Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s essay by Simran Hans is about new goings on in one of the most important restaurant neighbourhoods in central London: Soho. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s review by Dina Begum is about Bangla City, a Boxpark-like structure of 30 units in Upton Park which has become one of the most significant Bangladeshi food hubs in London. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.

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

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

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

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Reviews, a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants You can read all the previous reviews here.

Today’s review is by Bartolomeo Sala, for whom the social and local importance of the osteria holds a personal and longstanding significance. So last month, when one the buzziest restaurants to open this year landed on Soho’s Greek Street, the word ‘osteria’ in its name made him feel uneasy…

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Preserving the Fire

Bartolomeo Sala reviews Osteria Vibrato, Soho’s new Italian restaurant, and reflects on how the importance of an Italian osteria might come in new, unexpected forms. Photography by Tommaso Serra.

As someone who spent the best part of his late teens driving around the rolling hills of Piacenza in northern Italy looking for places to eat and drink, there are few things I like more than a good osteria. Born as a place for travellers to have wine and a quick bite before spending the night (the word itself comes from Old French for ‘host’), it co-evolved with its close relative the trattoria – a casual, family-run restaurant that focused on inexpensive, nourishing meals – and became the archetype of Italian conviviality in the postwar years: the place where old, local food traditions met with a new form of popular, cross-class form of hedonism.

I hope you will pardon this preamble, but you have to understand that the osteria represents something special to me. For a millennial who came of age after mass politics but before social media, it was my main form of socialisation, the setting for countless dates and piss-ups, hot summer evenings and foggy winter afternoons. It is also an integral part of the idea of the Italian countryside, for which I harbour a sentimental attachment. There is something about its jovial, laidback atmosphere that simply sets me right in a way that many self-serious modern restaurants never will. All this is to say that I felt uneasy when I saw the word in the context of the latest hyped-up Soho restaurant, Osteria Vibrato, which opened on Greek Street in February.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Last year, in Jonathan Nunn’s list of the 99 best restaurants in London, you may have noticed a Chinese restaurant at number 21 which we have never mentioned or written about before: Dong Yuan. Today’s review by Mei Bai is the full story of Dong Yuan, a Hunan-style restaurant specialising in xiao chao cooking on the Park Royal industrial estate in North Acton

But before we start, a note on the current status of a restaurant close to all of our hearts at Vittles, Kaieteur Kitchen, which was at number 9 on the Vittles 99. Since being evicted from Elephant and Castle, Faye, Kaieteur Kitchen’s owner, has been cooking at Walworth Living Room every Friday. The cooking is as good as ever, and she is there again tonight: if you haven’t tried her pepper pot, then today is an excellent opportunity to get it. Go!

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The first thing you notice at Dong Yuan is the fire. A burst of orange flame that rises above the wok before collapsing back into smoke. Through the window of a small porch extension, you can see the chef working at the burners. In one wok, he tosses the food almost non-stop, occasionally flicking the pan forward, letting the flames lick the food. Two other empty woks sit in front of him, being heated until they begin to smoke: this is the right moment when cold oil should be added so food doesn’t stick or get charred too fast. The wok hei reaches you first before the plates do: the complex, smoky aroma fleetingly cloaks the piping-hot stir-fries. The cooking here is organised around heat and momentum; ingredients are constantly sautéed, tossed and kissed by flame, with one chef simultaneously managing all three woks. Plates leave the kitchen as quickly as they enter it. Nothing here is designed to linger.

The fire cooking at Dong Yuan is an incongruous sight for North Acton, an area stitched together by industrial estates, student accommodation blocks and the skeleton of HS2 construction. For decades, the affordable rents here have drawn Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian restaurants and sweet shops tucked between warehouses and depots (outside Dong Yuan, the sign still reads Meat & Grill, a relic from a previous tenant). The restaurant sits on the outer edge of the Acton Business Centre, a block better known for its dark kitchens than for dining rooms. Around it, meals are assembled for delivery, packaged and dispatched. It feels accidental, almost provisional, yet the cooking is deliberate and precisely timed. Much of that timing revolves around chillies; if they linger too long in the wok, they soften and steam rather than sear, muting the aroma. The difference between a dish that smells vivid and one that falls flat can be a matter of seconds in the intimidating flames.

One of the faces you’ll spot engulfed in fire is that of Cui Yaohua, the owner of Dong Yuan. More than a decade ago, Cui began working at a company processing scrap metal and supplying 3D filaments in Acton; over time, he took over the business, watching Park Royal change around him. He started a takeaway-only food delivery business in Whitechapel, selling spicy and numbing crayfish, before taking ownership of a Japanese lunch spot in Canary Wharf. In 2021, he opened Dong Yuan on the site of a Lebanese takeaway. At first, Dong Yuan offered British-Chinese takeaway staples like sweet and sour chicken, crispy shredded duck and satay skewers. When nearby Chinese students enquired if they could do something more ‘authentic’ – like a clay pot stew or home-cooking staples like tomato with scrambled eggs and red braised chicken – Cui decided to cook the food he missed himself. Together with his business partner chef Li, who once worked in five-star hotel kitchens near Shanghai, he implemented a full kitchen makeover, investing in a set of powerful wok burners with a water curtain – a constant stream of water cooling the stainless-steel surface to prevent overheating – and started to cook xiao chao.

