chemical smell would cling to his hair and clothes, a bit like a freshly developed photo. If he wasn’t on call, he’d loosen his tie and pour himself a drink. Usually, this would be a glass of heart-healthy red wine, but once in a blue moon, he liked to make a martini.

My brother and I had no interest in medicine – I learned to write stories and Hank learned to write code – but that didn’t stop my father from sharing his med school wisdom. He taught me how to chop an onion with surgical precision, how to recognise the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, and how to tie a knot with one hand (a useful trick in the operating theatre). He also taught me how to mix a bone-dry gin martini, presumably because he thought it would be a laugh to have a tiny underage bartender at his disposal, which I suppose it was.

He showed me how to apply a light vermouth rinse to the cocktail shaker, and explained that gin can bruise if you shake it for too long. I can’t remember exactly how old I was during this martini lesson, but I can’t have been more than twelve, because I had absolutely no interest in tasting the drink I made. I wish I could remember whether he preferred an olive or a twist, but that detail eludes me now.

*

I came back to martinis as an adult, in 2011. I was hanging out in the beer garden of the Oxford Arms in Camden when a gorgeous New Orleans native approached our table and asked if she could join us – an unthinkably bold social move in London. As soon as she sat down, the two of us sank into the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon conversation that made us both realise we were almost certainly destined to meet. Cocktails were in Nisha’s blood, and we spent many nights together drinking Sazeracs, Long Island iced teas and dirty martinis that were never quite cold enough or dirty enough for our liking. We soon figured out the best martinis were shaken in a clean jam jar in Nisha’s kitchen, where we could add as much brine as we liked without resorting to the kind of language that might encourage a bartender to lick his lips. We preferred vodka and didn’t think to buy vermouth, but I shared my father’s lesson about bruising gin anyway. When Nisha suffered a devastating loss, the kind of bone-rattling grief that reshapes the rest of your life, we chain-smoked and mixed martini after martini, refilling the olive jar with cold water to make the precious brine last. We spent many evenings sitting on Nisha’s kitchen floor drinking those watery dirty martinis, faces seasoned with the salt of tears.

*

During the pandemic, the corner shop opposite my house had a glut of blood oranges that remained in stock for an unseasonable number of months. I bought my first cocktail shaker and learned how to make sweet blood orange margaritas. It was a nice way to mark the end of the working week: chopping board bloody as an operating table, a peachy cocktail in hand, getting stuck into a long Zoom chat with my best friend Emily (who only lived a thirty-minute walk from my flat but may as well have been on Mars).

My thoughts returned to the dirty martini when Perelló olives took over the world in 2021. Bored of sticky margs, I experimented with a martini made with equal parts Perelló-infused vodka and the spicy liquid-gold Perelló brine, garnished with a single plump olive. The result was a proper slap-your-ass-and-spit-in-your-mouth kind of bev, murky as swamp water. My husband at the time declared it undrinkable, but I knew that I was on to something beautiful, and I wasn’t going to listen to a negroni-drinking naysayer. I was going to listen to Emily, a stained-glass artist and naturally blonde cockney, who said it was her platonic ideal of a dirty martini (incidentally, she still prefers her martinis mixed to this somewhat unhinged recipe to this day).

Then everything changed. One afternoon, I found myself in a hotel bar, drinking a dirty martini mixed by a woman who really seemed to have her life together. She was wearing a crisp white shirt and her hair was perfect. My curls were a frizzy mess and I still had last night’s eyeliner smudged under my eyes. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter the words ‘extra filthy’, so instead I had ordered a simple dirty vodka martini and trusted her to take the wheel. She had tipped Belvedere, a generous 15ml of dry vermouth and a mere barspoon of nondescript green olive brine into a crystal-cut jug, stirred until the glass was etched with frost, then double-strained into a chilled coupe. The resulting martini was glacier water, clean and astringent. It was fresh, almost steely, with an immediate neurological effect, like an oyster or a line of coke. My head was turned. It was the kind of martini my father would enjoy.

The next time I found myself lured by the siren song of a dirty martini, I thought of that hotel bartender and bought a bottle of Noilly Prat, a dry vermouth aged in oak casks that are exposed to the salty sea air. Next, I discovered the joys of a split base – half cheap vodka, half expensive savoury gin. I learned, to my surprise, that my palate had sharpened and I preferred less brine than my previous filthy predilections. A generous dash of olive bitters was enough to provide that extra hit of salinity and deepen the savoury olive flavour. I learned that it’s bad luck to garnish a martini with an even number of olives, although this became academic when I realised I preferred the fresh zesty flavour of an expressed lemon peel cutting through the salt. While my father’s shaken martini was an aerated cocktail, cloudy as bath water, I began to stir mine in a frozen glass jug – a hat tip to the hotel bartender with the crisp white shirt – which allowed the ice to dilute the drink slowly and kept it crystal clear.

The resulting cocktail is dirty but looks clean – almost surgically so. It’s tailored to my palate, based on every martini lesson I’ve ever undertaken with every martini drinker I’ve ever admired. It reminds me of tearful nights with Nisha, Zoom calls with Emily, that beautiful bartender and, of course, martini lessons with my father.

I never had the chance to share a martini with my dad. The worms of his heart quit wriggling when he was just fifty-four, a cardiac arrest so sudden and so cruel we were told that even he – who a newspaper once described as a ‘miracle worker’ for saving a teenage boy stabbed directly in the heart – would not have been able to save himself. The trauma of his death will sit in my chest until my own heart stops beating.

