Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Helena Aeberli discusses the persistent influence of Luigi Cornaro, whose sixteenth-century discourses on abstention and careful monitoring of food intake have striking resonances with the contemporary obsession with fitness and longevity.

This piece is an online-only article linked to our forthcoming third print issue, ‘The Influencers’ – all about how the internet and short-form video have reshaped food culture, as well as about the broader sociocultural systems and structures that inform how we eat today.

Issue 3 is officially out this week. Today is the last day to pre-order it at a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). Order your copy here!

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A young man looks down at his plate. There isn’t much on it – a single boiled egg and a mug of bone broth – but that’s the point. Having obtained the latest intake-tracking technology and the hottest new diet manual (written by a popular wellness guru), he is about to embark on a programme of strict abstinence with the aim of transforming his body and soul. When his friends ask him why he’s no longer joining them at the pub or indulging in his favourite food, he tells them that he wants to feel fit and healthy. He wants to look unrecognisable in a few months and to feel as young in his old age as he does now.

This story of dieting, the anxiety-inducing pursuit of health and the tantalising promise of a long life lived well, is a familiar one today. Except in this case the year isn’t 2026 – it’s 1558. The new piece of kit is not a smartwatch or continuous glucose monitor but a weighing scale. And the charismatic lifestyle guru isn’t Bryan Johnson or Andrew Huberman. He’s a Venetian nobleman turned engineer and architect, who at ninety-one years old – or at least, that’s the age he claims to be – says he’s uncovered the secret to granting every man’s deepest desire. Luigi Cornaro says he can help you to live forever.

In Discourses on the Sober Life (Discorsi Della Vita Sobria, sometimes translated as How To Live To 100), Cornaro told the story of a personal miracle. After decades of overeating and chronic illness – including ‘spices of the gout’, a ‘continual slow fever’ and ‘a stomach generally out of order’ – he’d achieved near-mythical health and longevity through extreme restriction, carefully weighing out a slender daily ration of food centuries before the invention of MyFitnessPal. The man who used to ‘eat freely of every thing I liked best’ (including ‘melons’, ‘fish and pork’ and ‘pastry’) became a zealous dieter, endeavouring ‘never to cloy my stomach with eating or drinking; but constantly rise from table with a disposition to eat and drink still more’. With Discourses, Cornaro sought to convince others that they should do the same. Nearly 500 years later, with ‘longevity’ one of the buzzwords of the moment and an army of wellness influencers seeking to sell their personal protocols to the ‘worried well’, the story of the first modern diet manual is more relevant than ever.

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In an age where nearly everyone knows the calorie content of a chocolate bar, even if they don’t particularly want to, it’s hard to overstate just how radical Cornaro’s thesis was. Premodern dietetics preached moderation in all things and condemned gluttony, but it was also resolutely qualitative. Under the humoral theory (the dominant framework through which Europeans understood their health from classical antiquity until into the eighteenth century), the balance of the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) determined the make-up of the body. This balance was affected by what one ate. Foods possessed particular properties that related to their healthfulness, and it was important to ensure the appropriate balance for each individual eater.

The melons beloved by Cornaro were ‘cold’ and ‘wet’, which meant they were thought to lack nutrition and to be prone to corrupting inside the body. Pork was judged more nourishing (disturbingly because its similarity to human flesh rendered it easily digestible), but doctors believed it could be harmful to those of a sedentary lifestyle and weak digestion, such as scholars like Cornaro. While it doesn’t stand up to modern scientific criteria, this was a holistic – and surprisingly poetic – dietary system attuned to the individuality of the human body, acknowledging that different diets were appropriate for different eaters.

Cornaro, by contrast, believed that eaters should follow two dietary ‘rules’ – eating foods with qualities that agreed with them, yes, but also restricting the quantity they consumed. While moderation had long been prized, Cornaro went much further, proudly informing his readers of his slender daily ration: twelve ounces of food and fourteen ounces of wine – likely amounting to no more than 1000 calories. He carefully weighed his food and viewed consuming any more as a near-catastrophic threat to his carefully won health. After worried friends expressed concern about his restricted intake, he begrudgingly added another four ounces, an increase he contended made him dangerously unwell.

When Cornaro died a centenarian in 1566 (if his own accounts are to be believed; each new edition of the Discourses exaggerated his age a little more, and historians’ estimates of his birth year range between 1464 and 1484), his acolytes spread the word of his revolutionary abstemious diet as a panacea for spiritual and physical ill health. Cornaro’s work was frequently reprinted, and defenders of his method published their own books, prescribing a limited or ‘lowering’ diet to patients (eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne praised ‘diminution’ as the way ‘Cornaro lengthned out his Days, and preserved his Senses, in a great measure, intire to a hundred Years’). By the late nineteenth century, according to none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘thousands of copies’ of Discourses were still being sold each year in England alone. It continued to be cited well into the twentieth century; the most recent scientific praise I’ve found is in a gerontology article from 2018.

Cornaro himself is little known today, but his influence on contemporary food culture is difficult to overstate. While he lived in a society with little stigma around fatness, his focus on quantity presaged the introduction of standardised calorific intake and BMI charts, the multi-billion-pound weight-loss and wellness industries – and the deep vein of anxiety that continues to run through food culture today. The idea that one’s food intake can be measured, weighed and proportioned to the nth degree was his innovation. Cornaro urged his readers to find their own perfect quantity of food to ingest, promoting a data-driven attitude to the body and an emphasis on tracking and monitoring that has become ingrained in contemporary life. With him, the scale entered the kitchen for the very first time.

But as anyone who’s used a calorie tracker knows, knowledge of the body can easily slide into an obsessive desire to control it. Doctors and the media now talk about longevity fixation syndrome, an obsession with monitoring one’s biomarkers with the aim of extending life, while orthorexia, a disordered preoccupation with the healthfulness and purity of food, is on the rise and has been linked to the manipulative tactics of health and clean-eating content creators. (Epidemiological data for orthorexia are limited due to the novelty of the condition.) Cornaro and his disciples were not immune to similar accusations of making people sick: I recently stumbled across a battered doctor’s casebook from the early seventeenth century in the British Library, and was startled to find the apparent symptoms of orthorexia staring back at me – a ‘strict accurate diet by the scale’ was linked with making people ‘fearful … [that] an ounce of meat or drinke more than ordinarie, makes their pulse strike higher: they estrange themselves from civil societie; and must eate alone’.

Cornaro’s central focuses – extreme abstention and the aim of elongating life and wellbeing – are experiencing a contemporary resurgence, the former via the rise of ‘thinfluencers’ and the boom in GLP-1s, the latter via self-optimisation and longevity grifters. Each of these movements shares a vision of the body as a ‘project’, something that can be constantly improved. This perfectionist bent means that the goalposts of what constitutes wellbeing are constantly moving and have become increasingly unattainable for ordinary people. Wellness becomes competitive (Peter Attia’s bestselling longevity guide is titled Outlive), extreme (Bryan Johnson claims to take over 100 supplements a day) and expensive (the industry as a whole is currently valued at $6 trillion). It also promotes a kind of tunnel vision. If food is mere fuel, carefully portioned according to macros or calories, it is no longer a source of pleasure, joy, community or cultural meaning. Podcaster Steven Bartlett, who recently opined, Cornaro-style, that ‘a couple of glasses of wine … ruined three days of my life’, a ‘domino effect’ he tracked through his Whoop smartwatch, is a case in point. Such an obsessive fixation on diet, as one early modern doctor bewailed nearly half a millennium ago, makes ‘a man jealous of his owne fingers, daring to eat nothing with chearfulness’.

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For Cornaro, dieting was a spiritual pursuit which would enable him to make a good death, finally free of the sin of gluttony. We may not explicitly believe that dieting leads to spiritual enlightenment, but contemporary wellness and diet culture often still seek to sell salvation. Today’s wellness evangelicals routinely adopt the language of religion – promising transformative rituals and cleanses, and a strict ideology of self-discipline. Bryan Johnson’s latest programme is even called ‘Immortals’ (at a cost of $1 million a year, it is just one of many such expensive and experimental treatments available only to an extremely select few, at a time when predicted lifespans between the rich and poor continue to diverge).

Scholars such as Hannah Bacon and Michelle Mary Lelwica have persuasively argued that diet culture operates as a kind of secular religion in the West, offering a ‘salvation myth of physical perfection’. The bringing of one’s mortal body closer to that ideal is taken as a sign of superiority and self-control, and while unregulated supplements, peptide stack injections, extreme diets and self-tracking devices all draw on the language of science to sell their denial of death, they are often premised on a fantastical or delusional belief in effectiveness, despite the absence of any supporting evidence.

This delusion is understandable in an increasingly deranged and confusing world: body projects offer a modicum of control. The consolatory, quasi-spiritual function of self-control will be familiar to anyone who has suffered from an eating disorder. Strict structures provide meaning, promise certainty. Like us, Cornaro was living in a time of major turmoil, with plague and the Reformations producing deep social, religious and political strife. He likened order in the body to order in society, and it’s tempting to see his obsession with food regulation as a response to the turbulent age he lived in. The past may be a foreign country, but some impulses transcend time.

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Although Discourses on the Sober Life remains in print, Cornaro is rarely cited as a dietary authority today. And while it’s easy to overlook his story as a historical curio, I see his ghostly influence everywhere in the online world of wellness, as well as in my own perpetual desire to eat right and the lifelong anxieties this has caused me.

Today, it’s almost impossible to open social media without encountering an outpouring of emotive content about health, wellbeing and eating (or the restriction thereof). Most of this is created by amateurs whose self-professed expertise comes from a personal journey rather than any medical training (even supposedly legitimate scientists like Andrew Huberman and David Sinclair, respectively Stanford and Harvard professors, are frequently accused of peddling pseudoscience and misinformation on their popular YouTube channels and podcasts). The narrative these wellness and longevity influencers gurus is selling is broadly similar to Cornaro’s: the tale of a fellow sufferer, a former loose-liver turned disciplined, self-trained dieter who no longer needs the input of medical professionals. Ultimately, Cornaro was a clever salesman who understood the fears and desires of his fellow men. His legacy shows that diet culture is, and always has been, about telling – and selling – a good story.

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Credits

Helena C Aeberli is a writer and historian based between London and Oxford, where she is currently researching early modern eating disorders.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today, Loukia Constantinou visits a new ‘traditional Greek-Cypriot taverna’ at Arcade in Covent Garden and asks: what does the restaurant do for Cyrpiot cuisine in London?

Before the review, a reminder that this weekend is the last opportunity to pre-order our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, a magazine about how the internet and short-form video has reshaped food culture. If you pre-order the issue before this Monday 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price of 10% off, with an 20% discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). Order your copy here!

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It’s All Greek To Me

On my first visit to Zylia, a new ‘traditional Greek Cypriot taverna’ inside the latest Arcade Food Hall at the old TGI Fridays site in Covent Garden, I was instantly charmed by one of the knives in the cutlery set. Zylia is led by Athens-born Nick Molyviatis, the chef partly responsible for the success of some of London’s most lauded modern Thai and ‘Greek’ restaurants – Kiln, Singburi, Oma, Agora – alongside Barry Karacostas, who has Cypriot heritage. The bright, airy space is decorated with enough trinkets and knick-knacks, while you listen to repeat plays of the folk song Tillirkotissa, to trigger sentimental feelings of home in Cypriots of any generation, including me.

The knife is a minor detail in the grand scheme of paraphernalia on display – from Lefkaritika-style lace textiles dispersed along the shelves that frame the dining room to a selection of giant woven shallow platters (paneria) and sporadically placed clay jugs (kouzes) that look old enough to fetch water from the village well, and fragile enough to use in a traditional Cypriot dance of courtship. Of all these things, though, it was the knife that made me happiest. Simple, Italian-made, with a plastic handle that comes in various colours and a stainless steel blade, one third serrated and two thirds plain-edge, it glides through anything it touches with an ease to match the finest Japanese knives. This is the ‘Cyprus knife’ that we love and use for everything. Its presence was a promising first impression.

If only the early reviewers of Zylia had been as diligent in their attention to detail. Many of them managed to mangle the history and geography of both Cypriot and Greek cuisines. The Guardian described the food as being from two islands, rather than two countries. Broadsheet referred to Greece as ‘the mainland’ – a problematic term to apply, as it suggests that Cyprus is a Greek island (it isn’t). The Evening Standard went for a lazy quip about George Michael.

This lack of accuracy may have been influenced by the restaurant’s own early PR drive, which led to industry outlets, like Hot Dinners and London on the Inside, describing Zylia as ‘Greek-Cypriot’ ‘Greek Cypriot’ and ‘Greek/Cypriot’ – subtle but important differences for two nations with such a complex, intertwined history. ‘Greek-Cypriot’ – which is not an inherently inaccurate or dubious term (it is widely used in Cyprus to refer to Cypriots who speak Greek) – is first and foremost a Cypriot identity. Zylia officially uses the term ‘Greek Cypriot’ (without the hyphen), which has predictably been changed to Greek-Cypriot in publicity, causing a lot of the misunderstanding surrounding its Cypriot-ness.

This slight slipperiness seemed to be reflected in the menu, which promised to combine ‘the depth of Cypriot cooking and the breadth of Greek tradition’, but offered noticeably more of the latter than the former. No sooner had it been announced, conversations about Zylia among Cypriots were happening both publicly and privately.

Publicly, there were those who were thrilled – a group of writers and influencers who questionably choose to align themselves closely with Greece, despite having no Greek heritage to speak of. But there were more of us who took to group chats and private messages to sigh collectively at the unfolding narrative: not only did Zylia – or at least the discourse around it – appear to clumsily misrepresent Greek-speaking Cypriots, it also erased Turkish-speaking Cypriots entirely. Being in the restaurant and experiencing it myself on two separate occasions, once at lunch and again at dinner, did little to alleviate my concerns; all it did was make me question why Zylia bothered with the Cypriot angle at all.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Niloufar Haidari explores the bewildering rise of protein and its relationship to the contemporary masculinity crisis.

This piece is an online-only article linked to our forthcoming third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, which is all about how the internet has reshaped food culture, as well as about the broader sociocultural systems and structures that inform how we eat today. You have just one more week to pre-order the issue for the special discounted price of £18, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see here for details). Order your copy now!

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‘I can’t hit my protein!’ squeals Kai Shepherd mockingly, before demolishing 100 quail eggs. The twenty-four-year-old content creator has made a name – and bought a house – for himself off the back of protein-based content. His videos may be tongue-in-cheek, but his commitment to protein is extremely serious, as evidenced by his huge arms and the protein powder affiliate codes in his bio. Shepherd’s long-suffering-but-game parents also feature heavily in his almost absurdist output, as does his dog and, most recently, his girlfriend – unlike much of the dour (American) proteinaceous content online, Shepherd is able to poke fun at his obsession, and has spawned a genre of even more ludicrous spin-offs.

We are living in the age of protein psychosis. Every supermarket is hawking ‘high-protein’ products, from Lidl’s high-protein tiramisu to M&S’s high-protein sweet chilli lentil tortilla chips. Protein brand Grenade has collaborated with Cadbury to create the ‘Creme Egg Flavour Soft Core Protein Bar’; Babybel has launched Mini Babybel Protein, each of which features a whopping 0.8g more protein than the regular version. And if you’re thinking about getting on it but don’t want to jeopardise your macros, protein-fortified IPAs are available.