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Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Hester van Hensbergen.

In case you missed it, we released a new episode of our podcast yesterday with Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan in conversation with Ruby Tandoh. You can listen to it here.

To read more reviews, London and Paris restaurant guides, our recipe collection, and access the complete Vittles archive, please subscribe below.

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Every decade or so, someone points out that Peru has the original fusion cuisine. Chifa, the Chinese and Peruvian fusion that developed after immigration from the mid-19^th century onwards, sits alongside Nikkei, the repertoire of sushi and omakase-style restaurant cooking that resulted from the migration of Japanese agricultural workers beginning in the late 19^th century. Chifa has been the more influential of the two when it comes to everyday cooking. Dishes like arroz chaufa and lomo saltado can be found in the majority of London’s more casual Peruvian spots, like Tierra Peru and Peruvian Corner. Nikkei, meanwhile, has captured the haute cuisine market, most famously when Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa drew on it to launch his luxury restaurant brand Nobu in the mid-1990s.

When Peruvian food first became explosively popular in London in the early 2010s, Cantonese and Japanese fusion weren’t the main focus. The summer of 2012 was the summer of Ceviche, Martin Morales’s restaurant on Frith Street, which was credited with popularising the dish of the same name. The more homely Tierra Peru in Islington opened the same year, and so did Lima London in Fitzrovia. The latter had become the first Peruvian restaurant in Europe to win a Michelin star by 2014, and in the same year, Pachamama Group opened its eponymous first restaurant in Marylebone. It helped that Peruvian cuisine was becoming the darling of global elite gastronomy and coming into its own when high-concept celebrations of hyper-local, rarefied ingredients were all the rage. Peruvian fine dining restaurants flourished in the West End, while informal family-run places cropped up in the Latin American hubs of Seven Sisters and Elephant and Castle.

Today, Chifa and Nikkei are London cuisines, but their territories are different. Between Chifa and Nikkei, one offers warmth, while the other skews cool; one is accessible, the other exclusive. Yet they both share a unique capacity to fuse companionably and conspiratorially with the rest of the Peruvian kitchen to produce something which, if nothing else, will never fail to be interesting. London’s restaurant climate may be in a bad way right now, with high food and energy costs and dampened demand, yet recently eating at two Peruvian restaurants – one Chifa and one Nikkei – has made me wonder: is there something Peruvian food, one of the world’s most adaptable cuisines, can teach London restaurants about thriving in these straitened times?

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Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. We didn’t intend this to be Cypriot week at Vittles, but after Loukia Constantinou’s Wednesday recipe for Cypriot pasta, today we have a review by Alex Mylonas for four souvlatzidika in Potters Bar, the epicentre of Cypriot food in the UK.

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Like many London Cypriots, I grew up on the fringes of north London in a community that embraced its heritage – particularly when it came to food. Eating out usually meant sharing tables full of mezedes in ram-packed north London tavernes, where my grandparents seemed to know everyone. At the time, Potters Bar, a small town across the M25 in Hertfordshire, wasn’t part of our eating habits, and I only came to know it through family friends, and when my grandparents relocated there. As I recall, the two main high streets that run parallel through the town were primarily home to a range of quiet, family-run restaurants, cafés and tea rooms, plus a couple of pubs. Although there was a small Cypriot population, there was no real culinary imprint to reflect it, barring a now-closed Turkish Cypriot-owned Mediterranean fusion spot called Bistro the Walk.

Over the last decade, remarkably, Potters Bar has become a destination in itself for the Cypriot community. It now houses a concentration of four Cypriot souvlijidika (kebab houses), which may seem low but is fairly high for a once-tranquil commuter town surrounded by acres of woodland and farmland. The high quality of these Potters Bar souvlijidika makes it hard to have a conversation about Cypriot food in London without first looking past the M25. During the last 50 years, the epicentre of London’s Cypriot restaurant scene has shifted northwards, from its origins in Camden, through ‘Palmers Greek’, Enfield and Barnet, and now out of London altogether. Many of the old guard of Cypriot north London are now gone – some pushed out by economic headwinds, changing demographics or retirement, others by the increase in north London gang activity.

Over Easter this year, the fabled Vrisaki restaurant on Myddleton Road near Wood Green – once the Cypriot venue of choice for birthdays, christenings and weddings – closed down. Meanwhile, its neighbour and competitor Paneri has changed ownership, losing much of its long-term fanbase, who flocked to it as one of north London’s best takeaways. Across in Finchley, Uncle Tony’s Taverna shut earlier this year, while a few months later, the Vrisaki offshoot Andy’s Kebab House was evicted from its location in Oakwood.