The salinity of every dirty martini I make contains the slightest echo of that first martini lesson. But if, by some miracle, my father were to walk into my kitchen this evening, loosen his tie and ask for a martini, I wouldn’t make him the recipe I’ve perfected. In the twenty years I’ve had to endure of this life without him, I’ve learned something that I didn’t pick up from his tutorial: martini drinkers are particular. So, instead, I’d make him a bone-dry shaken gin martini, perhaps not with surgical precision, but with a lot of heart. Then I’d ask him whether he’d prefer it with an olive or a twist.

I’ve always wanted to know.

A Surgically Clean Dirty Martini

Keeping your spirits in the freezer, mixing in a frozen jug and using a generous quantity of ice will ensure a suitably cold martini. Serving in a frosty coupe will keep that chill until the last sip – as long as you drink your cocktail at the right pace. Drink too slowly and the last few mouthfuls will taste like straight paint thinner, too quickly and you risk immediate intoxication (as Marlowe Granados cautioned recently, martini drinking is serious business).

Ingredients

35ml frozen Four Pillars Olive Leaf Gin
35ml frozen vodka
5–10ml dry vermouth
a dash of The Bitter Truth Olive Bitters
lemon peel, to garnish

Method

1. Tip your gin, vodka, vermouth and bitters into a frozen glass jug, then add more ice than seems reasonable.

2. Stir eighty times (count your rotations), then double-strain into a frozen martini glass.

3. Squeeze a lemon peel over the surface of your drink, and rub it around the lip of the glass so the first mouthful is accompanied by a clean sniff of citrus.

Credits

Alice Slater is a writer and ex-bookseller from London. Her debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and won Debut Crime Book of the Year at Capital Crime’s Fingerprint Awards 2024. She co-hosts the literary podcast What Page Are You On? Her second novel, Let the Bad Times Roll, is out now in paperback. All photographs in this piece were provided by Alice.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

• ‘Serious Business’ by Marlowe Granados

• ‘Sweetness and Substance’ by Robin Craig

• ‘Good Pye: Catering Funerals with my Father’ by Vida Adamczewski

• ‘How to Eat an Orange’ by Vijeta Kumar

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay is a long read by Vittles editor Sharanya Deepak about delicious and chaotic South Asian Italian dishes, from keema spaghetti to pink sauce.

This essay is taken from our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – specifically the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of contemporary food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy. We have sold three-quarters of the print run so far and we are sold out of Issue 1, so don’t sleep on it!

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Buy Issue 2

The bedrock of Italian cuisine, I have been told my whole life, is minimal ingredients, freshness and proper, by-the-book technique. It is allegedly a cuisine rooted so firmly in tradition that there is a special state-led cabinet and culinary police force employed to determine who may be causing it harm. I sometimes wonder where Aunty Pasta in West Delhi fits into this lineage. Aunty Pasta is a small street stall just outside Karol Bagh metro station – a place that is a stranger to moderation and discipline, culinary or otherwise. Here you can buy everything from a retro MacBook to thrifted Yeezys to Pakistani salwars; around the stall, there are juice stalls, roadside sandwich grills, hundreds of people shopping for trinkets, and a couple of other people selling momo chutney-pasta made to Aunty Pasta’s recipe (only one of which is a permitted franchise).

At her stall, Aunty – as many Nepali women migrants in the city are known – whips up a concoction of sliced penne, oil, diced green capsicums (peppers), mayonnaise and Maggi masala, all mixed with an MSG-laden momo chutney that she pours into her seasoned iron kadhai from a plastic mug. The dish’s ingredients are essentially the same as those that go into a regular momo, but selling something less traditional helps Aunty to stand out and survive. The pasta – which has, since its invention around a decade ago, been subject to a cycle of influencer adulation, followed by mockery – is good in the way that a packet of crisps at a train station is good: it prompts buying a cold, fizzy beverage, and tastes mostly of starch and oil.

Across India, Italian ingredients continue to crop up in unlikely forms. Not too far from Aunty is ‘Billu’s Hut’, which takes several – more far-fetched – risks. On the menu is achari chaap pizza, Punjabi-sauce pasta, pasta Mexican, Punjabi paneer pasta and corn-nachos pasta. In North Delhi, another street vendor sells an Indo-Chinese macaroni dish to students at Delhi University; here, pasta and noodles are tossed together with oil, spices, ketchup and soy sauce (if you balk at the thought of combining pasta and noodles, I can point you to an influencer review I once watched, which said ‘maida maida hota hai’ – that flour is flour).

Yet it is the tamer, more traditional takes on the cuisine – pink-sauce pasta, malai tikka pizza – that have white folks everywhere gasping in uncanny-valley horror, as if the sanctity of their Tuscan holiday has been destroyed by South Asians adding spices to their pasta several oceans away. Last year, at a party in London, an acquaintance told me that when his girlfriend of Italian origin visited India, ‘it was hard for her’ to see the garlic-filled, spice-laden pasta sauces. ‘She had a difficult time,’ he said soberly, as if narrating incidents of systemic inequality.