For the modern man, the current ideal body type is large and muscular. Social media is overflowing with jacked gymbros in tight t-shirts showing off their muscles while guiding followers through what they eat in a day to get ripped: steak and eggs washed down with a protein coffee for breakfast, protein shake, 200g of chicken breast with rice and broccoli for lunch, protein shake, protein bar, twelve hard-boiled eggs as a snack, a bowl of minced beef for dinner and another protein shake – or perhaps some protein ice cream – for dessert. It’s the straight-man version of Lady Gaga’s ‘bus, club, ’nother club’.

Much of this content is explicitly geared towards fat loss: protein is exalted partly for its high-satiety properties, and the suffix which most commonly follows ‘high protein’ is ‘low calorie’. Protein influencers such as @tastyshreds (2.7 million followers) share macho recipes for staying in a calorie deficit without sacrificing flavour or testosterone, with captions like ‘This ain’t meal prep. This is fridge domination 😤🔥’. Unlike Shepherd, there are no traces of humour here, just invitations to comment ‘COOKBOOK’ and be sent ‘233+ macro-friendly recipes that actually taste like cheat meals’, alongside sporadic motivational quotes about Jesus.

The brief mainstream cultural flirtation with ‘body positivity’ – which ultimately proved to be an exercise in market expansion under the guise of progressive inclusivity – is over. While in the Y2K era of extreme thinness, content promoting dieting and weight loss was traditionally aimed mostly at women, this time around – as we bravely move towards greater gender equality – men’s body-image anxieties are also being targeted by influencers and snake-oil salesman promoting a broader culture of disordered eating, with men encouraged to obsess over their macros and body-fat percentage and put cottage cheese in places it has no business being. The motivation for these bad-faith actors is obvious: money. But what is the draw for men?

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Whereas previously companies created products and sold them to us via celebrities and marketing campaigns, the protein craze seems to have reversed the usual flow, with businesses desperately pumping out products to meet the demand created by social media influencers. A 2024 poll found that young men aged between sixteen and twenty-four were three times more likely than the general population to have increased their meat consumption in the preceding year, citing the influence of manosphere content that is increasingly shaping how this demographic thinks about image and selfhood.

With traditional markers of masculinity – such as stable employment or home ownership – increasingly out of reach, building muscle has become more and more linked with personal identity and self-worth. Wrapped up in the guise of self-improvement, the manosphere (it’s worth noting that a substantial proportion of muscle-building content is at least manosphere-adjacent) proffers advice rooted in essentialist, historically dubious notions, with men as the naturally dominant hunter-gatherers and women as docile, frail creatures who have caused a fertility crisis by sending work emails – a transgression against their feminine natures. In this world of pseudoscientific marketing, high protein consumption – specifically in the form of meat – is presented as an easy form of gender-affirming care for men, cosigned by beefy healthcare providers (podcasters) such as Joe Rogan, Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman.

It’s difficult (although not impossible) to sell meat via affiliate link, so many of these ‘longevity’ influencers have turned instead to shilling protein powders and bars while also commending the benefits of a ‘whole foods diet’. Rogan is the co-founder of Onnit, a health and supplements brand that has become synonymous with his podcast (and which was the subject of a 2024 lawsuit for deceptive advertising). He sold the company to Unilever for a rumoured $100 million in 2021, but still heavily promotes its products. Attia was co-developer and chief science officer of David – ‘the optimal protein for your optimal form’ – until he was forced to step down after being named in the Epstein files. Huberman, seemingly unscathed by his own string of scandals, remains one of its main sponsors and investors. Pushing protein is a serious business.

The protein trend comes alongside a sharp cultural turn away from plant-based eating and its liberal ‘soy boy’ associations. As the right-wing forces that increasingly forge our algorithms and our political systems lash out against ‘woke’ and the cultural progressiveness of the preceding decade – which also saw a short-lived reduction in meat-eating – old connections between vegetarianism, effeteness and liberalism have once again been brought to the fore. The ethnological link between masculinity and meat remains strong. A 2025 study found that ‘men who strongly identify as meat-eaters … tend to perceive themselves as more masculine’ and that ‘masculinity beliefs hinder reducing meat consumption and adopting plant-based diets’. Another, from 2024, found that men were ‘more likely to eat foods to the extent that those foods were perceived as higher in masculinity and lower in femininity’, which in turn translated into foods higher in protein and calories.

Online reactionaries, junk-science bros and conservative talk-show hosts feed these anxieties by producing a steady stream of content in which they insist that modern life – and eating tofu – is causing a crisis of masculinity. But these fears are not new. Masculinity has been in crisis throughout history – mostly because it’s incredibly fragile, definable primarily through what it is not. And in our current cultural moment, it is not vegan, it is not liberal, it is not weak, it is not feminine and it is most certainly not ordering oat milk in its coffee. As masculinity enters its latest and most online flop era, protein-maxxing is being offered to men as a shortcut to regain lost metaphorical testosterone.

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The mythologisation of protein as a symbol of strength and health goes back to at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the German scientist Justus von Liebig hypothesised that high meat consumption was necessary for strength. Von Liebig, who argued that protein was ‘the only true nutrient’, also created the first protein shake, a meaty paste made from boiled-down cow carcasses. (Although his ideas were quickly proved wrong, his thinking proved hugely influential and still informs many of our societal ideas about meat consumption.)

Commercial protein powders would follow a few years later. Although initially developed to help the poor and working classes to consume sufficient amounts of the nutrient, they were ‘largely purchased by members of the middle classes’, who had more disposable income and ‘were strongly attracted to the physical culture movement of the period, which was centered around eating well and keeping fit to combat the pressures of daily life in the modern world’.

The parallels to today’s ‘wellness’ world are strikingly obvious: although purportedly accessible to everyone, wellness is a nakedly aspirational lifestyle that relies heavily on fearmongering around modernity and is financially out of reach for the average person. The recent MAHA-approved update to the food pyramid – which places greater emphasis on protein from animal-based sources like meat and butter rather than lower-cost options such as beans and grains – is projected to increase grocery bills by nearly a third, according to one estimate, making it even harder for already struggling families to feed themselves. And, much like in the nineteenth century, the people worrying the most about their protein intake are the same people who are most likely to already be getting enough of it.

As we live through the death throes of (the myth of) Western liberal values, manliness has been repackaged as animal-based muscle gain, with protein sold as a magical, disembodied nutrient that you can and should purchase at every available opportunity – providing an easy alternative to self-introspection or class-based insurrection. What is marketed to men as ‘peak masculinity’ is a joyless, sterile life in which everything that makes life actually worth living – community, companionship, carbohydrates – is replaced with grams of protein, meal prepping and dunking yourself in ice-cold water upon waking. This way of looking at food (broken down into macros, obsessively tracked to the gram) is symptomatic of a wider shift in the way we eat now. Whether or not food actually tastes good, or whether the experience of eating it is enjoyable, has become secondary to whether the protein-to-calorie ratio is optimal for our goals. It’s the perfect dietary companion to our hyper-capitalist culture and its obsession with self-optimisation in the pursuit of increased productivity and hitting KPIs.

In a time of polycrisis – when everything feels unachievable, unobtainable or pointless – increasing protein intake has, for men, become a tangible way to solve everything that is wrong with their lives. More protein (plus gym) equals more muscle, which equals more manliness, which will make you more desirable, which will in turn make you more successful (according to the looks-maxxing prosperity index). At the end of this protein-based hamster wheel is every modern man’s dream: running a pyramid scheme barely disguised as a life-coaching business while accruing passive income from the people you exploit.

At some point – once every man in the world has given up gainful or useful employment to start a podcast sponsored by their very own protein-powder brand – we might finally hit peak protein. Either that, or the world will implode even earlier than expected from the sheer amount of livestock we will need to rear to meet the astronomical protein demands of men in sedentary desk jobs. Or maybe the snake-oil merchants in our phones will soon move on to something else instead – Kai’s girlfriend is a plant-based fibre-maxxer.

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Credits

Niloufar Haidari is a tiny woman from Neasden with the soul of an itinerant drifter and the eating habits of a racoon

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Last week I was in Brittany, taking a pit stop rest after signing off on Issue 3 of our brilliant new magazine, which has just gone to the printers. This is probably not news to many of you, but the fact that you can get on an evening ferry that’s almost as large as the Titanic in Portsmouth and wake up in St. Malo is as miraculous as getting on the Eurostar – except it’s far more comfortable and much cheaper. Brittany, as a whole, punches above its weight culinarily: galettes, buckwheat everything, Breton cider, Brets crisps. The best meal I had was at Le Bistrot de Cancale, a seafood restaurant just north of Cancale owned by the Roellinger family that has the setting and menu simpatico you normally associate with eating on Greek islands: delicate fried squid, lobster from the bay cooked with fennel, langoustine bisque, a perfect turbot with brown butter, blueberry and cardamom soufflé.

In St. Malo itself, I enjoyed the restaurants opened by the Maison Hector group, who are basically the Corbin and King of Brittany, specialising in old-school, kitsch, touristy restaurants that are far better than they need to be (I had more luck eating at these types of places than, say, the Breton take on an izakaya). Their seafood restaurant Cafe de l’Ouest is a huge amount of fun: huge, cold spider crabs, cheap pots of mussels covered in liquid roquefort, impeccably tanned fries, random things flambéed at the table. But I left wishing that I had ordered something from this automat (below), offering various fish rillettes, along with two dozen oysters and an oyster knife. The French just sometimes do it better.

If you work at Brittany Ferries please get in touch - Brittany Ferries has now been added to the list of companies we will shill for, along with Transport for London and Thameslink.

An evening for Venezuela

On Thursday 30th July, a group of food businesses in Netil Market, including Jupiter Burger, World Famous Gordos, and Paradox Design + Coffee, will be joining forces to raise money towards the victims and families affected by the recent earthquakes in Venezuela, which have so far killed almost 5,000 people, and displaced 20,000. Each stall will be fusing what they usually do with Venezuelan dishes, plus there will be Venezuelan coffee and music. To read more about it, click here.

A completely unbiased recommendation

Last month, the best shop in London (and my former employer), Postcard Teas, announced that they are going to start doing Ambient Nights on Thursdays and Fridays from 6.30 to 7.30pm, where you can try various cold- and ambiently- brewed teas and tea-based drinks. The idea of running a bar dedicated solely to tea was something that was in discussion when I used to work there, and I thought might never come to fruition – I am very excited to see that it has! You can book a place here.

Tantuni watch

A new tantuni shop, Tantunim, has opened in north London, spawning maybe my favourite Enfield-Turkish innovation so far:

Meanwhile, Mersin Tantuni, London’s third-best tantuni shop, has been killing it on social media lately:

More tantuni news as and when it happens.

Appall-achia

The Americans are at it again. First, it was opening a restaurant called Appalachia in Shoreditch that doesn’t really serve Appalachian cuisine, which was already mildly annoying. Then the least humorous Americans on Bluesky found it, claiming that the restaurant had ‘socioeconomically missed the mark’ and that ‘the worst meals of my life have been in the UK, this just seems like their whole thing’, while missing the fact that the owners are American.

Far be it from me to defend a menu with something called ‘hillbilly loaf’ on it, but can you imagine what it must be like to see a rich and varied regional cuisine get mislabelled and misinterpreted by a global hegemon, then be given an inaccurate name that has nothing to do with the cuisine being served, which itself has been created for the consumption of people who have never even been to the place the cuisine originates from?

Influencer watch

Our lead piece from Issue 3 by Stephen Buranyi is a six-month investigation into the world and economics of restaurant influencers. If you want to read it first, and find out who has been charging what, then you need to pre-order the magazine now.

One of the reasons the article had a long gestation is that every week there would be a new update from Stephen – a new piece of information about who was paying who, or who was on the take — that would upend a previous theory. The list of footnotes we could have included would be as long as the article itself. In the end, Stephen just had to stop reporting.

A footnote we would have loved to include is this week’s Shawarma Hut beef, which I am going to recount in excruciating detail. At some point reading this, you’re going to say to me ‘Jonathan, I have one life in this precious world, do I really need to fill my mind with the knowledge of any of these guys?’ which is fair, but it all gets to the core of what is going in the influencer world right now, and consequently, what is going on in food media.

The story starts with Shawarma Hut opening on Walworth Road back in 2021. I visited it then because its first menu had things like ‘jerk shawarma’ and ‘Mexican shawarma’ on it, and I cannot resist absurdity. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t as interesting as the concept and I forgot about it. Last year, Shawarma Hut suddenly rebranded online, with its owner Ali Alsahlane taking centre stage on Instagram. Its new selling point was that it was for the community, offering free shawarma for the unhoused and 5p shawarmas for those who asked. The restaurant quickly went viral, attracting the attention of many prominent influencers who know a good story when they see it.

Earlier this year, Alsahlane pivoted again, becoming an influencer himself, reviewing chain restaurants he considered to be overcharging and taking on a more aggressive persona. I wrote about this phenomenon five years ago in an article about Salt Bae, arguing that there is a huge overlap between the Attitude Era of wrestling and Salt Bae’s theatrics, both of which rely on kayfabe – the unspoken agreement to pretend that the absurd is real. Back then, I predicted ‘the Attitude Era of restaurants’, and this has come to pass: now, almost all restaurant influencers operate like this, particularly the successful heels that we love to hate.

Adopting this persona – which included going to Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et to denounce it – has been hugely successful for Alsahlane in drumming up publicity. But last month, The Londoner reported on a fight he had got into with the Albanian mafia running dodgy ice cream vans. The most interesting tidbit from the article was that the Shawarma Hut content was now being directed by Robbie Thompson, himself an influencer, who in June 2025 had posted a negative video about Shawarma Hut and its undercooked shawarma, and by October 2025 was standing in front of Stonehenge with a Shawarma Hut meal extolling its virtues.

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‘take a cold roast capon and cut it into thin slices square and small (or any other roast meat), mingle with it a little minced tarragon and an onion, then mince littice as small the capon, mingle all together…then lay capers by themselves, olives by themselves, samphire by itself, broom buds, pickled mushrooms, pickled oysters, lemon, orange, raisins, almonds blue-fits, Virginia Potato, caperons, crucifix pease, and the like…garnish the dishes sides with quarters of oranges, or lemons, or in slices, oyl and vinegar beaten together poured on it over all.’

What madness! What fun! And what a substantial and varied meal can be had by eating from May’s composition, which, though rich, still feels summer appropriate thanks to its unheated state. ‘Mingle’ and ‘lay’ might be the two key culinary methods from May’s recipe when it comes to salads. Either allowing ingredients to be mixed and develop into something greater than the sum of their parts, or laying them down on a serving dish to then be re-encountered in varied combinations on one’s own plate. Both are are to be found in these four ‘big salads’ by four of our favourite cooks, all of which can be eaten as a main course.