Like everything else in London, restaurants follow the housing market. The presence of Cypriots in Potters Bar goes back to the late 90s, when London’s Cypriots began relocating to its affordable housing and calmer, community-oriented neighbourhoods. The Twelve Apostles Greek Orthodox Church held its first service in Brookmans Park in 1999, while Andreas Antoniou – Mr Vrisaki himself – has lived there for the past 30 years despite operating his restaurant nine miles away in Palmers Green. Relentless rises in housing prices have continued to push London Cypriots into Hertfordshire; my grandparents made the move from Enfield Town to Potters Bar in 2013. That same year, Chris Christodoulou opened Potters Bar’s first souvlijidiko, Tavernaki. I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about a restaurant opening as I was about Tavernaki, which was the first real Cypriot grill-taverna to land in the neighbourhood. Its honesty, endearing staff and dependable mezes, souvla and souvlakia quickly became a hit among Cypriot locals – so much that it expanded into the neighbouring shop a couple of years later. Today, it is the first among equals of the Hertfordshire Four: a group of Potters Bar souvlijidika that have turned the town into the best place to eat Cypriot food in the UK.

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Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Simran Hans.

To read more reviews, London and Paris restaurant guides, our recipe collection, and access the complete Vittles archive, please subscribe below.

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As I waited for my table at Lupa to be ready, I noticed several passers-by peering in. ‘What is this place? It’s adorable!’ I heard one of them squeal. A new Italian restaurant in north London, Lupa would like you to think of it as a neighbourhood joint. Located in Highbury Park, it is a medium-to-long walk from all three of its nearest tube stations (11 minutes from Arsenal, 16 from Finsbury Park, 18 from Highbury and Islington), which is perfect for locals and annoying for anyone who doesn’t live nearby. It is an intimate space, seating just 28 covers, with coquettish half-curtained windows and an inviting, butter-yellow facade.

Except Lupa is not really a neighbourhood restaurant. It is a celebrity interloper, dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses. Co-owned by The White Lotus actor Theo James, a Highbury transplant from Buckinghamshire who spends half his time in Los Angeles, it has been booked solid since it opened in June. A friend who actually lives in the neighbourhood was unable to secure a reservation for her birthday in August. Determined, she turned up at 5pm sharp to assess the walk-in situation. Two other diners had already beaten her to it.

The tastefully decorated space does not draw attention to James’s involvement, but Lupa’s PR campaign has certainly traded on it. The place is co-owned by Carousel’s Ed Templeton, but it’s James’s name that is front and centre of allthereviews. Today, to fill a restaurant in London, you need more than the promise of good food. What you need is a fanbase. I was reminded of this when visiting Carmela’s, another newly opened Italian restaurant in Islington. A pizzeria serving ‘East Coast-inspired’ pies, it is co-owned by vlogging duo Gerry del Guercio and Paul Delaney, better known as BiteTwice (and on Instagram, where they have 163,000 followers, as @bitetwicefoodreviews). The ‘East Coast’ concept essentially refers to the thin base, foldable New York style, with a nod to the chewy, charred crust of its New Haven cousin ‘apizza’. I ate at Carmela’s a week after it opened. Like Lupa, it was packed.

Reaching a specific audience through the shrewd use of social media is hardly a new phenomenon. What’s novel here is the thing that’s being sold. In London and at its outer edges, the last five years have seen East Coast-inspired pizza taking off as an antidote to Neapolitan hegemony: Dough Hands, Crisp, Lenny’s Apizza, Alley Cats, Gracey’s and Vincenzo’s each offer an iteration. And BiteTwice has reviewed them all. It’s impressive fieldwork for opening a bricks-and-mortar space on Upper Street, which is home to at least six other restaurants where you can sit in and order a pizza. Selling intangible expertise – or a dream, or an idea – is very different to selling a product people will keep coming back to eat. But there is an awkward tension between the global online fan and the local customer in real life. They both have different expectations and needs. One expects fireworks – the sort that demands a photo. The other needs something to eat.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Mohammed Ali Salha.

You can read all his previous Vittles reviews here along with a map of 369 restaurants to try in London. To read all past recommendations and today’s newsletter in full, subscribe for £7/month or £59 for the whole year.

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A Love Letter to Kingsbury

Mohammed Ali Salha reviews four restaurants that suggest Kingsbury is now one of the city’s most overlooked food destinations.

It’s hard to really articulate my feelings about Kingsbury. I hate it, I love it, I don’t really want to write about it. But it’s one of the few places in the world that feels remotely like home. When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to leave the banality of life in NW9. My family had moved to London in the bitter winter of 1990 from a Lebanon just moving towards peace, darting around the city in temporary housing before finding a feeling of stability on Laburnum Grove. The neverending summer of ’96 was our first in Kingsbury and I was still tethered to the area until I left Kingsbury High School’s sixth form in 2005. Throughout that time, the area was dominated by the hallmarks of a working-class London enclave: parents popping in and out of cash and carries at a canter; lame, unloved franchises of once-popular restaurants; and fried chicken shops filled with kids in jack-ups and short ties.