Across the subcontinent, Desi spins on Italian dishes continue to shock the European canon. There is makhani-sauce pasta, roti lasagne, pizza with chicken tikka or beef keema, and spice-filled pasta sauce sprinkled with whatever mixes people have at home. In West Delhi this year, I ate spaghetti with a pesto made from mint and green chillis – it tasted like a Maharashtrian thecha. As I write this, my little brother tells me about a pasta his Kashmiri friend made with leftover aab gosht – mutton cooked in milk – which was the best carbonara he ever ate. This is a world where nobody seems to care about European scrutiny, where any culture of the West is mere flourish to adapt for maximum entertainment. When I spoke to a cafe owner in North Delhi, she told me Italian food was popular with local clientele. ‘Authentic pizzas and pastas’, she said, ‘inspired by people like Massimo Dutti, famous Italian chef’.

The origins of Italian food in South Asia are unclear, but most people I speak to say the same thing: Desi Italian is less inspired by Italian cuisine than it is by its twisted American counterpart. It was only decades after southern Italians migrated to the US in the 1940s that their food began to trickle down, like much else in American culture, to urban South Asia. The other thing that most people tell me is that some of the first Italian food made in India must have been started by some well-travelled Gujaratis. Writer Paromita Vohra mentions Snowmans in Bombay, where you could find pizza rolls. Cookbook author Saee Koranne-Khandekar tells me about Café Churchill in Colaba, which made a ‘wonderful’ roast potato and chicken lasagne. Not every exciting Indo-Italian creation came from Gujaratis. Editor and writer Supriya Nair remembers the classic Udupi restaurant pizza in Hotel Shabari: ‘All Udipis had the same pizza menu for the longest time – eight-inch pizza with tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, and a mountain of Amul cheese on a biscuity base.’

Even if no culinary heritage can be traced to a singular source, in Bombay the documented history points to one restaurant: Trattoria. Tratts, as it is popularly known, was opened in Cuffe Parade’s President Hotel in 1981 by Ajit Kelkar, who then headed the TAJ hotel group. Trattoria quickly became famous for its large selection of cafe-style Italian dishes (prawn cocktail, vodka pasta), served in a banquet room with an open kitchen and comfortable sofa chairs; it remains hugely popular today. ‘You should go after midnight,’ Alex Sanchez, a Bombay-based American chef and restaurateur, tells me. ‘It’s just full of people eating aglio [e] olio’. Before Trattoria opened to customers, chefs were sent to train in Italy, but also, crucially, Manhattan. In Bombay – the city that housed the Indian film industry – any establishment that promised a new vocabulary of glitz was sure to work. The idea was to sit in chandelier-filled rooms and eat dishes with names no one could really pronounce.

Even so, like anything new, Italian food needed to be sold to Indian diners. In 2001, when the restaurant writer and television host Rashmi Uday Singh listed the restaurant, she mentioned the ‘cappuccino tarts’ and ‘eggless’ dishes for Hindus and Jains. She also mentioned what was a primary draw in the city of Bombay: celebrity sightings (in this case, a young Jackie Shroff). Very soon, Trattoria became a signifier of new European cuisine, a safe choice for Indian elites living abroad when they were in town – Salman Rushdie, for instance, is said to have stayed at the President. But none of this could have guaranteed a trickle-down into the rest of Bombay’s eating culture. How many people – then and now – could afford to stroll into the President for a prawn alla vodka?

One of the restaurants that has long claimed to have made Italian food more accessible is the all-vegetarian Little Italy in Pune, opened in 1989 by Raj Mehta. When I ask Amrut Mehta, Raj’s son and the current CEO, how the idea for the restaurant came about, he echoes everyone else: ‘You know, we are Gujaratis – my dad had the acumen. When he met an Italian chef, he thought it was a good idea’. Little Italy started as a small operation that catered to European tourists visiting the Osho Ashram in Pune – the same ashram that features in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. In the 1990s, an Indian clientele started visiting the restaurant, and within a few years, when a branch had opened in Bombay, Little Italy had tweaked their recipes in favour of the Indian palate. Thin-crust crispy pizzas, well-cooked pasta (al dente won’t cut it) and a tomato sauce with more garlic and spice than the Italian way. Mehta also tells me that while Europeans like simple, one-dimensional flavours (others I speak to are less diplomatic, calling this preference ‘bland’), ‘Indians like spices. As a business, we need to keep that in mind’.

Today, across Little Italy’s fifty branches, many of the dishes that are popular are the ones that first made the restaurant’s name in the nineties: pastas like ‘Barberesca’ – a cream sauce with broccoli, tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, tempeh, chilli pepper and parmesan; and pizzas like Bombay, topped with spicy tomato sauce, onion, capsicum, cottage cheese, coriander and mozzarella. ‘And then there’s the thing we introduced years ago that people still love,’ Mehta says, fifteen minutes into our phone call. ‘Pink sauce.’

When I hear this, I double-check for confirmation. Discovering even the alleged inventor of pink sauce is like finding out which caveman rubbed flint to make fire. Pink sauce rules the trifecta of sauces that form the lexicon of Italian food in India. There is ‘red sauce’, made with tomatoes and spices (mostly described as ‘rich’ and ‘tangy’); ‘white sauce’, made with cheese, cream and flour (generally referred to as ‘creamy’ or ‘melty’); and pink sauce – the best of both worlds. I ask Mehta for the origin story. ‘I’m not sure, but I think one day, a gentleman mixed up two dishes on the table’, he replies, contemplating. Even if what Mehta says is myth, it is a plausible one – this kind of customisation and blending is inherent to how Italian food is eaten in India.