Nick Bramham’s roast chicken and ‘nduja panzanella was inspired by a private moment of ecstasy during restaurant service, after dragging a piece of focaccia through a dish of pan juices and is also an homage to one of the greatest textures in food: ‘crisp-gone-soft’. Speaking of texture, Hetty Lui McKinnon was in search of one that could sate her craving for Cantonese jellyfish salad, when she came up with this slippery glass noodle dish punctuated by crisp celery and fried tofu which can be whipped up in a trice for a cool savoury moment at lunch. I will never get over Tom Hanks’s character eating all the caviar from the salad in You’ve Got Mail. I would feel similarly enraged if someone ate the garnish of Boutheina B Salem’s addition to our salad of salads, omek houria. This beautiful arrangement of everything good – tuna in oil, olives (black ‘never pitted’), hard-boiled egg, capers – on a base of caraway-scented, harissa spiced carrot is exactly what I want to share on a warm evening (with friends who will behave equitably…) Finally, Paris Rosina’s maximalist masterpiece may be the most direct connection to Robert May’s ‘grand sallet’, with this luxe take on Olivier (or Russian) salad, in which a cubed miscellany including mortadella, potato, artichoke, pickled chillies and charred beans (and more) is bound together with a silky mayonnaise laced with fresh herbs. Swoon! RMJ

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Roast Chicken ‘Nduja Panzanella

Nick Bramham’s supercharged juicy crispy fiery take on the classic Tuscan tomato and bread salad.

This… was born one night at the restaurant where we had been roasting chickens in ’nduja butter. After serving the dish, I couldn’t resist dragging a piece of focaccia through the juices left in the roasting tray. It was like the best crouton I’d ever tasted. I knew it had to feature in a dish in its own right.

Omek Houria

Boutheina B Salem’s sweet-sharp caraway scented Tunisian carrot salad garnished with tuna, eggs and olives, and served with crusty bread.

Omek houria is one of Tunisia’s most beloved salads, a fixture of countless lunch tables, wedding buffets and restaurant menus….Morocco has its carrot salads too – generally involving cumin, which settles into the earthy sweetness of the carrots. But Tunisia takes a different route: we use caraway, which feels brighter, greener, almost citrusy. It wakes up the lemon juice and parsley, giving omek houria its characteristic freshness.

Sesame & Celery Noodle Salad

Hetty Lui McKinnon’s vegan reinvention of cold Cantonese jellyfish salad, with slippery glass noodles, fried tofu and crisp celery.

My mother, the best cook I know, rarely made salads. In Cantonese culture, salads and raw dishes in general are regarded as ‘cold’ foods, which upset the body’s internal balance. The fact that I built a career on salads as a culinary artform might be my ultimate Chinese daughter rebellion.

Charred Mortadella Olivier Salad

Paris Rosina’s fresh and luxurious take on the classic diced vegetable, meat and mayonnaise salad.

This is my chunkier, more charred take on an Olivier salad (also known as a Russian salad), which I make with mortadella – a perfect ensemble of mundanity lifted with folds of creamy mustardy mayo, zingy pickles and fresh herbs. It almost always features on my dinner menus. As a maximalist, it feels like the perfect salad to me, as it calls for everything but the kitchen sink.

The Vittles Summer Recipe Supplement was written by Boutheina B. Salem, Hetty Lui McKinnon, Nick Bramham and Paris Rosina. It was photographed by Emil Bendixen at Quality Wines in Farringdon. The recipes were tested and prepared by Georgia Rudd. The shoot was styled collaboratively by Georgia and Emli. The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! This week, we are publishing our Big Salad Summer Recipe Supplement, comprising four recipes for main course salads by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Nick Bramham offers a supercharged version of panzanella inspired by dipping foccacia into pan juices from roasting chicken with ‘nduja at Quality Wines, where he is head chef. To read the rest of the Summer Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Boutheina B Salem’s Omek Houria

• Paris Rosina’s Charred Mortadella Olivier Salad

• Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Sesame & Celery Noodle Salad

All the articles in the Big Salad Summer 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.

Panzanella is a rustic Tuscan salad that makes canny use of the summer’s glut of ripe tomatoes while also rescuing stale old bread. It generally also includes onions of some kind and usually cucumber, salad leaves and fresh herbs.

As far as salads go, panzanella is gutsy and robust. The bread soaks up the tomato juices and vinegar like a sponge, transforming into one of the food world’s great textures: crisp-gone-soft (I think also of Cantonese sweet and sour pork balls; a duck-fat roast potato smothered with gravy; rouille-smeared croutons slowly dissolving into bouillabaisse). This version takes the spirit of panzanella further and transforms it from a side salad or antipasto into something bigger. It was born one night at the restaurant where we had been roasting chickens in ’nduja butter. After serving the dish, I couldn’t resist dragging a piece of focaccia through the juices left in the roasting tray. It was like the best crouton I’d ever tasted. I knew it had to feature in a dish in its own right.

I like to use a hearty white bread, which I tear into craggy uneven chunks and toast in the oven (tearing rather than cutting provides lots of surface area to get crispy and frazzled and interesting). While the bread is in the oven, I fry a couple of chicken thighs to render out all the fat and get the skin super crisp and golden. Then, when the chicken is resting, I melt a big dollop of ’nduja in the same pan and toss the croutons in the resulting incarnadine pool of smoky, spicy roast chicken and cured pork drippings. If you’re thinking I’ve perhaps gone too far at this point, fear not: the raw bite of the onion, the clean snap of the cucumber, and the fresh crunch of baby gem lettuce hearts balance it all out beautifully.

Roast Chicken and ’Nduja Panzanella

Serves 2
Time 30–40 mins

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are sharing the final recipe from our Big Salad Summer Supplement – Paris Rosina’s luxurious take on the classic Olivier (Russian) salad inspired by memories of her mum’s favourite summer dish. The recipe features Paris’s silky, spiced, herb-scented homemade mayo. To read the rest of the Summer Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Nick Bramham’s Roast Chicken ’Nduja Panzanella

• Boutheina B Salem’s Omek Houria

• Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Sesame & Celery Noodle Salad

All the recipes in the Big Salad Summer 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.

I did not achieve my grand stature without more than occasionally filling my plate with salads of rich mayonnaise and reformed meat. I developed a taste for this combination as a child, when I enjoyed what I call my mother’s Shit Nineties Salad: hot-pink crab sticks, rolled-up ham, whole spring onions (white parts only!), cooked beetroots, cucumber, gherkins, pickled onions and sliced cheese (often Port Salut) oozing over the side, served with slices of French stick spread so thickly with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! that taking a bite felt reminiscent of having your teeth cast in gum at the dentist. The final addition was a huge dollop of mayo or salad cream – the backbone of the plate.

This salad represented a rare moment in which my mother ate a meal prepared only for herself. The ingredients would arrive in the fridge at the first sight of sunny spring, their appearance signifying that it was a day to sit in the garden and bask, eyes shut to the household chores. Her pleasure in her summer lunch is an image I will never forget.

This is a more pleasant version of my mum’s dish – or at least I think it is. It’s my chunkier, more charred take on an Olivier salad (also known as a Russian salad), which I make with mortadella – a perfect ensemble of mundanity lifted with folds of creamy mustardy mayo, zingy pickles and fresh herbs. It almost always features on my dinner menus. As a maximalist, it feels like the perfect salad to me, as it calls for everything but the kitchen sink.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are sharing Hetty Lui McKinnon’s recipe for a vegan version of a favourite cold Cantonese jellyfish salad. Hetty’s recipe is part of our Big Salad Summer Recipe Supplement, comprising four recipes for main course salads by some of our favourite cooks. To read the rest of the Summer Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Boutheina B Salem’s Omek Houria

• Paris Rosina’s Charred Mortadella Olivier Salad

• Nick Bramham Roast Chicken ‘Nduja Panzanella

All the articles in the 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

My mother, the best cook I know, rarely made salads. In Cantonese culture, salads and raw dishes in general are regarded as ‘cold’ foods, which upset the body’s internal balance. The fact that I built a career on salads as a culinary artform might be my ultimate Chinese daughter rebellion.

The one exception was jellyfish salad – a cold dish of slippery, bouncy and crunchy slivers, tossed with celery and chicken, with a sesame oil dressing – which she made for special occasions. I lovingly nicknamed it ‘rubber band salad’. Although the presence of jellyfish suggests a dish that is exotic or daring, it is really the opposite: its flavours are fairly tame, savoury and refreshing, rather than punchy. The most memorable part of the salad was the texture – the pairing of the chewy, crunchy jellyfish with the crisp and fibrous celery. Even today, thirty plus years after giving up all meat and seafood, I can still acutely recall what it felt like in my mouth.

This recipe is my vegan take on that salad, using translucent sweet potato starch noodles – the type used to make Korean japchae – to achieve a same-but-different elastic texture. These noodles fall into a category known as ‘glass noodles’, of which there are various types, from spindly thin mung bean vermicelli, to thicker, springier tapioca noodles. Any glass noodles would work in this recipe, though the thicker, sturdier varieties are chewier and so will better approximate the mouthfeel of jellyfish I’m trying to replicate. The celery is slightly pickled in the vinegar and sesame oil, just enough to relax it into a more pleasing bite.

Sesame & Celery Noodle Salad

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! This week, we are publishing our Big Salad Summer Recipe Supplement, comprising four recipes for main course salads by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Boutheina B Salem offers a caraway scented Tunisian carrot salad garnished with boiled eggs, olives, and tuna. To read the rest of the Summer Recipe Supplement, please click below:

• Nick Bramham’s Roast Chicken ‘Nduja Panzanella

• Paris Rosina’s Charred Mortadella Olivier Salad

• Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Sesame & Celery Noodle Salad

All the recipes in the Big Salad Summer 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

Omek houria is one of the few Tunisian dishes whose name tells you absolutely nothing about what’s on the plate. Even if you speak Arabic, ‘your mum the fairy’ doesn’t exactly scream ‘carrot salad’. Yet that’s exactly what it is.

Omek houria is one of Tunisia’s most beloved salads, a fixture of countless lunch tables, wedding buffets and restaurant menus. As a child, I couldn’t stand it. My mother tried to convince me that the carrots were good for my eyesight, but that argument got her nowhere. My grandmother had a better strategy: she told me that omek houria would make me beautiful like a fairy. The fairy comes from one of the many stories surrounding the dish. According to my grandmother, who got it from her grandmother, a mermaid was the first to make omek houria. She dyed her hair with henna, giving it the same bright orange colour as carrots.

Morocco has its carrot salads too – generally involving cumin, which settles into the earthy sweetness of the carrots. But Tunisia takes a different route: we use caraway, which feels brighter, greener, almost citrusy. It wakes up the lemon juice and parsley, giving omek houria its characteristic freshness.

Omek houria is a simple salad, and simple dishes have nowhere to hide. I won’t tell you to hunt down heritage carrots or fancy lemons, but it’s worth spending a little more on a good olive oil, which will pull everything together: the sweetness of the carrots, the heat of the harissa, the sharpness of the lemon and the punch of garlic.

Omek Houria

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today, Jonathan Nunn returns to the review beat! He finds himself taking the temperature of New Malden in the middle of a heatwave and wonders whether one restaurant in particular might herald a brave new era for London’s Koreatown.

Before the review, a reminder that last week we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, a magazine about how the internet and short-form video has reshaped food culture. If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price of 10% off, with an 20% discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). You can order your copy here!

Buy Issue 3

We have also now sold out of Ruby Tandoh’s Ice Cream City. If you didn’t manage to get a copy then don’t worry – we are going to do another print run and you can register your interest here.

New Malden’s new era

On a recent, blaringly hot summer’s day, as I was eating pork barbecue, sucking on pieces of collagen while watching a group of Korean men take off their glasses to wipe the sweat off their eyelids, I wondered if I might be sitting in the first great restaurant of New Malden’s new era.

I love New Malden, even though I have sometimes got the feeling that its best times might be behind it. I love that it never quite measures up to what anyone expects a Koreatown to look like. Last month, I went with a Chinese writer for whom the word ‘Koreatown’ conjures the tall buildings, lit up in neon, in Shenyang, or the huge plaza and mini-malls of Shanghai; instead, they were surprised to find that New Malden is full of drab office blocks and red-brick Wetherspoons, with just a thin smattering of Hangul. I love that New Malden might be home to the largest enclave of Koreans in Europe, but it is still clearly English suburbia – no amount of bingsoo cafés can hide that our biggest Koreatown is a high street in Surrey.

Yet, in the last few years, as the Hallyu has swept through London and made Korean culture cool, it’s felt like London needs New Malden less. Korean pochas and dabangs beloved by students are now more likely to open in central London than in the southwest boroughs. A place like Gamnamuzip, a drinking restaurant that serves up huge metal cauldrons of gamjatang and cups of cloudy makgeolli, would have once only thrived in New Malden but is doing even better in Angel. The most interesting restaurants to have emerged from the renewed interest in Korean food have tended to be second-generation-run, serving something slightly askew from traditional Korean food, and not in New Malden – places like Miga in London Fields or Calong in Stoke Newington. Amid this, the high street in New Malden has stayed, more or less, the same – a little unsure of what its role is once you can find Korean food everywhere.

But even the suburbs are gaining suburbs. Walk 15 minutes from the station along Kingston Road, past your Screwfixes and Aldis, and the shops selling camping equipment and Italian scooters, and you will find a new New Malden. There’s Chan Chan Chan, a shop that only sells banchan, the sides that normally come complimentary with any Korean meal, to take home and eat with rice. There’s Cham, which specialises in kimbap, which has a fleeting resemblance to Japanese norimaki, and dosirak lunch boxes. Around the back of an industrial estate, there’s Secret Korean Kitchen, where you can order delicate red tilefish caught off the shores of Jeju. And further on still is a remarkable Korean specialist that points to where New Malden might go next.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Imogen West-Knights traces the journey of food-waste in Lewisham, from bin collection to slurry ‘soup’ and conversion into biogas.

On Monday, we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, all about how the internet and short-form video have reshaped food culture. The magazine includes everything from an exhaustively reported deep dive into the economics of food influencing, investigations into MFK Fisher’s role in popularising Japanese cuisine, to long reads on how Natoora came to be the dominant force shaping restaurant menus.

If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). Order the magazine here!

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I fancy an orange. It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m in Tesco in South London. There they are, bright and jolly in their rows. I pick one up, check it for blemishes and put it in my basket. This orange came from Valencia. It was harvested on Tuesday and loaded into a refrigerated train that night. From there, it took about fifty hours to reach my local Tesco by rail and by truck, travelling a distance of at least 1,800km through the Pyrenees, the north of France and the Channel Tunnel to the UK. It arrived in Barking in the early hours of Friday morning and reached my Tesco just before the store opened. But I am not thinking about any of that. I’m not really thinking at all. I just want the orange, and so I buy it.

Friday evening gets away with me and I find the orange skulking in the bottom of my bag on Saturday afternoon. I don’t fancy it anymore. It goes in my fridge crisper drawer. It rolls to the back, and I forget about it until two weeks later when I am rummaging for some passable onions. Oh yeah, the orange. How long are oranges good for in the fridge? I’m not sure. It seems fine, less lively than it looked when I bought it, but still: probably edible. I peel it, zest spritzing into the air around my fingers, and eat.

Now I have orange peels. What could I do with these? I could turn them back into food by candying them. Add them into a simmering pot of marmalade. I could dry them and use them as fire starters. But let’s be honest, I’m not likely to do any of those things. So, I throw them in the bin.

This is how most British people eat and dispose of their food waste. In the UK, the majority of food waste goes in with the general rubbish and ends up in landfill in places like Essex, Airdrie and Falkirk. There, the process of its degradation contributes to global warming – in 2024, the House of Commons reported that ‘waste food and drink in the UK creates an estimated 18 million tonnes of CO2 each year’. The UK also exports its waste – generally plastics – to places like Indonesia and Malaysia, in what is sometimes called ‘waste imperialism’, but food waste tends to remain here. While big businesses like supermarkets are key players in producing food waste, it is households that produce the most, at 60%. The average household in the UK wastes about £1,000 worth of food every year.