But something has changed. There’s a new momentum transforming Kingsbury from a seemingly faceless hub to a place that reflects the decades-long history of an area that has provided solace for solitudinarians and sanctuary for the stateless. In the 1950s, it was a base for London’s Irish community before the Gujarati contingent – the majority of whom were expelled from Uganda – put their own stamp on the area from the 1970s onwards. More recently, Kingsbury has become home to sizable communities from Iraq, Poland and Romania. It is all of those communities which have brought so much to the current landscape – street snacks and sweets; labyrinthine fruit and veg shops with seasonal prizes; food emporiums with epic selections of pickles and pulses; widespread habibification. Ambitious entrepreneurs have begun to reshape the look and feel of the area by thinking bigger with bold concepts and even bolder decors.

Kingsbury, more than ever, looks like a culinary map of its many lives. And recently, there have been three genuinely different, excellent restaurants and food businesses, which render the area more than just a site of historical interest. There are colourful, comforting chaats, kebabs kissed by open flames and desserts piled as high as ambition; with each one shaping Kingsbury in its own way.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

A reminder that you can still secure a copy of Issue 1 of our magazine through our website here or order from one of our stockists across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world here.

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I have a theory about Singburi, the Leytonstone Thai cafe that has been accused by multiple credible publications of being the single best restaurant in London. My theory is this: everyone who loves it, no matter when they first ate there, feels deep down in their marrow that the restaurant is theirs and that it should stay exactly the way they found it.

For the first decade and a half of Singburi’s life, this meant a restaurant for locals, where you might greet its owners Thelma and Tony Kularbwong by name and measure out the remains of your evenings on the restaurant’s BYOB policy. If you came to it somewhere between 2016 and 2020, it was a destination restaurant filled with diners who, like you, had travelled far for its blackboard of specials curated by Tony and Thelma’s son Sirichai (Siri to those who know him). If you arrived after 2020, you would only have known Singburi as a hype restaurant with no usable booking system, where the thrill was getting a table in the first place.

If my theory is correct, it poses a problem for any restaurant that wants to call itself Singburi – particularly the Singburi that opened last month in Montacute Yards in Shoreditch, a new cookie-cutter development backed by real-estate developers Brockton Capital and Blackstone. Aside from its name, this restaurant currently has only two things in common with the old Singburi: both involve the presence of Siri (now a co-owner alongside Nick Molyviatis – formerly of Kiln and Plaza Khao Gaeng – and Alex Gkikas, who ran Catalyst Cafe), and both serve Thai food. However, there are new details to Theseus’s ship. There is a booking system and a credit card machine; there are stools and terrazzo tiles; there are drinks menus and tasteful fonts. There is a humane level of air conditioning. To call this ‘Singburi’ is bound to unsettle those who remember the oddities and unsanded edges of the original. It’s the restaurant equivalent of your dad forcing you to call his new girlfriend ‘Mum’.

I cannot review the new Singburi. I spent so many evenings in the old restaurant that I got to know and became friends with Siri. Since then, our careers have become unexpectedly entwined; any assessment I could give you of the restaurant’s new qualities would be compromised. However, I am interested in burying the old Singburi. In 2021, twenty-two years into its first life and with no PR, advertising budget or ambition beyond serving its neighbourhood, Singburi was named the best restaurant in the city by Time Out; two years later, the National Restaurant Awards ranked it the seventy-third best restaurant in the UK, an anomaly in a list dominated by central London and Michelin-starred destination restaurants. In 2024, The Infatuation London gave Singburi an almost unimprovable 9.8 out of 10, making it the best-rated restaurant of any city in which The Infatuation operates. The trajectory of that Singburi, is perhaps, the most unlikely London restaurant story of the past decade.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Gavin Cleaver.

A reminder that we’re almost all out of Issue 1 of our magazine, so if you would like to secure a copy then you can order through our website here or order from one of our stockists across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world here.

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Once Upon a Time in the West

Gavin Cleaver visits London’s newest US barbecue restaurant and contemplates an America of fading cultural relevance.

Historian Geir Lundestad once described American influence around the world as an “empire by invitation”. Of course, the US has exerted influence by invasion and all the other vicious ways empires prosper, but it has also conquered hearts and minds by projecting immense amounts of soft power around the world. This has been achieved by making the American way of life seem appealing: the music, the films, the TV, and especially the food. What was the most potent symbol of the Soviets’ ‘opening up’ to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall? The McDonald’s in Pushkin Square. A few years later, Gorbachev was advertising Pizza Hut. So what happens to Western culture when America becomes incredibly unpopular across the West? And what does this mean for the UK’s addiction to American food? Will our love for neon-signed bedecked interiors survive the next four years? And when American cultural imperialism fades, what fills the gap?