When San Francisco-born, Eleven Madison Park-trained Sanchez arrived in Bombay to head up the kitchen at The Table in 2010, he patiently addressed requests to add more chilli, salt or cream to plates that were sent back his way. ‘Like Italians, Indians are extremely particular about what they want,’ he tells me. But what on earth was pink sauce? ‘I made a few versions using what I knew from working in Italian restaurants elsewhere, but nothing worked. My line cooks would laugh at me, and I would say, Fine, guys! You do it! And they made a sauce with lots of garlic and chilli, adding cheese and enough dairy to make it pink. The sauce had to overwhelm the pasta’, he says. Eventually, Sanchez devised a pizza using pink sauce, called it ‘Pink Panther’ and put it on the menu at Americano, the restaurant which launched in 2019 that he co-owns. To no one’s surprise, the dish is the restaurant’s top seller. ‘It’s my little joke’, Sanchez tells me. ‘Reclaim pink sauce!’

If India has pink sauce supremacy, in Pakistan – where ‘vegetarian’ and ‘eggless’ are not concerns – Alfredo fettuccine is the primary player. ‘It’s everywhere, man! Everywhere!’ Alia Chughtai, a Karachi-based journalist, tells me, when I ask if she has encountered the recipe. The Pakistani version of the dish (and the only one with which I am familiar) is fettuccine – or whatever other pasta is on hand – cooked in a cream and flour sauce, then topped with spiced, baked or fried chicken breast. ‘People will top it up: green chillis, red chilli flakes and whatever else they want’, Chughtai adds. In his track ‘Introduction’, rapper Faris Shafi rhymes ‘Alfredo Fettucini’ with ‘red ho Lamborghini’. On email, writer Ahmer Naqvi tells me he ‘remember[s] a time when there was a “meri beti Alfredo fettuccine banana jaanti hai” vibe ongoing among middle-class families’, referring to the notion that a woman’s ability to cook the dish was used to advocate for her eligibility as a good hostess and wife.

On both sides of the border, Desi-Italian food seems to be a way to summon a fictional universe modelled after the Western world, an ‘elsewhereness’ that is aspirational but not imitative. ‘I like this,’ an American friend once said as we ate in a family-dining Western restaurant; she had ordered a macaroni salad with crispy corn and peppers. ‘A brown people’s version of white people’s lives’.

Packaged dry pasta was first introduced to South Asian markets in the 1970s; since then, billions of recipes – as infinitely varied as every household’s dal – have become a part of the repertoire of Desi-Italian cuisine. The Italian simulations of the restaurant world are timid compared to what happens in South Asian home kitchens. Many people I speak to mention dishes like ‘pasta sabzi’ or ‘chhonk vaali macaroni’, in which macaroni is cooked with a ‘chhonk’ – the everyday tempering of rai, haldi, jeera, mirchi (mustard, turmeric, cumin and red chilli powder) used for dishes like dal. Koranne-Khandekar tells me about her mother’s dish, inspired by a Tarla Dalal recipe, of spaghetti mixed with cream, sautéed onions, tomato sauce and ketchup, layered with a medley of vegetables and canned pineapple then topped with grated processed cheese and baked. When cooking Desi macaroni, ketchup is often present. Taiyyaba Ali, an independent chef who runs pop-ups, tells me that pasta dishes act as a place to ‘use Western and thrifted ingredients – like Domino’s oregano seasoning – that didn’t otherwise fit into an Indian repertoire’. For many mothers, pasta was a base starch, like flour or rice. ‘No one knew they were being “disobedient”’, Ali says. ‘There was no sense of the original recipe.’

By the 1990s, local pasta companies and small shops were selling new pasta shapes, while macaroni recipes – often marketed as ‘lunchbox staples’ – became a feature of women’s magazines. Some of these dishes – like Pakistani keema spaghetti (which also uses ketchup) – are so popular that they have become an institution. During the pandemic, Chughtai, like many others across South Asia, temporarily ran a delivery kitchen called Tangerine Tiffin, which had keema spaghetti on the menu as ‘Ammi vaaley keema noodles’ – Mum’s keema noodles. It was her most successful dish. ‘To me, keema spaghetti has never been Italian, always Pakistani’, cookbook author Maryam Jillani tells me. In a piece about the dish, Jillani writes that it was influenced by the method of ‘bhuna’ (through which the meat is cooked until it separates from the spices), noting how such recipes are modified not just by preferences of taste but also technique.

One common theme unites the Italian dishes that have become popular in the subcontinent: each has some element that feels familiar to South Asian diners. Unlike French cuisine, which people associate with raw meat, egg-based sauces and stoic fine-dining establishments, ‘there is a heartiness to Italian cuisine’, according to Koranne-Khandekar, that matches South Asian preferences. Naqvi loves Italian food because ‘the tomato-garlic-oil combo feels very similar to karahi gosht, which could be Pakistan’s national dish’. According to pasta chef Sambhavi Joshi, the Italian dishes that have caught Indian attention ‘have the same full, creamy mouthfeel as butter chicken and dal makhani’. Over a meal, a table of my friends concur that ‘pizza dough is just glorified tandoor ki roti’, which reminds me of the period when I would only eat pizza from one spot that made it on naan. Nair, meanwhile, mentions the ‘lactose availability’ of Indian diners. ‘So many Italian recipes are – especially in Bombay, and Gujarat – an excuse to eat cheese’, she says.