Sometimes, the moment that food becomes waste is stark. The shock of a dropped ice cream. Other times it is more gradual, but no less final. Few of us are going to root a mango peel out of the compost bin so we can scrape off a last morsel of fruit. But other times, we have to use our discretion to make the call between food and ex-food. There’s the five-second rule, the three-second rule and best-before dates (which lead to a huge amount of food waste because they determine the hard cut-off by which you need to eat the food or throw it away). I’ve certainly had these conversations with friends. Do you eat a biscuit three seconds after it’s fallen on the floor? Do you chuck the milk out the day after it’s due to go bad, or do you give it a sniff and see whether it’s got another twenty-four hours?

Many who are interested in food know about the miles our produce travels before it reaches us, but fewer of us know what happens once we’re finished with it. As I put the orange peel in the little green bin that sits on my countertop, full of loamy teabags and unloved vegetable remnants, I wondered: What journey does my food take after I start considering it waste? Early one morning last October, I took the bus over to Lewisham, South London, to the rather drab-sounding Wearside Service Centre, to find out.

When I arrive at Wearside, an operational hub for the council consisting of a few two-storey buildings and bays for the rubbish trucks, I meet Mamadou, the refuse manager. He gives me a hi-vis vest and a lift so I can link up with a team of binmen doing their rounds nearby, in Ladywell. They’ve been collecting and recycling food waste since 2017 from kerbside properties, and the uptake here in Lewisham has been healthy, Mamadou tells me. (In the period of 2025–2026, Lewisham council collected more than 5,700 tonnes tonnes of food waste.) Across London, there has been a steady increase in the number of boroughs offering food waste recycling. Bexley were early adopters – they’ve been doing it since 2004 – and by 2020, there were twenty-four London boroughs offering the service. ‘The majority of residents are very, very keen on it, I can tell you. People are always [asking] questions about what happens to food waste’, Mamadou says as he drives.

What happens to it, in the first instance, is it gets picked up by people like Terry, Carla and Steve. This is the team I am joining today, and we find them making a quick pitstop for coffee and cigarettes, their truck parked up behind the railway line. I wouldn’t have said that waste removal was a job with glamour to it, but Carla is certainly bringing some. She started work at six this morning and is wearing a luxuriant pair of false eyelashes and pristine acrylic nails. Carla has been at Lewisham council as a loader for four months, and before that she worked for private-waste collection company Veolia. She likes the early starts, she said. Back at Veolia, the shifts meant she was often out on rounds when her son got home from school. This way, finishing at 2pm (or earlier if they’re fast), she gets to spend more time with him.

As I climb up into the cab of the truck, where there are three snug passenger seats, Steve warns me that ‘It’s very smelly, the food waste.’ It is, in that strong, sour way that anyone who has left their bins for a little too long will recognise. Terry, the truck’s driver – a man in his sixties from Essex – drives us to the next strip on the route (which takes them to approximately 5,000 properties per week in Ladywell). The team know this patch inside out. Terry parks the truck, and Steve and Carla jump out, grab a wheelie bin each and set off to collect the food. Carla opens one bin on a housing estate and shakes her head. Leaves. ‘We don’t take leaves, that’s garden waste’, she tells me. They have to be strict about what they do take: from a food management perspective, a leaf is distinct from a salad. There’s nothing unsightly today, but there can be. ‘People put all sorts of things in there. Nappies are the worst,’ Carla says.

We drive on and stop again, on a terraced street off the A20. Terry opens one food bin. The bin itself is spotlessly clean and the little green bag is tied up like a Christmas pudding. ‘See that, that’s beautiful,’ he says, and tosses it in the wheelie. But they’re not always like that, and the food is not always in the bag. Bin juice is, naturally, a problem, but it is early October and the team are spared from the worst potential contents of these little bins: maggots. In summertime, things are different. ‘Feel like I’ve become an expert in maggots. Come in all shapes and sizes’, Terry says, shuddering. As we drive around, people rush out of their houses with their bits and bobs, food waste or otherwise, to meet the team. A resident with a wine bottle comes up to Terry and hands it over. ‘Is that for me? It’s empty!’ Terry says, and they both laugh.

As we drive on, Terry tells me he used to be in financial services but decided to get out of that game after the 2008 crash and train as a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) driver, which is what the council now employs him to do, driving the waste truck. There’s always work for HGV drivers. He likes that there is this people-facing element to being a binman – meeting the residents, getting to know a neighbourhood. ‘It’s the satisfaction of a public service, keeping the streets free of vermin and rubbish,’ he says. I ask him whether collecting food waste has made him think differently about food, and he pauses for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘food is food. You gotta eat innit.’

On the day I visit them, the Wearside Lewisham waste team work at a rapid clip and there are no unforeseen complications, so at ten past ten in the morning, after a little over four smooth hours, Steve and Carla are done. After the collection, the others leave, and Terry and I set off on the next leg of the rubbish journey – to the waste centre in Dagenham, a fourteen-mile drive away. Here, he warns me, the smell will be more intense. The drive takes us through the new Blackwall Tunnel, past the IKEA in Greenwich and that great monument of giving something a second life, the O2 Arena. As we get further out of London proper, we are surrounded by a Hovis factory, Tate and Lyle, large hubs for Tesco and Co-op. Then, just a little further out, the waste facilities. In Dagenham, there are two side by side – ReFood and East London Biogas, the latter of which we are heading to with our haul.

East London Biogas, which opened in 2014 as the first anaerobic digestion plant inside the M25, buys food waste from Lewisham council, as well as other councils like Essex. The plant has been owned by a private company called Bio Capital since 2019. When they receive the waste, East London Biogas convert it into energy and fertiliser (rather than sending it to landfill, where it releases greenhouse gases as it rots). They do this via a process called anaerobic digestion, in which food waste is put into tanks and broken down by microorganisms. The site processes up to 70,000 tonnes of food waste every year. When I fancied my orange, it never occurred to me that the skin I would throw away had the potential to be turned into fuel.

As Terry had warned, the smell of food waste begins as we get closer to East London Biogas. Eggs, sulfur, farmyard. On arrival, he drives us over a weight bridge that measures how much waste in the truck today: 4.4 tonnes. ‘Not bad’, he says. We head into a huge hangar space which contains three dumping bays and reverse into one of them. There are hills of rotting food in here, light grey and speckled with the more intact detritus. Scraps of Sainsbury’s bags swim in the slurry. A whole melon sits looking lost on the ground. Waste workers are knee-deep in the stuff, moving it around with shovels. An orange peel peeks out at me, slicked with indeterminate mulch. Beside us, large as a house, is a vat where the food waste is turned into what the company genuinely call a ‘soup’.

To begin the process of anaerobic digestion, bulldozers scoop the food waste up into the vat. Here it gets pre-treated to remove the plastics, diluted with water and heated to 70°C for one hour to kill all pathogens in the food. Then it goes into an enclosed, oxygen-free tank where it is broken down by microorganisms and begins to emit a low-carbon biogas, which is then transformed into green energy. Recycling six teabags in this manner produces enough energy to boil the kettle for the next cup, they say. Then the material that is left over – biofertilizer, as it is called – is supplied to agricultural companies and farmers local to this plant, so they can grow more food.

Today, the parent company, Bio Capital – which is in turn owned by British developer Equitix – has eight such plants around the UK, and as of late 2025 there are 750 biogas plants all over the country. The proliferation of privately owned anaerobic digestion plants is largely thanks to government incentives like the Green Gas Support Scheme, which was introduced in 2021.

But anaerobic digestion isn’t the only useful thing that can be done with food waste. Eleanor Barnett, in her richly informative book Leftovers, writes that up until the nineteenth century, it was common practice in England for food waste to be fed to pigs, who roamed town streets scarfing down piles of food left outside people’s doors. Feeding food waste to pigs was banned in 2001 due to foot and mouth disease, but some have argued that a version of the pig solution is one that ought to be brought back, like the (no longer active) campaign group ‘The Pig Idea’. There is also a more labour-intensive but valuable process whereby specific kinds of food waste can be mined for useful chemicals and compounds. Waste coffee grounds, for instance, can have caffeine as well as chemicals that create the coffee aroma extracted, which could then be used in the production of instant coffee.

Still, it is biogas that is considered among the best possible uses for food that is no longer fit for human consumption, Paul Hellier, an expert in sustainable energy at UCL, tells me when we speak on the phone in early May. Even though biogas isn’t a perfect product (‘There’s the issue of there being impurities like hydrogen sulfide once the biogas is produced – which smells like rotten eggs and does not providing energy when it burns’), overall, he says, ‘it’s viewed as a very useful resource.’

We can also do more to intercept food from supermarkets and restaurants before it makes the transition into being considered waste at all. This is the model of companies like Oddbox, which rescues aesthetically imperfect but edible food from being thrown out by supermarkets, or Too Good To Go, which matches hungry customers up with businesses that have excess food at the end of the day.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), an environmental action NGO, visualises the food waste hierarchy as an inverted triangle. At the bottom tip of the triangle is sending food to landfill, the absolute worst, most wasteful final destination for a food product. Near the top, there is redistribution to people who need it. ‘Ultimately, the objective is: if we can halve food waste, [we] will be able to make more of the food that we’re growing,’ Rosemary Brotchie, who works at WRAP, tells me, ‘and improve food security, not just for individuals, but also for the UK as a whole.’

How can we waste less? In an ideal world, food is produced, it reaches you, you eat it in its entirety, you turn the food into energy and, well, flush the resulting waste. But that is only how it goes some sixty-odd per cent of the time – in the Western world, at least. In 2011, a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization acknowledged that it lacked household waste data from outside Europe and North America; it estimated that around one-third of food produced globally was lost or wasted. People famously do not think about the journey an orange, say, makes across the continent – or even across the world – before it gets to them, nor do they appreciate the energy that was expended in the process.

As of March this year, it is now mandatory for all councils across the country recycle food waste. This is part of the UK’s commitment to a UN Sustainable Development Goal to halve food waste by 2030. We could certainly be doing more to recycle our household food waste in this country. South Korea, for instance, has a ‘pay-as-you-throw’ system that charges depending on how much food waste is generated; this has led to more than 95% of its food being recycled. While all councils will now be required to offer the option to recycle food, it remains to be seen whether people will step up and take advantage of this. While it can be easy to feel powerless in the face of cost-of-living and environmental challenges, Rosemary believes that waste is an area where the individual consumer can and should make a difference, keeping food out of landfill and money in their wallets. ‘If you’re seeing the quantity of what you’re wasting, there are opportunities there for us all to stop and think, “Well, did I have to waste that?”, she says.

After dropping off our load at East London Biogas, Terry and I set off back to the depot in Lewisham. Terry explains that they’re at a tipping point: the work that the team does each day is sufficient to deal with Lewisham’s current food waste recycling output, but if everyone suddenly started recycling at once, there would be too much waste to process and the system would break.

When I bid goodbye to Terry, I sit down at the bus stop. There, in a pavement groove, sits a dusty Haribo sour cherry. I think about the packet it must have come from, the sugar-coated fingers that fumbled it at the last moment and let it fall to the ground. Where this food item that came within touching distance of being eaten will end up next is anyone’s guess. But I’m going home for a shower, and to use up some of the leftovers in my fridge.

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Credits

Imogen West-Knights is a journalist, novelist and video game writer based in London.

Wunmi Onibudo is a photographer based in London whose work reflects human stories and modern culture. You can find her at www.wunmio.com or on her Instagram at @wunmio.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we are publishing our last essay from Issue 2, in which the writer Amel Mukhtar visits three London restaurants — The River Café, Luca, and Barney’s Pie and Mash — while navigating the classist and colonial connotations attached to dining etiquette and table manners in Britain. To read all the essays from Bad Food, click here. We do still have some copies left of Issue 2 if you want to read the whole magazine.

Earlier this week, we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, a magazine about how the internet and short-form video has reshaped food culture. If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price of 10% off, with an 20% discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). You can order your copy here!

We have also now sold out of Ruby Tandoh’s Ice Cream City. If you didn’t manage to get a copy then don’t worry - we are going to do another print run and you can register your interest here.

Buy Issue 3

Finally, we are extending the pitching window for reported features, investigations and long reads until this Sunday, 5 July. Further details are available here. A note: we are looking for specific stories rather than broad overviews of subjects, so if you have one then please pitch it to us.

When I was nineteen years old, my first boyfriend’s mother taught me how to eat. Up in Norwich for a week (my first time meeting his family), their stately home had a name, not a number. There was a drawing room – separate to both the living room and the dining room – with a grand piano. They had acres of garden. Each dinner, my boyfriend, his parents and his siblings got dressed, picked out a wine from the rack and sat around the table just chatting – no TV in the room. I felt like I’d stepped into an Enid Blyton novel. After I left, I was pleased to hear over the phone that his parents had liked me. There was just one thing, he said. ‘My mum was distracted by the way you eat.’

Huh? I’d had my fork in my left hand, knife in my right… Were my elbows on the table? ‘Don’t worry. She said she’ll show you the next time you’re here.’

A month or so later, sitting by the breakfast bar, his mum gave me a private lesson. You pierce with your fork – never scoop. Push extra food onto the back of the fork with the knife. If you must scoop, place the knife down and switch the fork to the right hand. Want more food or a cruet? Even if it’s within reach, never grab it; ask someone else if they’d like it and allow them to offer it back to you. And so on, and so on. Dissociating a bit, I watched the scene from outside myself: a young savage educated on the proper ways by the kind mistress of the house. Perfect Oscar bait, for sure, but jarringly retrograde on an otherwise normal 2010s day.

Later, I complained to her son about how colonial and classist it felt – the idea that there was one right way to eat and that it was whatever convoluted bullshit rich white people had made up between themselves one day – and he explained that she’d gone to a finishing school and just wanted to help. And I mean, fair enough. They had a family crest. They knew how to turn the most normal things possible, like being born or eating lunch, into something that seemed more official than everyone else’s. That was an alchemy I didn’t know the first thing about. How did you even get a crest? Was there a waiting list? Maybe these secret societies would open to me, too, once I learned their codes and stopped turning their stomachs with my scooping.

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, which was on my university syllabus the next year, helped me to understand the fundamental difference in our perspectives. ‘In opposition to the free-and-easy working-class meal, the bourgeoisie is concerned to eat with all due form … this whole commitment to stylization tends to shift the emphasis from substance and function to form and manner, and so to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating and of the things consumed, or … the basely material vulgarity of those who indulge in the immediate satisfactions of food and drink,’ he writes.

A French sociologist, Bourdieu was from the birthplace of etiquette. The notion of etiquette was born of the scores of strict – and superfluous – rules that King Louis XIV set for his court, many of which continue today (he popularised the whole no-elbows thing). The point for the king was to keep his courtiers busy and perpetually distracted by each complicated mandate they had to learn and follow, thereby quelling the possibility of class rebellions like the ones he witnessed as a child.

In Sudan, my parents ate with their right hands, sans utensils – a cultural rite that connects humility with godliness (in numerous hadiths, this is how the Prophet Muhammad eats). The only rule I recall from home is that you don’t eat with your left hand. Otherwise, one of my earliest memories is being scolded in a Manchester preschool for holding the knife and fork the wrong way round. But I had no real concept of just how complex it could get.