If you’re just joining us, it might be worth going back and reading the piece in which, in the name of public service journalism, I ate at every American barbecue restaurant across London. The conclusion was: US barbecue in London is based more around our affinity for American culture than it is reverence for good barbecue (but such is our affinity, we’re still more than happy to pay big money for bad examples). Since then, I’ve been fortunate to eat good barbecue, though sadly it hasn’t been in London. In February, I was back in Texas and lucky enough to visit Goldee’s in Fort Worth in the company of Texas Monthly’s barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn. He was in the midst of writing the new Top 50 BBQ guide, which happens once every four years — like the World Cup but far more intense. When we met, Vaughn had travelled 900 miles around Texas in just a few days to eat barbecue. I wouldn’t travel 900 metres to eat most of the barbecue in London.

Still, one of the better places I visited for the piece was the sadly shuttered Prairie Fire barbecue, which Kansas native Michael Gratz started as a pop-up in 2015 after coming to the UK to work as a chef for the US team at the 2012 London Olympics. Gratz opened a permanent location in early 2020 that couldn’t outperform its curious location in Wood Lane, across the road from the old BBC Television Centre. Gratz has now worked with the newly opened Lil’ Nashville, a themed Nashville-style country bar in Chiswick created by country music obsessives (there’s a lot of live music), on a new menu of smoked meats to sit alongside the restaurant’s other generically American menu items like burgers, nachos, wings and mac and cheese. Gratz isn’t actually there cooking, but has created the recipes, trained the staff, including head chef Allison Vines-Rushing, a Louisiana native, and even installed the kitchen himself. The Kansas City-style barbecue at Prairie Fire was excellent, but it’s an open question whether that can translate to a country music bar in Chiswick without Gratz himself behind the pit.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Jonathan Nunn.

We are quickly running out of Issue 1 of our magazine – if you would like to secure a copy then you can order through our website here or order from our stockists across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world here.

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Recession Rotisserie

Jonathan Nunn reviews Norbert’s and Spring Street Pizza.

If you want some hard evidence to prove the ailing state of the London restaurant industry, you can do no better than count the number of chefs who have professed a sudden interest in serving rotisserie chicken. As concerning as the glut of big name closures so far this year – Lyle’s (RIP), Hill & Szrok (RIP), Norman’s – are new rotisserie restaurant openings like The Knave of Clubs, Flock, and Toum, or the rotissification of Café Francois, Story Cellar and Bob Bob Ricard, all of which have produced an unexpected excess of rotisserie chicken in central London.

My concern can be summed up thus:

Rotisserie chicken restaurants don’t suddenly appear because chefs love to make rotisserie chicken. Almost no chef actively sets out to cook rotisserie chicken – which is less about cooking than it is marinating and waiting around. Instead, places that sell rotisserie are built to be resilient in the face of dire economic circumstances. We’ve seen this before, when the 2008 financial crisis led to the boom in street food, burgers and assorted Americana, which still define the casual food scene in London. We saw it in 2020, when restaurants pivoted to modes of survival familiar to any immigrant-run restaurant in the outer boroughs of London (chicken, sandwiches, pizza), with varying degrees of success. The problem then was translating the mentality that you need to be a great chef to the production of one simple item. Restaurant cooking thrives on a degree of ego – call it ‘cheffiness’ – that is always in pursuit of the new and seeks to distinguish itself from anything else. Cooking a single item requires the destruction of that ego in service of the format; a knowledge that there is nothing more important than the functional user experience of eating a sandwich, a slice of pizza, a piece of chicken. Some chefs understood this; others tried to fit whole meals between two slices of bread.

Five years on into this brave new world of the ‘Recession Restaurant’ comes Norbert’s, a new rotisserie chicken shop in East Dulwich. I was particularly excited about the opening of Norbert’s when I first heard it was in the making. For one, it’s near my house, and two, East Dulwich is just bougie enough to make it acceptable for me to say there is not much else worth eating there (even if I’m devastated that Norbert’s took the place of the old-school Italian restaurant Il Mirto – another casualty of 2025). It’s also an unexpectedly big-name collaboration between John Ogier, the veteran restaurateur who opened Lyle’s with James Lowe in 2014, and Jack Coghlan, who also worked at Lyle’s and was most recently Seb Myer’s top lieutenant at Planque, one of London’s most progressive fine-dining restaurants. As far as new openings go, this is the proverbial ‘killing ants with a sledgehammer’; there is enough talent between the two men to open an ambitious restaurant in any neighbourhood in London. Instead, they have dedicated themselves to a cramped 15-seater on a suburban side street serving rotating poultry.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Hester van Hensbergen on a new generation of New York City inspired restaurants in London.

Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com

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The cartoonish green waft of Manhattan garbage must have caught a drift on a strong westerly wind because, in London’s restaurants, it’s beginning to smell a lot like a New York summer. There are West Village burgers selling out nightly in Notting Hill, USDA-approved rib-eyes hitting the tables in Mayfair, and soon enough sliders will be joining the finger sandwiches at Claridge’s for the season. Aspiring restaurant magnates are taking their cues from Keith McNally, the legendary (British) proprietor of Odeon and Balthazar, who – though he says he regrets almost everything – has been hugely influential in shaping his adopted American city’s restaurant culture. In other words, NYC dining is everywhere right now. And nowhere is warbling New York, New York at the top of its lungs quite like the place I chose for dinner – down an alley that looks like a sitcom set, under an electric blue awning, up a narrow flight of stairs and through the heavy curtains of the newest New York brasserie: Shoreditch’s One Club Row.