This is why, since the 1990s, pizzas – made on store-bought doughs, and sometimes rotis – have become similarly popular with South Asian households. ‘When I was growing up [in Islamabad], my mother bought pizza dough from the Afghan bakery, pre-made marinara sauce and picked her own toppings.’ Jillani tells me. ‘While she didn’t code any of this as “liberation”, I’m sure it must have been fun to be able to do something outside the traditional repertoire.’ In India throughout the nineties, when economic liberalisation had set in, products like FunFoods Pizza Sauces, branded pizza cheeses and, later, ‘taste makers’ (packets of spices that often tasted vaguely like Domino’s seasonings) made home-style pizzas ideal for hosting. By the noughties, ‘pizza’ had become a theme or abstraction to dispense as party snacks, like the ‘herbed pizza strips’ from Tarla Dalal’s The Complete Italian Cook Book (which was published in 2000 for an audience of mostly elite Indian housewives).

Today, the dry pasta market in India is valued at more than $1.4 billion, topped by older brands such as Bambino but also newer ones that sell pasta made from gluten-free Indian grain like jowar (sorghum). There are Italian cheeses sold by big brands like Amul, plus small-batch versions made by (and sold to) the upper classes in friendly organic stores, where they are stocked alongside handmade ceramic and soaps. There are also ranges of ‘Italian spices’ (‘itself an oxymoron’, according to Nair), sold by trusted small-sale sellers like Bharat Masala and multinationals like Maggi.

In Pakistan, this is taken up a notch: the brand Bake Parlor’s macaroni mixes range from ‘Balti Macaroni’ and ‘Tikka Macaroni’ to ‘Shashlik Macaroni’, ‘Chicken Ginger Macaroni’ and ‘Bihari Tikka Macaroni’. The website has recipes, too, for dishes like Balochi tikka lasagne and penne pasta pizza sticks. (To make the pasta-pizza sticks, penne, olives and cheese are loaded onto a skewer and dusted with spices and the brand’s pizza sauce, like a doughy, Italian-flavoured seekh kebab.)

As the market evolves, so too does home cooking. No one is simply throwing macaroni shells in a tadka pan anymore. There is chilli-garlic pasta, schezwan spaghetti, and cheesy pressure-cooker macaroni. Rajeswari Vijayanand, who runs the blog and channel ‘Raks Kitchen’, uses Italian pantry ingredients to suit her Tamil cooking – she tells me about her recipes for pasta sundal and orzo payasam. ‘Sometimes people in the comments will say, “this is disrespectful,” But I am a home cook – I use the tools of instinct and memory’, she says. People with more access to the global pantry might use ingredients like tahini, harissa and miso in their recipes, along with contemporary brands of upscale, small-batch produce. ‘There is cuisine, and then there is cooking’, Sanchez says when I ask about Indian-Italian dishes. ‘When it comes to cooking, “correct” is not a useful conversation. In a way, Indian-Italian cooking is a huge compliment to Italian cuisine.’

Before we continue, I must – as one is forced to – declare that I actually like Italian food. I have loved eating arancini in Rome. I have been fed aromatic soups and spaghetti alle vongole, lovingly made in huge pots, by my friends in Naples. Food in Italy, much like food anywhere, is delicious. I question only the treatment of those who dare trespass on the rigidity of the cuisine, especially when the policing comes from outside the country. It has been disgruntled British acquaintances who have lectured me about freshness if I dare so much as look at a bottle of Sriracha when hastily making pasta. Once, at a mediocre restaurant I worked at in Brussels, I was asked to tell an Indian family not to add chilli flakes to their lasagne, as if it hadn’t been made with substandard produce from Lidl’s discount aisle.

By the time I returned from my life in Europe, I had internalised all this snobbery. ‘God, overcooked pasta’, I muttered when I watched a friend eat a spicy pasta arrabbiata and order ‘extra sauce’ on the side for his free garlic bread. ‘You know it’s after noon’, I said at dinner with cousins when someone ordered a cappuccino (in response, my chair was dragged and positioned at a corner so everyone on it could throw croutons at my head). The idea that we must protect the sanctity of Italian cuisine reflects what I like to call ‘political proximity’, where things are sometimes brought into the white, Western canon, their value rendered by how much they appeal to a European appetite for culinary adventure. Even if those things are new, they must be unthreatening; it doesn’t take much for something to become too novel – not exciting anymore, but a threat of some kind. To its protectors, Italian food is safely exotic – delicious, exciting and a little different. Crucially, it is owned by white people, which makes it just foreign enough.

Earlier this year, I spoke to Alberto Grandi, the co-author, along with Daniele Soffiati, of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (‘Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist’). He told me that, these days more than ever, the Italian public believe that the world is hell-bent on destroying Italy’s cuisine. ‘Italians are convinced that everyone else in the world eats disgusting food,’ he says. ‘It allows the image to be formed of Italians being the perfect, rustic makers and consumers of cuisine.’ Grandi’s work, which has summoned the ire of puritanical chefs and food writers everywhere, argues that the idea of a unified Italian culinary tradition is steeped in marketing rather than truth. ‘In politics, it is easier to send the message of a “hypothetical enemy” [in this case, the ones tampering with Italian recipes], rather than a meaningful one that is based on what people really need.’

Today, Italian cuisine is propped up by the Punjabi farmers making parmesan and the Bangladeshis who run restaurant kitchens in Venice. Reuters reported that, in 2023, non-EU workers made up 34% of new hires of cooks and pizza-makers, with the proportion of non-EU kitchen assistant hires (such as cleaners and dishwashers) even higher at 58%. ‘Of course, this is not acknowledged’, Grandi says. ‘Because if it is, how will they sell the myth of one traditional cuisine?’ I think of all the South Asians cooking in Italian kitchens, policing their own instincts. When I tell Grandi about pink pasta, he is unfazed. ‘Did you expect shock? Because I am Italian? I am not shocked. Adaptability is the foundation of Italian cuisine.’