When I read it, Bourdieu’s 1979 class theory stunned me with its ready application, but how far does it really apply? And in any case, the current post-Brexit, post-woke, proto-fascist landscape feels like a different world. Are there new rules of the table, too?

‘This is where the money is, darlin’.’ My Uber driver and I are debating the merits of East London versus West London until he wins it with this line. I can’t argue with that. It is what has brought me to W6, Hammersmith – an hour and a half from my home – to scope out The River Cafe. I’d first heard of this lauded British-Italian institution through a zany billionaire scion of a media conglomerate. We were the same age – in our mid-twenties – starting the same role at the same job. After work, on the evenings I felt too lazy to cook, I’d often pick out a ready meal at Sainsbury’s, comparing the discounts. The days that he felt too lazy to cook, which were most of them, he ate at The River Cafe.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Marwan Kaabour, Melek Erdal, Issariya Morgan, Sumaiya Mustafa, Trà My Hickin, Barsha Mallik and Yemisí Aríbisálà introduce untranslatable words from their languages that reflect cultures of food outside the English-speaking world.

On Monday, we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, all about how the internet and short-form video have reshaped food culture. The magazine includes everything from an exhaustively reported deep dive into the economics of food influencing, to investigations into the hidden history of MFK Fisher’s role in popularising Japanese cuisine, to long reads on how Natoora came to be the dominant force shaping restaurant menus.

If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). You can order your copy here!

Buy Issue 3

Finally, although we are no longer accepting pitches for personal essays or memoir, we are extending the pitching window for reported features, investigations and long reads until this Sunday, 5 July. Further details are available here. A note: we are looking for ideas outside the usual genre of a food-story, and rather pitches have a strong sense of storyline and criticality about eating, cooking and purchasing food.

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For me – like many others – English is the language of work and writing, but not the language of feeling, or life. I live in Hindustani (the Hindi–Urdu hybrid that is one of Delhi’s languages), surrounded by my family’s Tamil, and my neighbourhood’s other languages (Punjabi, Haryanvi, Nepali). When I write, I still struggle to bring the entirety of my life into the English language. No matter how hard I try, something always gets missed in translation – especially when it comes to expressions of eating and cooking. This is too much that goes on here that English simply cannot hold.

Take ‘khayali pulao’ (پلاؤ خیالی ; खयाली पुलाव्)), which translates from Urdu and Hindi as ‘pulao of the imagination’. It refers to an activity akin to daydreaming – expectations that can amount to fiction, anticipation that can have the weight of fantasy. The closest equivalent in English is perhaps ‘building castles in the sky’, but that phrase feels – to my South Asian ears at least – too judgemental or instructive. It doesn’t capture the pleasure of possibility that ‘khayali pulao’ invokes.

Every language around the world is strewn with similarly untranslatable phrases. So, we asked seven writers to write about their favourite food-related idioms in their primary languages, from Arabic to Tamil, Yoruba to Thai.

Sharanya Deepak

Arabic: زنخة (Zankha)

Closest translation: ‘The strong smell of eggs, chicken or fish left on a pan’

by Marwan Kaabour

Zankha is used to refer to a wildly unpleasant odour – discerning noses can pick it up on plates, bowls, glasses or cookware which have been used to cook eggs, chicken or fish and not properly cleaned. It’s a deep, embedded smell that tickles your nose in all the wrong ways and, once detected, is impossible to ignore. It seems like Levantine Arabs (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine) are the only people to recognise and detect zankha immediately. It’s not a subtle thing, but an olfactory slap to the nostrils: enough to turn your stomach upside down and make you gag. I personally think that eggs are the main culprit. Whenever I make them, I have to scrub and clean the plates twice – otherwise, zankha. My absolute nightmare is when someone cooks eggs and throws everything in the dishwasher without pre-cleaning or rinsing. You hear that beep signalling the end of the wash cycle, you open the dishwasher door and out comes the steam that should signal cleanliness, but instead you get smothered in zankha steam.

I have had countless conversations with Arab friends to try and find the most accurate translation: rancid, eggy, funk, stench. But none truly encapsulate zankha’s repulsive essence. I have also done numerous tests with my non-Arab friends to try and help them understand zankha. I once shoved a plate under my flatmate’s nose, encouraging her to smell it, but all I got was a confused look. Another time, I was at a restaurant with five friends, and the table itself seemed soaked in zankha. I tried to stay civil and not say anything, but alas, it got to me. I had the waiters clear the table and have it cleaned (with soap!), and only then was I able to get back to my meal. You might call me crazy, I call it zankha.

Bengali: ভাতঘুম (Bhatghum)

Closest translation: ‘A nap after eating rice’

by Barsha Mallik

Imagine a hot summer’s day, where the humidity is so heavy it lulls you into drowsiness. Add to that a plate of rice with the usual side dishes, like dal, fish curry, some sort of shak vaji or shobji vaji (sautéed greens or vegetables), and what follows is almost inevitable: a nap lasting for a few hours. In Bengal, the word used to describe this is bhatghum. It’s both an activity and a long-standing cultural practice. You could call it a siesta or a food coma, but bhatghum is far more specific. Here in Bengal, bhat (rice) is like air – you ‘inhale’ it every day – so it makes sense that there’s a word for the sleep rice summons.

This word captures the eternal nature of the Bengali people – bhat and ghum, rice and sleep. We can’t live without our rice, and we certainly don’t mind our laziness. All Bengalis have a relationship with bhatghum, whether or not they actually nap. Though bhatghum can strike at any hour, it belongs most naturally to the afternoon. When I was growing up, my grandma used to say, ‘Bhatghum ar chor akloge aye’, meaning ‘Bhatghum and thieves come in pairs’, referring to the unproven theory that afternoons here see more theft simply because everyone is lost in their rice slumber. Growing up, my father was adamant about bhatgum being a healthy practice. Every afternoon, he insisted we sleep; I rebelled, choosing my favourite TV show over his rules. But now, as an adult, my body leans toward bhatghum almost instinctively. Even on rice-less days, afternoons tug at me for a nap.

A friend of mine likes to complain that, despite our collective devotion to bhatghum, we still don’t have anything like wǔshuì in Chinese schools or the midday nap breaks of some Japanese offices. For a culture that has a name for the rice-induced nap, we are surprisingly stingy about permitting it institutionally. Sometimes I take a slow walk through sun-dappled snoozing alleys in Dhaka. A warm afternoon in a neighbourhood deep in bhatghum carries its own kind of calm.

Vietnamese: Nhậu

Closest translation: ‘Eating and drinking for no particular purpose’

by Trà My Hickin

I’ve asked many people how to translate the Vietnamese word ‘nhậu,’ and my favourite answer is ‘eating and drinking for no particular purpose’. It’s a term deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture: to nhậu you must have good company, good food and drink and a lot of time on your hands. Nhậu is not a celebration of any occasion, even the end of the week. The only reason to nhậu is because somebody has asked. This doesn’t result in a fancy meal, but one eaten (usually) on the roadside. All dishes are shared, served extra salty so they can be washed down with beer. Crucially, nhậu is the act of slowly nibbling and drinking over hours of conversation. No one is in a rush.

When I return to Vietnam, I bring with me my hasty Londoner’s mindset, trying to cram in plans with relatives and friends. Nobody listens to me, and I find myself nhậu-ing with some friends, family and occasionally a few randomers. Nhậu is both a verb and a noun, the noun enshrining that nhậu is a part of the culture. One day, I was showing friends around Hanoi when I bumped into my uncle, who was skiving off work on a random Tuesday. ‘What are you doing here at 3pm?’ I asked, and he replied ‘nhậu’, which also implied, I’m being cultured or I’m keeping up a time-honoured tradition.

Living far away from loved ones, you’d think that marking up time to visit everyone would make sense. But in Vietnam, time has its own logic; plans are unspoken and spontaneous but somehow work out in the end. Meetings blur into one another, people drift in and out, and suddenly you’ve seen everyone you meant to. Being present for these rituals of banality is how you make the most of time here. When nhậu is in session, time slows down and folds in on itself. It feels like you’ve been there forever. In these moments, time belongs to everyone again.

Tamil: கப்பல் (Kappal)

Closest translation: ‘Ship’, but used to mean ‘gluttony’

by Sumaiyya Mustafa

In Tamil, the word ‘kappal’ means ship, but in the coastal dialect that I speak, it doubles up to mean ‘gluttony’. Until the 1970s in my hometown (a southern port in Tamil Nadu called Kayalpatnam), most men, or at least one man per family, were traders who worked in other port towns, especially in Sri Lanka. To the people of Kayalpatnam, there is nothing as familiar as the largeness of a ship, and so anyone whose appetite is vast is called a kappal. I often call my six-year-old daughter ‘French fries kappal’ – a ship of French fries – because of how many she can eat in one sitting. The sea and its objects are an inseparable occurrence in the daily language of Kayalpatnam. While other Tamil communities use words like ‘sothu mootai’ (meaning ‘sack of rice’) to express gluttony, in Kayalpatnam it is kappal – the ship.

Last month, my grandmother told me about a person named Kappal, who died as an old man in the 1980s. When she mentioned his ability to eat one full sahan (a large round plate of Dutch Boerenbont that is used for communal eating in the community during wedding feasts and other family functions, and which feeds three or four people) of rice, mutton curry and dal, the character began to feel perfectly apocryphal. The day I learned of this man who earned his nickname, I was a happy person. I felt myself a participant of a culture, as a practitioner of culinary vocabularies. Besides the knowledge of methods and measurements, these lexicons carry vestiges of a community or a family’s past. Even a Tamil speaker outside of this dialect would require a good measure of guidance to understand the metaphor.

Thai: ข้าวใหม่ปลามัน (Kao mai pla maan)

Closest translation: ‘They go together like fresh rice and oily fish’

by Issariya Morgan

Food and romance are old friends. They enliven our senses, keep us lingering at the table late into the night. Speaking about romance in the language of food is as common in Thailand as anywhere else. And here, it seems, the simple things are best. Take the expression ‘kao mai pla maan’, which means ‘fresh rice and oily fish’. Describing ‘a very good thing’, this phrase is often used in the context of a new relationship – those tender beginnings when everything feels alive with possibility. Recently, at a gathering with my family in Bangkok, we read my cousin’s Tarot cards, which foretold the arrival of the Two of Cups. The image showed two lovers sharing a glass of wine. When she was asked what it meant, my aunt exclaimed, ‘Kao mai pla maan!’ Fresh rice and oily fish!

That is the spirit of the phrase – as sweet as a comforting meal, its significance instantly understood by all. But not all idioms are so straightforward. In Thailand, definitions can vary wildly depending on who you ask. Another of my favourite romantic idioms is ‘kanom jiin pasom nam ya’ – literally ‘white noodles and curry sauce’. I learned this from my mother, and understood it to mean ‘two people who are made for each other’. But when the phrase came up during the Tarot reading, it caused a cheerful commotion. Laughing, my cousin told me it meant ‘two people sneaking off to have sex’. Same same but different. I suppose that’s the joy – and trouble – of untranslatable phrases.

Turkish: Yeme de yaninda yat

Closest translation: ‘Don’t eat it, sleep next to it’

by Melek Erdal

‘Yeme de yaninda yat’ is a phrase describing a dish so good it could be promoted from something inanimate to something you’d potentially take out on a date. A meal that deserves your attention, to be listened to. A dish so beautiful it should not be disturbed with hands or mouths but rather observed and perhaps displayed in a gallery – much like Alan Titchmarsh’s red cashmere jumper, held in a glass cabinet in the Garden Museum. It is a phrase I have never heard my mother say; it is entirely my father’s way of speaking. My mother, who does the majority of the cooking in our family home, would never try to sell us a meal. The root of her cooking was, and is, duty, and a quiet joy in doing this well. For my father, the novelty of cooking made it a performance – to entertain and rally up support and joy. If for any reason he cooked, the meal would arrive at the table and be sold as the most delicious thing ever made. Here it is, come look at this – ‘yeme de yaninda yat’ – have you ever eaten anything more delicious? He would remind me of those people in Istanbul that stand outside restaurants to convince passersby to come in.

This month, I read the phrase out to my friend Zoe while on a train to Worthing to record The Kitchen Cabinet. ‘Ah, the British equivalent to this could be “snog, marry and avoid”’, she said. This got us thinking about foods we would ‘snog, marry and avoid’ if they were people. ‘I can’t think of any foods I would avoid’, I said to Zoe. ‘Start with a person you would want to avoid and think what food they would be’, she suggested. This helped. I thought about how much I dislike people who speak over me or are long-winded. This would definitely be truffle – overpowering, lingering longer than it should. Also, why is it everywhere? Who gave it the right? I would snog chicken skin and fat. Every encounter is a state of bliss, but it’s not sustainable long-term for health reasons. I would enter a polygamous marriage with a lemon, onions and pul biber – I couldn’t live without them, and we’d all actually always get on. I would have said bread, but we are in the midst of a divorce. For now, we’ve grown apart.

Yoruba: Mo jẹun, Mo yó, Mo ri mọto, Mo yà!

No translation, but the phrase says: ‘I ate, I was full to the brim, I saw a car coming and I moved out of its way!’

by Yemisí Aríbisálà

The songs I remember being chorused around the dining table and during meals in my childhood had all kinds of tropes. They were usually sung to distract the baby, to make her eat: they sometimes eulogised the matriarch who’d cooked the food, or they were a silly radio jingle for Choco Milo or Maggi cubes. The songs kept those begi-begi toddlers (begging for your chicken or fish) gainfully employed while you ate. You made them croon for morsels, promising them something at the end, then you tuned them out and ate fast. The songs had one thing in common – they were all nonsense verse, or bordering on nonsensical. They were impulsive, mad, peppered and boiled well with inebriation, the delightful, and – I warn ahead – near impossible to translate into English. The words always made us laugh, like a joke that could never lose its charm. Take this one, for example:

Mo jẹun,

Mo yó,

Mo ri mọto,

Mo yà!

It says, literally, I ate, I was full to the brim, I saw a car coming and I moved out of its way! There are many such songs (Yoruba language is made up of the tonal marks do re mi, so you are singing whether you like it or not…), and this particular one is being insidiously philosophical, too, but also doing the work of the best prayer, acknowledging those who are hungry and mad with hunger, enough to despair and stand in front of a moving car. The songs were a contrast to the stiff, uninspired ‘grace’ it seemed every single Nigerian child was taught to sing before meals in primary school. This one gives thanks for the encouragement that a good meal provides to try again, to embrace this difficult life. The song reminds us not to forget those who are hungry in a world with so much food. It does this brilliantly, while making us laugh. I have to say that we are all now too cool, too self-conscious, too urbane to sing thanksgiving for a meal.

Credits

Marwan Kaabour is an independent graphic designer, visual artist and writer from Beirut. Marwan’s debut book, The Queer Arab Glossary, was published by Saqi Books in 2024.

Melek Erdal is an Alevi Kurdish writer, cook and multidisciplinary storyteller. She was Fortnum and Mason Cookery Writer of the Year in 2024 and the Jane Grigson Trust Award recipient 2026 for her upcoming book Xwê, Salt (due to be published in 2027).

Yemisí Aríbisálà is the author of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds (Cassava Republic Press, 2016) and In The Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life (Daunt, 2020).