Before getting to that, though, we need to define New York cuisine. Attempting to identify a unitary, exportable culture for such a huge city shaped by centuries of migration might seem counterintuitive, just as it would be for London. But actually, London does have a distinct culinary scene that it projects to the world: quality British ingredients, simply seasoned and cooked, often with a Tamworth or Middlewhite pig involved along the way, and served in spartan white dining rooms. The same is true, but differently so, for New York. There, the mood is grand, European, mid-century.

It’s “like fake French”, says J Lee, the Contributing Food Editor at Interview. NYC cuisine isn’t seasonally focused in the way London cooking is. “It’s asparagus all year long,” says Becca Forman, a long-time NYC server. The city’s menu follows a fixed formula: “There are oysters, tartar, crudo, a burger, martinis. Big table salad.” Maybe there’s crab, probably Crab Louie. Meat course, it’s duck, steak, roast chicken. “Flambé the dessert.” It’s Balthazar and it’s Odeon. We’re talking counterfeited French decadence, sometimes a bit Italian, but always in big, loose American strokes.

Bringing that vision of Big Apple brasserie dining to London is One Club Row, the recently opened collaboration between chef Patrick Powell, Camberwell Arms co-owner James Dye and NoMad NYC alumni Benjy Leibowitz, which sits above their Shoreditch pub, The Knave of Clubs at the flash end of Bethnal Green Road. Why, one might ask, would you bother to open a New York-style brasserie over a Parisian one? Because it is 2025, and to add one more name to the teetering pile of Camille, Constance, Francois, Henri, Josephine and Josette would be tempting fate on a bust. So instead, the savvily business-minded are adapting and iterating on the Francophile moment. That’s why Dove, Jackson Boxer’s reimagining of the site of his daintier seafood restaurant Orasay, isn’t a little sibling to Henri (the Parisian bistro he opened at Experimental Group’s Henrietta Hotel in Covent Garden last year) and why its signal dish is based on a burger he ate on a trip to Manhattan 20 years ago.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s essay on Irish cuisine finding a new identity across London is by the writer Karl McDonald.

Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com.

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If, in your yearning pursuit of something real in a world of exaggeration, profit and error, you seek authenticity, why not consider Irishness? We (I’m Irish, I should tell you straight away) have been hard at work providing a counterpoint to Englishness for a rollercoaster 850 years. To your rationality, we have offered romance. To your sense of order, we have offered heartswell rebellion in forms ranging from a pitched early-modern army to the post-punk revival. We’re still here, we’re still different and we’re interested, at last, in seeing if you would like to try our humble cuisine.

On the margins, the idea of Irishness as an authentic characteristic of food is already visible in London, a city whose limitless choices could see you eat gold-flaked steak for dinner one night, then arepas, pie and mash or chaat (all for a hundredth of the price) the next.

Most visibly, the Guinness marketing team has made sure many people know the difference between a good and a bad pint. But the roots run deeper than that. On Broadway Market and New Cross Road, pubs sell Murphy’s - a Cork stout little seen even in Dublin - presumably for those wishing to display their discernment. At the chic Café Deco in Bloomsbury and at Violet Cakes in Hackney – which provided Meghan Markle’s wedding cake – Barry’s Tea is on the menu.

Neither stout nor tea are Irish inventions and, though I will be headlocked for saying it, both are products with English equivalents that have equal or better heritage. But Guinness and Barry’s can rely on a power that Tetley’s (tea or ale) cannot: like the Irish in general, they’ve been around forever, but they’re still different.

Something is happening here. Led by bold multinational brands (I should mention the butter here too) and brave expatriate chefs, Irish cuisine is beginning to establish itself at last, helping to slough off some of the cultural cringe at spending the eating-out budget on an Irish meal instead of, for example, Italian or Korean or tapas. We have found, or are finding, a cuisine.

What is Irish food?

Resistant to ingredient variety and without any particularly unique flavours, Irish cuisine is hard to pin down in its ideal form. Those who look into the subject (such as Margaret Hickey, who wrote 2018’s Ireland’s Green Larder) crash quickly into a widespread squeamishness about things the French would consider the best locally available ingredients. This means that, despite being a large island in the north Atlantic, seafood is often regarded with suspicion in Ireland; in its damp and verdant landscape, mushrooms other than button are largely ignored; despite its proliferation of cattle and sheep, offal is mostly eschewed.

Tomás Ó Criomhthain, a monolingual Irish-speaking writer born in the 1850s on the now-uninhabited Great Blasket, gives a good sense of the traditional attitude, even among those barely eking out subsistence. In his book The Islandman (1937), much of the diaristic narrative is taken up with fishing and harvesting from the sea, but the produce is eaten only when it can’t be helped. He and his subjects cut seaweed and gather mussels for manure; they catch mackerel and lobsters for market. Nevertheless, at home they are ‘served with a three-cornered lump of bread and a saucepan of milk’ after a day’s work. ‘We didn’t care for fish,’ Ó Criomhthain says. ‘We were sick of it.’