Meanwhile in India, the idea of being devoted to the true Italian method is a new way for the elite to distance themselves from the public. At her restaurant Casa Pasta Bar, Joshi serves pasta made from local, single-origin Indian grain, which she says ‘is a very Italian thing to do. But often, people don’t understand, and say, “This is not Italian” – because I have not used “durum semola” imported from Italy’. Archit Puri, a strategy consultant who works closely with restaurants, tells me that what used to be experimental is now the basis of a ‘pizza-pasta-burger repetition’ among venture-capital backed, consultant-run restaurants that are solely geared towards profit. ‘While the first Indo-Italian dishes were experimental, they have now become the norm. People use fancier names for the dishes like red sauce pasta and use them to replicate the same menu everywhere’, he says. But outside the rigidity of industry, the experiments continue, led by the dynamism of the home kitchen, small restaurants and innovations on the street.

The day I ate at Aunty’s Pasta, I got into an argument with two identical-looking lads who, wanting to speed their motorcycle through the road – which had been destroyed by crowds and rain – bullied and shouted at an older man with a heavy pushcart. As I ate, my argument widened, ending only when one of the boys conceded. ‘Haan hain hum badtameez chutiye!’ he yelled, calling himself an asshole before I could. If food is about one’s environment, these aren’t the rolling hills of Emilia-Romagna. In South Asia’s cities, pleasure is a sacred, evasive thing, which must be experienced (whether ‘tangy’, ‘melty’ or ‘creamy’) in the dense, pacy bustle of life.

While the first innovations may have been coded into a genre, they continue, as always. On the internet, there are recipes for Bangladeshi ‘nashta pasta’ or ‘breakfast pasta’ – pasta mixed into spiced scrambled eggs. In Toronto’s Pizza Karachi, people flock to eat pizzas with toppings like Bihari sauce, Afghani tikkas and soft pieces of reshmi kebab. Last week I chatted to Amit, a young vendor making a street-style makhani pasta near where I live. I told him that this recipe may upset Italians. ‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t everyone adding masalas and malai in their pasta?’ Amit remained confused as I explained further, then asked me to show him videos of famous Italian chefs. ‘It’s not like I can put any of these men out of work’, he said, as someone nearby asked me if Massimo Bottura was in fact Steve Jobs. ‘Zindagi kabhi mushkil hai kabhi tamasha, aisa-vaisa hua toh maaf kardena’, he continued as I wiped down my last bit of makhani sauce. Life here is all hardship or spectacle. So forgive us if we take it too far.

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Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from and currently in New Delhi, India. She is also an editor at Vittles Magazine.

Svabhu Kohli (they/them) is an independent visual storyteller whose work explores the interconnections between people, place, and the natural world through layered narratives rooted in magical realism. Their book The Desert Queen received the 2024 Stonewall Honor Award. Kohli’s practice bridges art, ecology, and storytelling to nurture deeper relationships with the living world.

A note from Sharanya: I’d like to thank everyone I interviewed for this piece. Special shukriyas to Supriya Nair, Ahmer Naqvi, Alberto Grandi, Paromita Vohra, Archit Puri, Sofia Grandi, Sanam Maher and Taiyaba Ali.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. If you missed yesterday’s podcast with Joké Bakare, you can catch up with it (and all previous episodes) here.

A quick reminder that Faye Gomes at Kaieteur Kitchen is cooking at Walworth Living Room from 5-9pm tonight, after being evicted from Elephant and Castle last year. If you’ve enjoyed her food, please go and support her - you can find the menu below.

Today’s review by Dina Begum is about Bangla City, a Boxpark-like structure of 30 units in Upton Park which has become one of the most significant Bangladeshi food hubs in London. 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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It was as if Bangla City appeared overnight. For years, I’d passed what used to look like a junkyard just off Plashet Grove in Upton Park, nestled between Chaiiwala and Naan Staap. Sometimes I would spot rolls of old carpets, broken furniture and offcuts, not really paying attention to the narrow passageway or the sizable space it led onto. And then one day, sometime in the summer of 2025, the greige turned into Technicolour. Suddenly, it was Dhaka: a bustling food street of shipping containers, alive with the scents of Bangladeshi home cooking: biryani laced with kewra water, pandan leaf extract mingling with aromatic chinigura rice. People gathered in groups everywhere, the staccato rhythm of Bengali conversations punctuating the steady stream of popular Bangla songs. It was almost as if we were all thinking the same thing: ‘Who knew a place like this existed in London?’

Bangla City Food Court, as it is unofficially known by locals and vendors, has since become one of the most significant hubs for Bangladeshi food in London. Around 30 units are currently open, with more than 20 coming over the next few months. These businesses comprise everything from colourfully decorated food carts selling popular Bangladeshi street foods to single-unit containers and fully fledged restaurants with a focus on the cuisine of Dhaka, the capital. Upon entering the development, you can’t help but be swept along – particularly after 5pm, when crowds form in every direction and deftly move through the space, picking up a snack here and there: chotpoti, spicy fruit chatnis, salads, fried snacks or sweet treats like bhapa pitha, a steamed coconut and molasses rice cake.