Sumaiya Mustafa is a writer based in India. She writes on tastes, cultures, and films.

Issariya Morgan is a British-Thai writer who grew up in West Wales. Formerly the editor of Berry Bros & Rudd’s No.3 magazine, her background lies in wines, spirits and food. Alongside freelance writing, she maintains a ceramic art practice.

Barsha Mallik is a Bangladesh-born writer and artist based in Dhaka. She often explores heirloom recipes, culture, womanhood, healing, and the natural world through her work.

Trà My Hickin is a writer based in London and editor at Translator Magazine.

Ibrahim Rayintakath is an illustrator and art director based in his coastal hometown of Ponnani, India. His editorial work, which explores themes of culture, politics and mental health, has appeared in various outlets like the New Yorker, the New York Times and NBC.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

A Eulogy from the Editor

Food writing is dead. We had a decent run of it – an unbroken 201 years from the publication of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste in 1825 (to which our front cover attests). But nothing lasts forever. Over the past few years, short-form video has become mass media’s dominant format. Food culture is now being moulded by a new generation, who do not have to rely on the gatekeepers of legacy media to reach their audience: young cooking influencers who use montage and jump cuts to sell a dizzying array of recipes; enterprising YouTubers who put together travel content and dispatches in the exploratory spirit of Bourdain; restaurant influencers who have supplanted the critic with the art of kayfabe, performing ludicrous characters to grab our attention. This transition has contributed to the homogenisation of food media into a series of tics and formats that please the algorithm, and yet it has also allowed people shut out of food writing to speak about their culture on their own terms. The content they produce is chaotic, tasteless, infuriating, diabolical, unpoliced and, sometimes, brilliant. The age of the influencer is upon us: you can love it or hate it, but either way, you have to take it seriously.

This issue, which we made instead of going to therapy, is our attempt to do just that. It uses the new figure of ‘The Influencer’ as a jumping-off point to talk more broadly about who has had the power to influence food culture, and how this is changing.

Our lead essay – an investigation by Stephen Buranyi into the economics of restaurant influencing – is the biggest piece we’ve ever published. Over the past six months, Stephen has spoken to more than fifty influencers, chefs, restaurateurs, PR professionals and other industry players to find out where influencers came from, how they gained such power in the industry, and how the business of influencing works day to day. What Stephen has uncovered is not the usual narrative that pits influencers against traditional journalism; instead, he tells a more complex story, one in which influencers, journalists and restaurants are embedded in a system that obscures when we’re being advertised to. Over the course of the investigation, it becomes clear that this is really a story about old and new forms of advertising, a proxy war being fought between the real powerbrokers of food media: PRs and the social media platforms themselves. If you want to learn how it all works, how much people are charging, and why Eating with Tod isn’t picking up our calls, then this essay is worth the price of admission alone.

We’re also honoured to be publishing two major pieces of food history writing in this issue. In the first – a story we’ve wanted to tell for almost a decade since we first heard about it – Vaughn Tan unearths the secret influence that the food writer MFK Fisher had over the mass popularisation of Japanese food, and specifically how documents in her archive prove that she orchestrated a behind-the-scenes PR campaign to change American food culture. In the second, Ozoz Sokoh has spent many months in the cookbook archive to write the definitive essay on the history of Jollof rice in Nigeria, and how (and why) the recipe has changed over the past century.

Across Issue 3, you’ll find stories about the people – and systems – that shape the way we eat, often in hidden or clandestine ways. Hester van Hensbergen has written the long read on the wholesaler Natoora that we’ve all been waiting for, tracking how, over the past two decades, it has risen to become the most influential player in the London restaurant world. Ariel Saramandi reports from Mauritius about how climate change has influenced the crops that people can eat. Yanyu Sun looks at the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and how it is creating a new canon of London restaurants – from Ecuadorean offal soups to Bulgarian barbecue – based on ‘the Chinese stomach’. Lily Kelting talks to trend forecasters from around the world about predicting the future of food, while Adam Almeida maps out the impact of private equity on the British dining scene.

One of the big themes of the magazine is how online food culture is creating new genres of influencer. Hussein Kesvani writes about halal food influencers and how Muslim consumers have become some of the most important drivers of food culture in Britain today. Claire Ratinon interrogates the ‘back to the land’ influencers who have made their names advocating for a rural lifestyle, but who rarely divulge the reality of what it costs. Barclay Bram delves into the world of so-called microinfluencers and how, ultimately, the entire food media world runs on comps. We also asked six of our favourite writers across the world to write about influencer culture in their own country, which reveals that, despite a globalised media system, influencers can still remain local.

If that’s not enough, we’ve also put together a panel of experts to determine the most influential British restaurants from the last seventy-five years and how each one has changed the way we eat out, for better or worse. In a landmark interview, we speak to cookery writer Nigel Slater and photographer Jonathan Lovekin on food photography and their twenty-eight-year working partnership, which has transformed how we look at food. We sit down with the influencer Rob Martinez and Anthony Bourdain’s collaborator Helen Cho about the similarities (and differences) between food TV and Instagram reels. Calum Jacobs writes movingly about how our parents can inform the ways in which we cook, and his failed attempts to cook the food of his heritage. And in an eerie piece of fiction, author Rebecca Perry retells a familiar fairy tale about how hunger can drive people to make the most desperate of decisions. Plus there’s adverts from Mam Sham, diagrams, maps, cartoons, gravestones and more!

Influencers are here to stay. Food has a sensuality attuned to the virtues of short-form video, and because of our reliance on the phone screen, online food content has the capacity to reach millions of people, including those who don’t usually consume food media. With this magazine, we wanted to acknowledge that, but also make a case for what food writing can do when it’s given a bit of room to stretch its legs. By the time you reach the end of the issue, we hope you’ll agree that the reports of food writing’s death have been greatly exaggerated – not least by us.

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Like with Issue 1 (sold out), Ice Cream City (almost sold out) and Issue 2 (just about not sold out), this magazine is entirely self-published and funded only through user subscriptions (no adverts, no spon con). Pre-orders are vital for us. If you pre-order the magazine by 27 July the magazine will cost £18, down from the RRP of £20. Paid subscribers will get a further reduction to £16 – there’s a discount code after the paywall.

If you are a retailer and wish to stock Issue 3, then please email our distributor Antenne Books: mia@antennebooks.com.

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Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! A reminder that you can listen to our back-catalogue of episodes with Shuko Oda, Songsoo Kim, Joké Bakare, Ravneet Gill, Ferhat Dirik, Gemma Bell, Ruby Tandoh, and more, both on here and wherever you get your podcasts. If you prefer to watch your podcasts, you can now do so on our YouTube channel!

Some quick notes before today’s episode. Firstly, postage for EU orders is going up by £3 due to a new tariff that comes in on 1 July. Therefore if you want to order Issue 2 or Ice Cream City to the EU then this weekend is the best time to do it. On Monday, we will have to add the new tariff.

Secondly, if you're a shop or ice cream parlour that wants to stock Vittles’ recently published Ice Cream City guide by Ruby Tandoh, we have limited copies left. Please get in touch with us soon on vittleslondon@gmail.com to register your interest as we're currently working on wholesale in time for the summer.

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub, the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and immediately went viral on social media.

In the episode, we discuss creating something that people really want in a moment when so many hospitality businesses are feeling the pain; about the meaning and importance of community and authenticity; about navigating virality and hype online; and about how, despite all their early success, neither are trained chefs.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

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

Like last month’s episode with Koya’s Shuko Oda, you can also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

Thank you for listening, reading, watching and supporting our work.

Please note this is an extra episode and we'll be back again soon, as promised last time around, with the conversation Adam had with Will Gleave, the head chef at Sargasso in Margate, who will be talking about the early days of P. Franco, the role of Australians in London and getting out of the city. We’ll see you then.

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Credits

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

Farsin Rabiee was born in Colorado and raised in Sweden amid a strong Iranian diaspora community where he developed his understanding of Iranian cuisine – embracing multigenerational cooking, learning from his mother, grandmother and aunties. Farsin lived in Spain, before moving to London 15 years ago. He is a journalist and news producer who has worked in different projects and for a number of major Persian-speaking channels. His work focuses on Iran, and the Middle East, with a particular interest in human stories with a goal to raise awareness for marginalised communities within Iran or about human rights violations within Iran.

Ziad Halub was born and raised in London to Iraqi communist parents from Basra who were exiled. His parents are prominent writers, and he was raised among Iraqi creatives in London which deeply influenced how he connected with his homeland. Like many diaspora, unable to visit their homelands, Ziad understood his culture first through food, and then with art. Background first in archaeology and heritage. His professional life was multi-hyphenate working with photography, writing, and international brands with the theme of exploring junctions between material culture and consumption.

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! Today Sharanya Deepak writes about the disappearance of her appetite in the presence of romantic partners.

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

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I have never loved a man who welcomed my appetite. This thought formed one day at a restaurant in central London, where I was eating among people I had just met.

The group had erupted in familial havoc as soon as we sat down, as often happens when South Asians get together abroad. We were mostly new to one another, and on our walk to the restaurant, casual rivalries had already emerged, with people rallying for others to join their side. When we entered, I thought I felt the room shrink from our raucousness. Two tables of white people – probably real families – began to talk politely to one another, as if conducting conversation simply to compete with ours.

‘Dai! Everyone has ten minutes to order, no more!’ the group’s self-appointed patriarch announced from one side of the table. Another man flung his menu at me, tired of its ornate British manner. ‘Order something for me,’ he said, becoming my annoying older brother for the night. The man opposite me, in contrast, was patient, and ordered quickly after he read the menu, a bowl of noodles. He was hungry, I knew – I had heard him tell someone else he had worked all day, skipping lunch.

When our food arrived, dishes were passed round, the ownership of each one dissolving as they circled the table. I drank a beer slowly and, because I was sitting at a desolate corner, much of the food disappeared before it arrived on my side. This is when the man opposite me pushed his bowl to the centre of the table. When someone else’s spoon approached, he gently held up his own to obstruct it, as if telling them gently to wait until I had eaten. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said, laughing, as I served myself some noodles and a few pieces of meat. ‘Take as much as you want, don’t take two helpings and put one back.’

Later, my friends listened patiently to this anecdote. ‘What kind of restaurant was it? Was it good?’ they asked, humouring me. My sister was more cutting. ‘Good man’, she said calmly in a voice note. ‘But why can’t you eat when you like someone?’ Before she pointed out this tendency, I had attributed my inability to eat that night to the chaos that premised our meal. ‘What’s your problem?’ she continued, and I could hear her fiddling with her pressure cooker, letting out steam. ‘Why can’t you eat when you have a crush?’

I once loved a man for so long that I sometimes referred to him as the ‘love of my life’. With stories of this man, friends were less accommodating. They would turn away when they heard me embellish him with fake qualities. After the first few years, my sister would accept no mention of him, marching from the room whenever he came up. One of my embellishments was that he had fed me well. ‘He always knew when I was hungry’, I would say. It was true that he was a good, occasionally great, cook, and sometimes made elaborate meals. But the narrative that he cooked for me as a routine aspect of our relationship twisted that fact into an insidious lie.

I loved watching him cook because I loved watching him do anything. He was a beautiful man, and we were often in remote places that rendered me dependent, more foreign in his country than I already was. Once, I followed him around ten supermarkets looking for a Bundt tin – he needed it to make a complicated Iranian cake. Another time I watched him shell broad beans for hours before eventually adding them to a large omelette (I modified and cooked this recipe after we finally grew apart). He had learned almost no recipes that connected him to the country in which he was raised; his loyalty was to the city of his birth – a beautiful, ancient metropolis that an American military had trampled and destroyed.

For a while after we stopped speaking, I held on to these visions of him preparing food. I considered them the ‘good bits’ of our relationship: there was the time he peeled the skins off peppers for hours to make an elaborate dip; the day he wordlessly shelled langoustines in a restaurant. With these recollections, I tried to erase the memory of the loneliness I felt on other days. I imbued his cooking with extra meaning, but in real life, it was a wavering, sporadic gesture; it did not have the reliable, routine quality of care. I buried the thoughts of the morning when I stayed hungry until he wanted to eat, afraid of starting an argument by turning on the stove. Or the times he left the flat for days without a word, when I wandered around the city looking for him, halving a sandwich in a paper bag so it would last me two mealtimes.

Our physical intimacy was also sporadic and dependent on his mood. If I broached this, even in conversation, he would make it clear that I was asking for something that was beyond him. The rule was this: hunger for more than the crumbs I was thrown would ruin our relationship. I learned to stop expressing my desire, observing myself as he positioned me in his choreography. Recently, I found texts on an old phone in which I begged for forgiveness after expressing longing, desperate texts sent while I waited for him to call me back. Depending on his mood, I was a main or side character: faithful or worthless, good or bad, desirable or not.

Sometimes I try to draw a direct line between the failure of my romantic relationships and the suppression of my appetite. I eat happily with friends, siblings and family, but the same appetite dissipates in the presence of romance. The fraught connection between my appetite and my sexuality can feel like something I’ve imposed on myself – or so I have been told. ‘Bahut sochti ho tum’, someone will say to me now and then, suggesting that these are knots of my own making, that these limits on my body are an effect of the analytical quality of my mind.

But it’s not just me. While it is true that I led a mostly happy childhood, raised by a squadron of friends and neighbours, I was also raised within the code of the land set to police women’s appetites.

Growing up, the news flashed with moustachioed uncles announcing that young women who ate Chinese food from roadside stalls were a dangerous, national liability. That women’s cravings for an outing, a snack, a cigarette were the cause of their being routinely snatched off roadsides – their full, fleetingly happy bodies discarded into street corners in the dark. When we were teenagers, we were forbidden by a friend’s parent from lingering at our chosen chaat stall in the neighbourhood. They said that men lurked there to follow us back. We disobeyed, but sprinted home after we finished eating, wiping our mouths clean as we ran. Twice, some men did chase us, but we were faster than they imagined, so they gave up, stopping midway to masturbate against a wall.

The atmosphere, even on regular days, was heavy with the fact that for women, punishment for initiating touch could be severe. Hunger, whether sexual or physical, seemed safest when it was retracted inside. Now, I often feel like I have no sexuality, as if my desire needs to remain shadowy, suggestive, without a body. And with no body, what do I feed it? How can it have an appetite?

As a child, I would watch my maternal grandmother spend hours in the kitchen, shaving coconuts, soaking tamarind, swatting away the trespassers that entered her domain. She cooked with a prowess cultivated in the dominant-caste culinary ethos, in which rigid and oppressive ideas of purity and exclusion are softened and disguised in recipes. Every mealtime, she would hover unsmilingly over my grandfather, serving his meals with military zeal, each morsel created to match his preferences. Where are yours? I remember thinking then. Now almost ninety, when she asks for store-bought falafel and hot stewed apples, I wonder when, amidst cooking for tens of people for all those hours, she ate what she liked.

My mother, meanwhile, refuses to cede control of her appetite. Hers is keen and jovial. I’m still not sure what she likes to eat best – she seems to enjoy everything with equal fervour – but I do know she likes to eat before anyone else. When there is a spread of food anywhere, she walks over to it, eyes glistening and gaze focused, sneaking to a corner with a full plate like a toddler out of earshot.