Irish restaurants usually ignore the common reticence around the likes of seafood and offal to some degree, depending on what they’re trying to do. The Allens at Ballymaloe, probably the centre point of Irish ‘country cooking’ across several generations, serve sole and monkfish. Bastible, at the avant-garde end in Dublin, serves ‘mushroom custard’. The Pig’s Ear, an experimenter with tradition, offers ‘tongue ’n’ cheek kidney pudding’.

In his Phaidon Irish Cookbook, Galway chef JP McMahon produces a semi-credible idea of Irish cuisine that includes everything from cottage classics like bacon and cabbage to ambitious projections of an imaginary cuisine, like deep-fried rabbit with wild garlic mayonnaise or charred octopus with seaweed glaze. The ingredients might be authentic, but a focus group in Westmeath would take a while to guess they were Irish, I’d suggest.

Beyond a few elements – local cheeses, named-farmer beef, named-cove oysters, soda bread – the centre does not really hold in these efforts. While the Greeks don’t need to explicitly state that octopus is part of their heritage, the delineation of Irish cuisine is sometimes hard to see. But ‘Modern Irish’ cuisine is somewhere to be found – just like a constellation in a sea of scattered stars, it’s not always easy to tell where. Taking it off the island of Ireland and placing it against the foods of the world might be helping to clarify things and shape a new identity.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Jonathan Nunn.

Issue 1 of our magazine is now back in stock and you can order through our website here. If you would like to stock it at your shop or restaurant, please order via our distributor Antenne Books by emailing maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com

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If, like me, you are obsessed with the finer points of barbecued meat, then you and your companions may have recently discussed the declining quality of London suya. Not that there was ever a golden age. British-Nigerians have been discussing the sorry state of our suya for decades and comparing the standard with Lagos in a way that mirrors how some people talk about the almost-mystical qualities of fish and chips north of Sheffield (‘It’s the sea air!’ ‘It just tastes better’). Suya – thinly-cut meat, barbecued once to doneness, blasted again to crisp it and then dusted in a spicy, aromatic powder called yaji – has the same reviving qualities on the tongue that a 12-volt battery and jumper cables do to a broken-down car. More than any other Nigerian food, suya has cross-over appeal, travelling from the Hausa north to the south, from Lagos to other Nigerian cities, which now includes London. But something can get lost. Restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa once detailed a newspaper-wrapped package of Lagosian suya being smuggled into the country by a relative, the message being that Nigerian suya, even after two airport checks, a trip on the Piccadilly Line and reheated in the microwave, was better than whatever the jokers in London were serving up.

Still, there were pockets of hope: in the 1990s, there was the Kanu-frequented Obalende Suya in Peckham, one of the only suya shops in the world which had a Wikipedia page, and, later on, Aliyu Dantsoho’s Alhaji Suya, the first Hausa-owned suya spot in London. Then, just before the pandemic, a new restaurant called Ikoyi put Iberico suya on one of its early menus, right in the heart of St James’s. When the Queen’s son Tom Parker-Bowles reviewed Tiwa n Tiwa in Peckham, it looked as though we might be in for a new era of serious barbecue, suddenly supported by the highest echelons of Clubland. But today, Obalende is closed, its Wikipedia page deleted. Alhaji Suya burnt down and reopened without a live fire grill; its suya does the job but is a pale imitation of its original self. Parker-Bowles went to Nigeria and made a suya potato cottage pie. The demure sweetbread suya on two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi’s new £350 tasting menu is delicious, but would answer a suya craving as adequately as thinly-sliced wagyu steak would satisfy a drunk man in search of a doner kebab. London is more obsessed with suya than ever, but lately I’ve been hard-pressed to tell anyone where to actually go. It’s a shame because there’s a whole continent of difference between good and great suya: good suya can form habits, but great suya changes behaviour permanently.

Wanting to definitively answer the question of where does great suya in London in 2025, I decided to do my own research; one strand took me on a c2c train as far as estuary Essex (and therefore is functionally useless to this review) while another led me ten minutes from my home to the new location of Suuyar in Peckham. If you know the name Suuyar, then you will have almost certainly visited its street food stall on the corner of Choumert Road and Rye Lane, where Kolawole Ajayi – a showman whose tagline ‘the most popular Nigerian-born, male chef you can watch on YouTube’ begs more questions than it can answer – hands out tasters and live vlogs serving customers on his wildly successful TikTok account. The sudden appearance of a bricks-and-mortar Suuyar at the tip of Peckham Rye has been a source of local intrigue for months: could a new kitchen allow Suuyar to claim the undisputed belt?

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Jonathan Nunn.

Although Issue 1 of our magazine is temporarily out of stock until next week, we are still selling prints from the issue by illustrator Sing Yun Lee and photographer Michaël Protin, which you can find here.