Even though Bangla City appeared suddenly, the conditions that led to its arrival have been in the works for years. Over the last decade or so, the Bangladeshi foothold in Upton Park has grown deeper, with Indian and Pakistani businesses swapping hands with Bangladeshis. Every other shop, from clothes stores to fried chicken shops, now displays Bengali names and sells types of frozen freshwater fish, amaranth greens and soft drink brands I only ever used to see at select stores in Whitechapel or Brick Lane. The new hub of Upton Park makes an interesting contrast to the historical Banglatown in London’s East End, which has been home to Sylheti immigrants since the 1970s, following the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. My discontent with Banglatown has always stemmed from the dissonance between Bangladeshi home cooking and the curry house fare you’ll find there: a hybrid cuisine created for the British palate. Yet Upton Park – particularly the food court – offers a fresh social space for Bangladeshis and non-Bangladeshis alike to experience traditional food and the late night cha and adda (tea and conversation) culture of Bangladesh.

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Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star – an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving.

In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged.

In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.

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 with another podcast in April when Adam will be talking about why ingredients matter with SongSoo Kim, head of sourcing and development at Super 8, the restaurant group behind Brat, Smoking Goat, Kiln and the new Impala in Soho. We’ll see you then.

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Credits

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

Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.

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 to Vittles! In today’s essay, Vitória Croda reports from Brixton, where food and drink traders are being evicted from Brixton Plaza – a mini-mall of immigrant-run food businesses covered previously on Vittles. Potentially more evictions are on their way too.

Today’s article is not paywalled, but to report on situations like Brixton Plaza we rely solely on reader subscriptions. To support our work, 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 our restaurant coverage.

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On 1 March, Kevin Agila received a phone call from the manager of Brixton Plaza, who asked him to withhold the upcoming month’s rent. Agila is the owner of the Ecuadorian restaurant Kasama, which opened less than a year ago and is one of eight small food retailers that operate in Brixton Plaza – a mini-mall inside a Grade-II-listed building on Brixton Road that also hosts Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza. The retailers serve everything from Ethiopian and Chinese food to cuisines you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the city.

Agila found the request to withhold rent strange, but the manager assured him it was just part of a regular procedure the landlord does every once in a while. A couple of days later, he received an eviction notice, telling him that he would have to leave by 7 April. He would have roughly a month to pack his stuff and find another location for Kasama.

Then all the other traders in Brixton Plaza received similar phone calls, including Cathe Figueiredo, who runs the Brazilian restaurant Delicathe Gourmet with her brother, Dery. Delicathe, which, as I wrote for Vittles last year, specialises in Afro-Brazilian dishes from the northeastern state of Bahia, and opened around the same time as Kasama. It was going well, thriving even, with regular customers every single day. Figueiredo had another reason to be happy: she was five-months pregnant with her first child, a little girl. The same week she got the news that Delicathe would need to move, she sadly lost her daughter too. ‘I honestly think it was due to the stress I felt,’ she tells me. Even though she was hospitalised, she kept receiving phone calls from the management company of Brixton Plaza, demanding that she pack up Delicathe as soon as possible. (The restaurant remains closed until Figueiredo is physically recovered from her loss.)

While Brixton Plaza’s traders were the first to get evicted, publicly available planning documents (note: you’ll need to search for the reference number 25/02874/FUL) show that the entire building – currently a heterogeneous mixture of small businesses, clothing retailers, barber shops and independent restaurants – has been approved for internal demolition by Lambeth Council. It will be replaced by an Aldi, according to the Brixton Plaza manager, although the documents make no mention of this. The future of traders in Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza remained uncertain when I spoke with them last Saturday (21 March), although many are now reconsidering their future in the neighbourhood altogether.

‘Poor Shopfronts’

414–426 Brixton Road was originally built as a Quin & Axtens department store in 1906. The building was bombed during World War 2, but since the 1950s, it has been refurbished, listed and subdivided into units of mixed use (most notably, it was a Mothercare, until it closed in 2018). The building was quickly rebranded with temporary signage as Brixton Mall and Brixton Plaza (and, later, SW9 Plaza). These spaces are used interchangeably and have the same owner: Governside Limited, an offshore company registered in the Isle of Man, which has owned the freehold for the building and leasehold for the ground floors since 1999. The complex has been referenced in planning documents as having a ‘neglected and shabby’ appearance and accused of having ‘poor quality shop-fronts’ that ‘detract from the quality and significance’ of the area. The heritage report attached to the application registered with Lambeth Council says the new development could enhance the area and make it a ‘more attractive tourist destination’ for those coming to O2 Academy events.

However, once you step into the building, it is clear that the place is far more interesting than these documents claim. From young professionals queuing to buy shawarma at Forno, to entire families having a weekend lunch at Estación 504, the building is widely used by Brixton’s many communities. Its narrow corridors have been the testing ground for some landmark London restaurants: in 2022 it housed Burrito Cocktail, the first place to sell Honduran dishes in London; in 2024, the space now taken up by Delicathe was Pura Vida, London’s first Costa Rican restaurant, which has since relocated to Bounds Green. It is a spontaneous version of many purpose-built indoor markets around London, including elsewhere in Brixton. It is also the epitome of the diversity and bustling neighbourhood that estate agents brag about in their Brixton area guides.