I did not witness my mother cooking long, elaborate meals when I was young. I would listen as she told us how she oversalted the food as a young bride, hoping that my father’s family would send her back to her sisters. As a teenager, I would grumble at how my tiffin boxes lacked the finesse of hot lunches made by ‘hardworking Indian mothers’. Sometimes I would be given leftover idlis with a smattering of chutney podi, but many times I would open my lunchbox to find two slices of buttered toast with a lone apple or an unpeeled boiled egg.

As an adult, though, I have stopped my demands for hot lunches, and my mother is pleased that I happily eat her cooking. She often makes thin, crispy dosas because she likes her flawless cast-iron pan. Some days, she texts me mysterious one-word menus out of context. ‘Lazzaniya’ appeared on my phone the other day, and I walked to her flat to pick up a cheesy Tupperware of zucchini, potatoes and carrots cooked down with dried red chillies and tomato puree – no pasta in sight. Whenever we share a meal now, I enjoy myself, borrowing her tendency for fun. She avenges me for prior complaints, anticipating my responses to our meals, mocking the lofty way I speak English. ‘Is it shee-sha-shoo? Is it oh so la-la-la?’ she says, doing a pesky jig around the table. ‘Is it like England? Is it like French? Is it like Japan?’

Last year, I fell briefly in love with a man whose appetite was constrained by an illness. Our meals – and words – were carefully curated, with each physical and emotional action performed in the tight mould of restriction. This was a drill I knew well, so I jumped into it mindlessly. When we saw one another, I remained alert, on duty, sharp and performative from the distance between us. Our meetings formed a dynamic so formal that I often called it a ‘courtship’. I felt the familiar sensation of undernourishment, of not knowing where I stood with this man.

Each time we met, I held on to small details that gave me a window into his personality: anecdotes he told me about his best friend, the clumsy way he parked his car. We mostly sat in bland cafes, drinking mugs of tea and eating scanty snacks. One time we ate an overpriced chocolate ganache and I discovered the only real thing I would ever know about him: he had a keen sweet tooth. If I had liked him more, I would have turned these details into something more than they were, used them to sanctify him in my mind. Instead, they remained inconsequential, and my appetite for both food and affection became something I recognised.

On the first day I decided to stop seeing him, I picked my sister up from a metro station in central Delhi. That morning, I had cooked him a picnic he didn’t eat. ‘Wait, what is this?’ he had asked, as if I were standing on my head, not rolling out a cotton sheet to eat on under a flowering fig tree during Delhi’s ever-diminishing springtime. I told my sister this story as we ate the leftovers of my picnic – apple juice from the mountains, kebab rolls and channey-ki-chaat – in the back seat of our car. She pushed most of the food towards me, her cheeks blown out in anger, but also because her mouth was full of seekh kebab.

On the second day I decided to stop seeing him, I ate a piece of expensive chocolate cake in a cafe in central Delhi, looking out at strolling families with shopping bags and rich teenagers taking selfies that showed off their diamond-studded bracelets.

On the third day, I took a cab to my friend’s studio in south Delhi, and we drank spiced rum and ate bits of toasted garlic naan on her balcony. I had just spent hours with this man, listening primly to his stories; I was giddy with this weekday indulgence with my friend, realising that this, and any of the pleasures I considered primary, were not things he would understand.

On the fourth day I decided to to stop seeing him, my little brother made me an oily bowl of noodles with leftover keema and scallions, which I ate while reclining on his bed. ‘I’ve been so hungry, dude’, I said to him as he nodded sagely, rolling us cigarettes on the floor where he sat.

While acting on my sexual and romantic agency still feels mythical and challenging, I have started to act when my appetite for food needs me to give it form. I have begun to order sugary beverages with meals at restaurants, a luxury I thought was meant for other, thinner people deserving of such addendums. I have begun to fry myself an egg now and then, styling it with whatever new condiments I may have – coarsely ground lemon-pepper from a market in north Goa; Henderson’s Relish bought from the Morrisons in Peckham when I needed a reason to stroll around the supermarket, quietly weeping about my limited time in the colonial capital, a city I constantly and tragically love. I now eat breakfast every day, a habit I picked up two years ago when I visited a friend in Tokyo. Aghast at how I skipped the first meal of the day, within minutes of me leaving my room, he would quietly guide me to his dining table and place a plate of grilled cheese and steamed fish in front of me.

When it came to that man I loved the longest, my relationship with his city was in stark contrast to the one I had with him. I shared a temperament with its sharp, fast-talking citizens. Like me, they valued neighbourhood loyalty and high-quality banter, and like me, they enjoyed hot meat slid into bread. Often abandoned by this man, I took refuge in his city. ‘Alright?’ I started to say, like everyone else around me, nodding at the local postman when I saw him. I began to look forward to other things – chatty elderly women on the bus, blue patches in cloudy skies.

Without him, I also began to eat my way across the city. I would stand in line at a bakery to buy small frosted cakes. I began to buy oysters in a local shop, where I would talk non-stop to the man who shucked them, even though I understood little of what he said. I ate breakfast and drank mugs of tea at an old cafe, reading the local newspaper slowly in imitation of the old men around me. Every day, my favourite among them told me that he was related to the actor Ewan McGregor, even though I assured him that I believed him from the start.

On days when I was homesick, I would look up a nearby ice cream shop run by young Pakistani men, reading the reviews – and the owners’ rebuttals – on their Google page. I began to visit it, eating brightly coloured cups of ice cream and scribbling in my notebook, listening to the boys who ran it argue behind me, waiting for the bickering and bravado from the review pages to teleport into the shop. On one of my last days in the city, I decided to order a sundae, eating it slowly at a table near the windows. As I started to leave, one of the boys stopped me. ‘Sister! You forgot something’, he said in Punjabi, and I shrugged to say no. He gestured that I move two steps back, as if on a childhood cricket pitch, cheering as I caught what he threw at me. He touched his fingers to his forehead in salaams to say well done, but also goodbye.

I left, and started on what would be one of the last walks I took through those streets. I walked a long, circular path past the places in the city that had fed me – a widely debated bakery with an overpriced sausage roll, a beloved falafel cart where I would order whatever everyone else was getting: ‘Halloumi wrap, spicy potato, garlic sauce, fries.’ As I walked, I unwrapped my gift to eat on the way back: two small barfis, a block of candied cherries and a Snickers bar wrapped in foil.

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Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from and currently living in New Delhi, India. She is also an editor at Vittles Magazine. More of her work is on her website.

Lisa Carpagnano is an illustrator who lives and works in Rennes. Inspired by cinema and photography, she creates narrative compositions, mostly in colored pencil or felt-tip pen, that blur the line between fiction and documentary.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s guide-essay is by Molly Pepper Steemson. A month ago Molly proposed an idea to us: before she left the country at the end of the summer she wanted to undertake a critical piece of service journalism and embark on one final and important mission: to find London’s best bagel.

This weekend is the last for preorders for Ruby Tandoh’s Ice Cream City (which is now available to send to Europe, America and the rest of the world.) We hope to send out all pre-orders within the next week – if you would like to order it you can do so here.

If you have enjoyed the writing on Vittles at any point during the last six years, then please consider supporting us below, which allows us to continue publishing work that is meaningful to us, and hopefully to you too.

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Mine is a life built on bagels. For two years I lived above Fairmount Bagel, one of Montreal’s most famous bakeries, in a flat that, thanks to its 24-hour wood-fired ovens, always smelled like bagels. Invariably, I too always smelled like bagels. It made sense: I was born within literal spitting distance of Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood, where, when we were sick, my father would go to buy us chicken soup and bagels. The rest of the time, we ate New York Bakery’s ‘Original NYC bagels’. A lot of them. Those pappy, gummy, crustless supermarket monstrosities were toasted and spread with a layer of Marmite so thick that the skin on the roofs of mine and my sister’s mouths would peel off at the sight of them. The bagels themselves were really quite bad, but they were the bagels we had and the bagels we knew. Many Brits today have no idea what a bagel really is. They just think they do, and New York Bakery is to blame.

They are not, however, to blame for the desperate ‘New York-style’-ing of contemporary bagel brands, which would rather trade in asinine and inaccurate pastiche than use a word like ‘Jewish’. These ‘New York-style’ bagel shops, with their menus of variously ‘filled’ bagels, have been the focus of much of recent history’s bagel discourse, which is something I care neither for nor about – and for good reason. Good reasons, even:

Raw bagels (untoasted) are considerably worse than cooked (or toasted) ones. Cream cheese is an inferior product to good British butter. And most of all, a bagel is a shit vehicle for a sandwich. A good bagel is crusty and chewy and, without toasting, should offer significant dentine resistance. Put my salt beef on rye, my BEC (bacon, egg, cheese) in a crusty roll. Bagels are for the toaster – for the butter knife, Maldon, and occasionally Marmite – for a cup of tea, for home.

These are all things about which I’m currently feeling quite sentimental. At the end of the summer, I’ll be moving to, predictably, a flat that is no more than a minute’s walk from what friends assure me is a ‘really great bagel’ in the world’s bagel capital, New York City. Each morning, I’ll be offered schmear and nova or lox, and other things I won’t buy. I’ll miss London’s bagels, which are less bloated than their American cousins and chewier than their fresh-baked Canadian counterparts. A good London bagel has a dark crust and a density of flavour, as well as the right dough. I had to make my final London summer (for a little while) count. So I set out with a plan – a journey across north and east London to try 16 bagels, ending at what I believed to be the British bagel’s spiritual home. No, not there, at the top of Brick Lane. But St John’s Wood.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today Vijayta Lalwani writes about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused a massive shortage of cooking gas, impacting the livelihoods and health of working Indians.

If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of Bad Food. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy.

Another quick thing: our friends at The North-Eastern have launched an important and beautiful magazine that is publishing art, reportage and analysis – a continuation of the decades-old tradition of Eelam Tamil transnational activism. ‘Ours is a magazine committed to the principle of Tamil self-determination, not as a closed or parochial idea, but as a universal right,’ write the magazine’s editors. Read more on their website, and subscribe to The North-Eastern here.

‘I get tears in my eyes while cooking,’ Anita Salunkhe tells me. It’s a May afternoon in Malwadi, a neighbourhood dotted with makeshift homes and auto-repair shops in Pune, Western India. Salunkhe and her family live in a one-room tin-walled structure in a small, informal settlement that is mostly populated by migrant construction workers.

When we meet, she is sitting under a tree, having just cooked for her family. The sun blazes above us. To cook, Salunkhe uses a chulha – a traditional firewood stove – which is situated outside her home. Such stoves are viewed nostalgically by the elite classes, for whom they recall a more traditional form of cooking, but the reality of relying on a chulha (as many Indian working-class migrants like Salunkhe do) is far from romantic. Salunkhe cannot cook indoors because the smoke builds up incessantly, choking her. Daytime temperatures soar above a blistering 40°C, so she tries to cook early in the morning or evening. She tells me that all her neighbours are in the same predicament. I counted at least nine other homes in the settlement with a chulha outside their entrance.

Until two months ago, Salunkhe cooked inside her house on a gas stove, using a liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder. Salunkhe, like most of the urban working classes, does not have adequate paperwork to secure a gas connection (migrant workers usually have gas connections registered in their native village), so she would purchase the cylinders through the black market at inflated costs. But all this changed when the Strait of Hormuz closed after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February; since then, energy supplies in India have been hugely disrupted. Around 60% of India’s LPG is imported – and almost 90% of that travels through the Strait. Even though India and Iran have long been strategic allies, the Indian government has neither condemned the US and Israeli bombings on Iran nor adopted a clear stance during the war.

In India, there are over 300 million registered users of LPG gas cylinders, which form the primary infrastructure for home and commercial cooking. Since March, the official price of domestic 14kg LPG cylinders – cylinders sold by sanctioned state-owned and private agencies to households and businesses with registered connections – has increased from Rs 850 to roughly Rs 950. But for families like Salunkhe’s, who purchase cylinders through informal markets, these escalations can be much higher. Salunkhe used to purchase one cylinder a month for Rs 1,200 – already substantially higher than the official price. Now the cost has skyrocketed to nearly Rs 4,000, which is completely unaffordable for her family (Salunkhe’s husband, a daily wage worker in a construction site, earns Rs 300 per day – if he is able to find work. The day we met, he returned empty-handed.) Their daughter usually eats at the nearby public school, which guarantees a midday meal for children, but it is closed for vacations. ‘We are eating much less now and my daughter keeps crying for food. If she is hungry, I give her some biscuits and tell her to be quiet,’ Salunkhe says.

In the immediate aftermath of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure, there was a surge in demand for cylinders, as well as supply-chain bottlenecks and a delay in deliveries. Visuals showed hundreds of Indians lining up through the day, with many waiting for hours outside gas agencies across the country. Railway stations and bus depots were crowded, as scores of migrant workers returned to their native homes after running out of gas and savings.

Even today, months after the crisis began, these effects persist. Affluent households remain unaffected and the middle classes find a solution, so the impact is felt most acutely by those working in informal sectors – nearly 90% of the population in India – who may not have registered gas connections. Last month, I discussed the LPG crisis with single working mothers, street vendors and small-eatery owners across India, all of whom are barely scraping by.

In Hadapsar, a neighbourhood filled with food-establishments, I stumbled across Shree Krishna Bhojnalay, a small, affordable eatery. While most of the other places had at least a few customers, Shree Krishna Bhojnalay was completely empty. A middle-aged man who had been taking a nap on a chair identified himself as the owner (he refused to give me his name). ‘We are not open. I am packing up and shutting this place down,’ he told me.

He had been running the eatery in the rented space for over a year, cooking everything himself. He was able to sustain it before the war began, but once the shortages hit, the gas-supply agency told him they did not have any cylinders to sell. In March, the Indian government redirected fuel supply away from businesses and industries to households which rely extensively on LPG (despite having previously reassured businesses that there would be no disruption for seventy days). As a result, the supply for commercial customers became erratic across India. In Bangalore, for example, the Hotels Association in Bangalore released a pleading notice, stating that ‘sudden stoppage of supply is a big blow to the hotel industry’.

The owner of Shree Krishna Bhojnalay was forced to turn to the informal market for his LPG, but the prices (at least Rs 3,500 for a 14kg cylinder, and in some places up to Rs 5,000) were totally unaffordable. He cut his menu offering down to only two items – a rice plate for Rs 80 (consisting of rice and sabzi or dal) and chapati bhaji for Rs 70 – so that he wouldn’t have to increase prices. He also told me that he tried cooking on a chulha, ‘but there was too much smoke and it drove my customers away’.

Shalini Sinha, the Asia strategic lead at Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), told me that ‘The LPG crisis is not an isolated crisis but the result of multiple overlapping crises: rising living costs – including food prices – and income losses caused by extreme heat.’ Street-food vendors, the backbone of India’s urban food economy, already operate with high precarity. ‘They cope by reducing nutritious food for themselves, and their dietary intake goes down, even as working hours and physical labour increase,’ Sinha added.

Sunil Suryavanshi is a vendor selling tarri poha, samosa and kachori at a bus station in Nagpur, 740 kilometres away from Pune. ‘We had to shut shop for two weeks because we were not able to get a cylinder for a whole month,’ he told me. Now he is back open, but he has had to increase the cost of his food from Rs 30 to Rs 40 per plate. He is using a chulha to cook, which turns his utensils black. Sangeeta Singh, who heads up the street food programme for the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), told me that laws on pollution mean street vendors often have to pay a bribe to municipal authorities when using coal or firewood. ‘There is a lot of harassment and eviction they are facing,’ Singh noted. And although ‘NASVI have tried [throughout the crisis] to provide induction stoves to vendors … but electricity agencies ask for a lot of paperwork, which many vendors do not have.’