Nara Araújo, who is from Brazil and moved King Churros to SW9 Plaza a year ago, tells me how diverse her customers are. On the day I first interviewed her, many of them were heading to see The Vaccines at the O2 Academy Brixton, but there are many locals too – ‘especially women and the LGBT community, they have become my sweeties’. Inside Brixton Mall, Honduran restaurant Estación 504 offers traditional chincharrón con yuca and pollo con tajadas alongside daily soup specials for lunch (for no more than £7.50, you can get a beef shank soup with slow-cooked vegetables, also known as sopa de res). The restaurant’s customers have become part of a wider ecosystem that props up the Mall: before eating at Estación 504, they might also stop in at Vivien’s, the manicurist next door, then ship a package at Paquetería, where Jenny offers shipping services.

Mixed Communications

Like in Elephant and Castle last year, when multiple traders were evicted at short notice over non-payment of electricity bills, the traders at Brixton Plaza have little to no recourse for legal action. When they moved into the complex, they signed precarious fixed-term contracts with the management company that allow only one month’s notice to be given in case of eviction. But what has been most disappointing to the traders is how poorly communicated the regeneration has been to them. None of the traders at Brixton Plaza, Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza have direct contact or contract with the landlord, Governside; instead all communication goes through the manager, Solomon Berhe, who is himself a tenant and who refuses to disclose information about the landlord.

Looking into the landlord, Governside, things get interesting (and a little complicated, so please bear with me). One of the listed ‘beneficial owners’ (ie a person who directly or indirectly ultimately owns or controls a corporate entity) of Governside is Mushtak Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s listed address is also the registered address for companies named Crown Insurance Services, which has a ‘Mustak Ibrahim’ as a director), Crown Properties and Yashmin Properties Limited. All three of these companies list Yaumna Sattar Mahomed as a beneficial owner. Among Yashmin Properties’ former officers, two – Mohammad Hassan and Haroon Abdul Aziz – have links to Golfrate, the company set up by property developer Asif Aziz. Asif Aziz is no longer involved in Golfrate, but via his other company, Criterion Capital, he has been linked with a slew of other evictions across London (which have recently been reported on extensively by London Centric).

London Centric

The "Azizification" of London housing

Coverage of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital went mainstream this week, with news outlets across the political spectrum covering the mass evictions that London Centric has been reporting on for weeks. There’s increasing political pressure, from central government down to the mayor of London’s office and local councils to get a grip on the issue…

Read more

2 months ago · 93 likes · 17 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

We’re unable to say definitively that the Brixton Plaza landlord Governside is directly linked to either Golfrate or Asif Aziz, but the connection is strong enough that when Brixton Plaza opened, some residents believed that Crown Properties and Golfrate owned the building. Irrespective of whether the companies are linked, the evictions in Brixton involve a level of confusion similar to that seen with Criterion’s evictions.

Even though the planning application has been approved for the entire building, traders from the Mall and SW9 Plaza have been receiving mixed information from Berhe, who told them that Brixton Plaza is the only one being refurbished. (I reached out to Berhe for comment, who told me as a fellow tenant he ‘has no idea what they [the landlord] are going to do’.) ‘They told me that I would probably have more years here,’ Araújo says. ‘I just wish we could have been better informed. We haven’t been told anything.’

Some traders have told me they invested significant amounts of money in their businesses only to have the rug unexpectedly pulled from under them. James Vasco, who owns a small barber shop inside Brixton Plaza, moved his business to the premises just a month ago, and is feeling particularly frustrated after receiving his eviction notice. ‘We’re all small businesses. Something like this can destroy people,’ Vasco tells me. Vasco claims that Berhe told him he didn’t know about the demolition plans. ‘But how could they not know? Of course they knew.’

At Brixton Plaza, rumours were going around late last year about contracts potentially ending, but these rumours were quickly denied by management, who reassured traders that their businesses were safe. However, Lambeth recorded the proposal to redevelop the building in its database in September 2025. Until earlier this week, some vacant shopfronts in Brixton Mall still displayed ‘to let’ signs with a contact number. When I rang the number last Monday (16 March) and inquired about renting the space, the manager told me that it was promptly available at a monthly price of £2,500, with a contract that could be renewed every six months.

While many traders from Brixton Plaza are struggling to find other sites at short notice, proper communication could help those in Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza to save money to move their businesses. As Brixton’s commercial rents continue to rise, many are still uncertain about their future in the neighbourhood. Araújo wants to stay in Brixton, as it’s where most of her clientele is. Jenny would like to be a part of the diverse ecosystem that the other Latin American businesses brought to her Paquetería, but is afraid that this might not be possible. Figueiredo has had to pause her search, which puts her at greater financial risk.

Agila, meanwhile, has found another place to rent for Kasama, though not in Brixton, where he was born and grew up. Kasama blends his Ecuadorian roots with British food culture. His alitas, chicken wings coated in sweet and slightly spicy passionfruit sauce, combine the street food of both of his heritages and are one of the restaurant’s most ordered meals. His menu’s success is reflected by the wide range of customers – a mix of Latin American diaspora and people trying Ecuadorian-inspired food for the first time.

Agila acknowledges some improvements in the area from his teenage years, but he tells me that advances shouldn’t displace locals. He emphasises how important small businesses are to the area; how chains like Leon and Costa tend to close in Brixton while its residents seek the sense of community that places like those in Brixton Plaza can offer. But the ongoing gentrification of Brixton puts this ecosystem at the risk of becoming homogenised. ‘People forget that the main reason people come to Brixton is the community, the small independent businesses,’ Agila tells me from behind his counter. ‘They don’t want to come here to eat at a big company. For that, they can go anywhere else in London.’

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Vitória Croda is a journalist and immigrant from Brazil. She’s been in London for five years, and is currently doing her PhD at Loughborough University.

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