Despite the government’s move to prioritise domestic gas supply, in many urban areas the interval between cylinder deliveries has increased from twenty-one to twenty-five days. And, for many households, the cylinders have taken weeks to arrive, even though they were paid for in advance. Pinki Devi, a forty-year-old mother of three in Delhi who earns Rs 8,000 monthly as a cleaner, told me over the phone that she paid for a cylinder on 23 May – it cost Rs 913 – but it didn’t arrive until 10 June. While she waited, she managed with a chulha, cooking at 4am before heading out for work; sometimes she used her neighbour’s cylinder to cook in the evening. The simple meal she cooks every day cannot be stored for later. ‘Everything spoils in this heat and I do not have a cooler or a fridge,’ she said.

In the initial days of the conflict, fears over LPG shortages sparked extreme hoarding of induction stoves and electric cookers, which were then sold on online platforms and through vendors at inflated prices. And while many hotels and food vendors – who have regularised electricity connections and an additional budget – bought inductions as a contingency measure, they remained out of reach for most.

Rajaram Veer, a vada pav seller in Mumbai, purchased an electric stove in April for a whopping Rs 20,000 after his agency stopped supplying commercial cylinders. However, the electric stove has increased his electricity bills by 20% because it heats slowly. Vada pav is a heat-intensive dish; it requires deep-frying, and Veer must heat the oil for at least twenty minutes before he can begin frying the potato vadas. ‘The taste is not the same. The vada is naram, not kadak [soft, but not crisp],’ he said. Despite rising costs, Veer has not yet increased his prices, currently selling his vada pavs for Rs 23 apiece.

Chai vendors cannot increase their prices, as their clientele is dependent on cheap, fast beverages and snacks. Siyaram Kumar Rai, who runs a small stall in Mumbai and sells each cup of his chai for Rs 5, has been using coal for the past two months. He now cooks the tea in his home and then packs it in a thermos flask to take to his stall. ‘Many customers have stopped coming to me because I cannot prepare the tea on the spot according to their preference,’ he tells me. Pramod Wakode, the founder of Tea Coffee Association, a non-profit working with over 10,000 tea vendors across India, said his association was helping sellers access electricity so they could start using induction stoves. In addition to the fuel shortages, the price rise of milk, loose tea and sugar has led to further strain on tea vendors, he told me.

All this might seem like a miniscule increase to someone in the Global North, given that one Indian rupee is less than one per cent of the British pound. But the price surge of a staple is a massive issue in India, as it affects the consumption ability of millions of middle- and lower-income households that run on tight monthly budgets. The gas crisis has evidently driven pushed more households, vendors and restaurants to the edge.

While the country’s working classes reel from new obstacles in everyday life, the government has not taken action, instead putting the onus on already financially insecure citizens. In 2016, the central government introduced a welfare scheme, aiming to provide LPG cylinders at a subsidised rate to women from low-income households; since the war, the number of gas refills has been reduced from the initial twelve times a year to just four. In May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to Indians to adopt a host of austerity measures – such as working from home, limiting travel abroad and buying less gold – in order to limit fuel usage and balance foreign reserves. In a separate appeal, he asked Indians to cut cooking oil consumption by 10% (edible oil imports have risen over the years, and the war has driven up importation costs even further).

Much of Indian cooking relies on oil from coconut, soybean, groundnut and mustard for frying, tempering and preserving food. Many vendors I spoke to said it was not feasible to cut down or switch to cheaper alternatives, even as cooking-oil prices have increased to nearly Rs 200 per litre since the war began. ‘Customers can tell the difference in the taste, so we cannot change the oil,’ Suryavanshi, who uses at least five litres of soybean oil daily to prepare the snacks he serves at his stall, told me.

Veer also uses soybean oil. He said he would rather purchase the same ingredients at a higher cost than opt for cheaper alternatives. Street vendors build their business with deep thought and high risks, and, even though the government believes the measures they introduce are minor, Rajaram reminds me that even a moment’s error can cost him his livelihood.

For many, food is the only form of respite in the face of severe economic adversity. Roma Devi, who earns a monthly salary of Rs 10,000 as a factory worker in Delhi, continues purchasing the same brand of mustard oil and using similar quantities in her cooking for her children. ‘How can we deceive our stomach?’ she said. I asked her about the Prime Minister’s proposed austerity measures: ‘We do not have the money to buy gold,’ she told me indignantly. ‘All poor people have is food to get by.’

Editor’s note: As of two days ago, the Strait of Hormuz is due to open as per new talks, but reports say that this does not guarantee an end to these problems, or that inflation will go down.

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Credits

Vijayta Lalwani is a writer and an award-winning journalist covering the impact of politics and polarisation on livelihoods.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. As of today, we are open for newsletter pitches for the first time in almost a year. Below you’ll find our updated pitching guide, which details the type of pieces we’re interested in commissioning. Details of our rates are published here.

Before we start, an announcement for everyone outside of the UK: due to popular demand, we have now opened up Ruby Tandoh’s Ice Cream City to pre-orders to Europe, America and the rest of the world! We hope to send out all pre-orders within the next two weeks - if you would like to order it you can do so here.

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

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The Vittles Pitching Guide, 2026

What we’d like to commission this year

Vittles is now over six years old, and although a lot has changed in that time, one thing remains the same: in this magazine, the articles we publish are never only about food. Rather, food is a way to tell a larger or more interesting story – something surprising or intriguing, something that offers a fresh perspective.

In this round of commissioning, we are looking for submissions across a range of genres – everything from investigations and personal essays to opinion pieces and reported features (note: we are currently not commissioning recipe pieces other than Cooking From Life essays). Irrespective of format, to work for Vittles, pieces need to be voice-driven and argument-led and to have a definite story arc. In other words: please do not pitch introductions to or explainers of specific dishes or cuisines, and DO NOT USE AI.

The best way to figure out if your idea might work for Vittles is to ask: what is the story here? What else, aside from the dish itself, does this idea tell us about the world around us? As always, we particularly encourage people who don’t consider themselves food writers to pitch – writers outside the so-called ‘food world’ invigorate the often-staid ways that food is written about.

The following is a list of types of pieces and themes that we are commissioning:

Features and Reporting:

• Investigative features like this piece on the working conditions at Gail’s. Investigative pitches should have a firm sense of scope and methodology (we will work with writers to develop reporting plans). We have larger budgets for investigations that require additional time and reporting, and these can be negotiated in advance.

• Gripping, timeless longreads that offer novel insights into modern food culture and the people and companies who influence the way we eat. Examples include Joe Zadeh’s investigation into why white people are afraid of reheating rice, this exploration of the weird, fantastic history of Pakistani sushi by Sanam Maher, and this essay by Tim Anderson on how katsu curry became a British phenomenon. We are also looking for longreads that engage with the connections between food and energy, climate, trade and the slowly disintegrating global-food economy.

• Thoughtful critical dispatches from outside the UK and USA, like this story about crisps in Madrid, this essay by Yemisí Aríbisálà about the cookbook industry in Nigeria, or this reported piece by Dora Taylor about how Hurricane Melissa exposed Jamaica’s longstanding dependence on corporatised agrarian systems. We are particularly looking for great stories from China, Taiwan, Africa and the Arab world.

• Food writing that holds particular resonance in the backdrop of rising fascism in Britain, from within neighbourhoods or communities who have been unfairly demonised or underreported on. Good examples are this story by Francesca Humi about Earl’s Court, and Lola Olufemi’s piece on the role of food in radical social movements. (Note: we do not publish ‘discovery writing’.)

• Pieces that take a critical, original look at something quintessentially British, such as Heather Parry’s investigation into how the popular TV show Jamie’s School Dinners affected her hometown of Rawmarsh, Digby Warde-Aldam’s piece on Pizza Express’s design, and Ruby Tandoh on the Sainsbury’s design archive.

• Scams and feuds: So much of modern food culture is absurd, and driven by spite, ego and sometimes outright fraudulence. If there is a story with scams and feuds right at the heart of it then please pitch it to us. The more shenanigans the better.

• Stories about the un-glamourous, chaotic, inauthentic or confused aspects of eating in the world – like this piece by Sharanya Deepek about South Asian Italian cuisine. Note: a lot of the ideas we were interested in for our print magazines (on Bad Food and Influencers) are still interesting to us.

• A note on South Asian pitches. For pieces from the subcontinent, we are interested in thinking about food outside the domestic. We urge writers to pitch silly ideas about the messy, chaotic ways we live our lives in South Asia, or ideas that connect to themes of labour, industry, political surveillance, and manufacturing. Remember: we do not publish pieces about ‘heritage’ if they are solely associated with dominant-caste Hindu communities.

Memoir

The personal essay is not dead. That said, for a piece of food memoir to work for Vittles, it needs to stand out – to offer a distinct voice and point of view alongside thoughtful, lyrical writing. The Cooking from Life column is home to a lot of our personal writing – have a read through its archives.

Some particularly strong recent examples of memoir include:

• This personal essay about overseeing the tea and biscuits at AA meetings

• This set of vignettes about the Eucharist by Waithera Sebatindira

• Jo Hamya’s lyric essay about eating in bed

• Robin Craig’s Cooking From Life about the role of food in hospice care

• Aryan Anbari’s Cooking From Life about Iranian makaroni

• This graphic essay about grief by Ella Bucknall

Opinion/Acid Reflux

After a few issues at the tail end of last year, we have not published a new edition of our gossip/opinion column acid reflux in some time – our apologies! However, it is something we would love to continue – both in its regular form and with guest slots. If you have an issue you would like to write about, or if there is a trend in restaurants or food culture you want to interrogate critically, then this is the space to do it in. Some previous examples include Thom Eagle on serving bad customers, or Niloufar Haidari on the matcha boom.

On a related note, we would like to commission more short, critical opinion pieces this year (very much along the lines of our old column, The Hater). We are especially looking for pieces about the British hospitality industry written by people within the industry. If you’re a chef, front-of-house worker, KP, restaurant owner, producer, supplier or distributor and you have something you want to write about the industry that you can’t think of a home for, then please get in touch. Essays can be written anonymously if preferred.

Send your pitches with ‘PITCH’ in the subject line to vittlespitches@gmail.com by 30 June. We aim to reply to every single email, although due to the high volume of pitches, it can take up to six weeks for us to get back. Details on rates are below.

A London project

We are working on a special project this year which will take us back to the early days of Vittles and London Feeds Itself, focusing on the everyday and often unwritten about ways in which Londoners eat. We are particularly looking for stories about the people who feed Londoners: shopkeepers, distributors, wholesalers, importers, cooks (of all kinds, whether commercial, institutional or domestic), growers, foragers, or community networks (either physical or online), tips on people who grow or source ingredients that you cannot get elsewhere – things which are legendary among certain communities or neighbourhoods but don’t receive enough attention. If you have a strong story for a feature or profile, then please email us at vittleslondon@gmail.com. The deadline for this specific project is this week, Friday 19 June.

Vittles Restaurants

When we started Vittles Restaurants almost three years ago, we had a very simple mission statement: that over the next few years, we are going to make the way you eat tangibly better. Over the last three years, we’ve tried to cover the London restaurant ecosystem in its entirety, putting restaurants and neighbourhoods in conversation with each other rather than covering them in silos. We hope to expand that coverage this year in different forms, not limited to any particular format. This year we’re looking to commission reported features, guest reviews, neighbourhood guides as well as interviews and opinion pieces from within the London restaurant industry. Along with recommending the best places to eat, we want to also explain the mechanics of how a city like London is fed, and who and what influences it.

Pitching is now open for pieces which fall into these categories. Below is a little more on what we’re looking for as well as a list of guides we’re opening for commission.

Reviews

We are looking to commission guest reviews on restaurants in London with an exceptional story, which go beyond merely recommending a place to eat. The review might shine a light on a particular phenomenon or trend in the city, or highlight a chef who is doing something out of step with the rest of the scene. Some examples might include Mei Bai’s review of Dong Yuan and its link to Chinese social media, or Dina Begum’s piece on Bangla City and its importance to the Bangladeshi community, or Jonathan Nunn’s essay/review on The Yellow Bittern and its position within the history of British food culture.

Interviews

Who are the people making the key decisions behind what we eat now in London? We’re looking to interview those who are influencing the way restaurants operate, look and feel, the decision-makers, the tastemakers, the people on the frontline of the labour market. Ask yourself the questions: why is this person interesting? What is interesting about what they are doing? Why should more people know more about them?

Some examples of interviews we’ve published before are Jonathan Nunn with Chitra Ramaswamy, and Adam Coghlan with Andy Hayler, as well as the Vittles Podcast.

Features

We aim to publish more reported features covering specific venues (places and neighbourhoods) that are critical to communities in London – the places that are at risk of closure, those pushed ever harder by the property market. We want to hear from those who are operating and sustaining them. Food and restaurants must be a part of the story, but it is never the whole story. We want to broaden the story to include the restaurant’s wider context: its people, place, and importance in the ecosystem, of not just hospitality but London culture itself.

Examples of previous restaurant features include Vitoria Croda on Brixton Plaza, Amel Mukhtar on Ridley Road, Gavin Cleaver on Plush N16, and Xiao Ma on Chinatown.

Neighbourhood guides

After our three lunch guides, which cover the areas of central London where many Londoners work, we want to expand our guides into neighbourhoods of London in Zones 2 and above, where many Londoners live. We are looking to commission deep dives into particular neighbourhoods from people who know an area intimately and have strong opinions on what is worthwhile and what isn’t. Rather than aimed at outsiders, these guides should be useful for other people who live in the area and simply want to know where to eat on a regular weekday without expending too much energy.

Single-subject guides

We are now commissioning guides for the rest of 2026. The main guide we are accepting pitches for is our Vegan Guide, which will not only cover vegan restaurants, but places serving the best vegan dishes in any restaurant in the city.

We are also looking to commission more single-subject guides from people obsessed about the execution of a single item of food and are willing to try every example available in order to find their ideal. If there is something you’re interested in – whether it’s pizza, tacos or banh mi – please let us know. Previous examples of deep-dive guides include Ruby Tandoh on ice cream, Gavin Cleaver on barbecue and Ed Fenwick on sandwiches.

Six of One

If you don’t have a long review or guide in you, then we are always looking for Six of Ones for our regular recommendation slot. A good Six of One should be like a recommendation you would give to a friend for a lesser-known restaurant that you’re on the verge of gatekeeping (but would rather not). You can find examples from across the history of Six of One, but the main thing is that the restaurant serves excellent food, rather than simply being obscure.

Send restaurant-related pitches with ‘PITCH’ in the subject line to vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com. We aim to reply to every single email, although due to the high volume of pitches, it can take up to six weeks for us to get back. Details on rates are below.

Rates

We aim to ensure that contributors to Vittles are paid fairly. The current rate for writing is £800 for a reported 2000–2500 word newsletter, £600 for 1500–2000 word opinion pieces or personal essays, £500 plus expenses for reviews, £100 for Six of Ones, or roughly 40p a word for smaller pieces. For longer pieces, investigations, or features that involve more reporting, we can discuss a higher rate with the writer. Rates for illustrations and photography start at £250.

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Credits

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

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

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

Hope to see you there!

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

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

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

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

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

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