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As I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted by debilitating digestive issues and the stress of trying to publish a print magazine, there is something afoot at the bottom of Caledonian Road right now. Before the pandemic, my favourite place to eat around there was Q’s Kitchen, a chicken shop that did a semi-secret trade in Punjabi dishes, allowing you the dignity of assembling your own fried chicken paratha wrap and dipping it in spiced gravy. Q’s has since gone, but the shoulder of the road where it barges its way into King’s Cross is now teeming with restaurants: there’s the alt-Roti King, Hawker’s Kitchen, a special menu of Dongbei dishes at Xin Kai, a new location for hip South Indian restaurant Tamila and even a second Dr. Noodle, the northern-Chinese New Cross noodle specialist that led our first issue of Six of One. Oh, and the most famous restaurant in the world, The Yellow Bittern.

In truth, my break from writing has had as much to do with restaurant fatigue as it does my terrible gut health. It may just be a standard seven-year itch for restaurant writers, but there came a point where I realised that if the restaurants I like most tend towards serving home cooking, then I should cut out the middleman.

I’d been happy pottering away at the stove until my friend Jess sent me the menu from a new Hong Kong restaurant and tea room serving a highly peculiar set of home-style dishes, many of which I’ve never seen in London before. Of course, it turns out it’s in the basement of an art gallery on Caledonian Road. The space is remarkable, and has had the same effect on every person I’ve taken there: an intake of breath and a slight gasp. One minute you’re in what feels like a hospital waiting room and the next you’re in a languid underground tea room of teal and pastel pink, with impasto walls, marble tables, carved wood furnishings and conspiratorial alcoves. The restaurant has been open for a month, but barely looks ready at all; critics used to joke that Fay Maschler only went to restaurants new enough that you could still smell the plaster, but on my first visit, the tables were still dusted in it.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by the writer Ciaran Thapar, who interrogates the premise — that of an undivided Punjab — of one of the biggest restaurants to open in London in the last twelve months, Ambassadors Clubhouse on Heddon Street.

There are a few tickets left for our panel this year’s British Library Food Season which will ask the question: ‘What is the point of a cookbook?, featuring Ozoz Sokoh, Rukmini Iyer, Sophie Wyburd, and Ruby Tandoh. The event will take place at the British Library next week, on 28 April at 7pm. Tickets are £10 and you can buy the last remaining ones here.

British Library Food Season

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In April 2023, the day before catching a flight to Pakistan with my wife Yasmin, I fielded two phone calls. One was from my thaiya – my dad’s eldest brother – who, citing our Indian heritage and the political instability surrounding Imran Khan’s recent arrest, tried to persuade me not to go. The other was from Yasmin’s mum, who was excited for our visit to Pakistan, where her parents had relocated (across the border, from their ancestral city of Jalandhar) at partition, before migrating to London in the late 1950s. But she was also unsure of how her relatives might react to me being from a Hindu family, so asked me not to mention it.

After touching down at Lahore airport, we queued up to exit. The security officer flicking through my passport landed on the Indian visa from two months prior. He shone a small torch into my jetlagged eyes. Time – seventy-six years, to be exact – stood still. I felt a bead of sweat drip from my armpit – past the Hindi tattoo of cheesy old Bollywood lyrics which are scribed on my ribcage in memory of my late grandfather’s song-filled battle with dementia: ‘phir bhi dil hai Hindustani’ / ‘but my heart is Hindustani’. Then he snapped the passport shut, handed it back and smiled, ushering me through.

We stayed with Yasmin’s cousin Noor and his wife Aleena. It turned out that Yasmin’s strict vegetarianism was more baffling to her family than me being half-Indian. On the contrary, my East Punjabi-ness became a badge of honour. When Noor told the elderly samose wala beside the Wazir Khan Mosque that my father was from Ludhiana, he let out a hoarse shriek of delight, throwing an extra handful of snacks into our folded newspaper. ‘Welcome home,’ Noor translated, chuckling.

Through such interactions, I got a glimpse into the fantasy of an undivided Punjab – what it was like before 1947, and what it could be like now, if things had gone differently. With my mouth full of food – nihari spooned from a cauldron with a squeeze of lime; boti kebabs with fluffy naans and imli; street-side chicken biryani; drive-thru gol gappe and falooda; several outstanding karahis – I forgot about the phone calls. I forgot about the Radcliffe Line separating me from the Amritsari fried fish, aloo paronthe and saag with makki ki roti that I’d only recently been devouring a few kilometres to the east. Momentarily, I forgot about the notion – reinforced through years of participating in tense banter with other brown boys in the playground, watching cricket games in desi pubs and mistakenly defining my identity as distinct from my wife – that Charda Punjab and Lehnda Punjab were separated at all.

A year later, I felt my eyebrows rise with equal parts skepticism and excitement when I was invited to the launch of Ambassadors Clubhouse, the restaurant from JKS which opened last August on Mayfair’s Heddon Street and which boldly claims to serve the food, drink, music and hospitality of an undivided Punjab. Few have dominated London’s contemporary South Asian fine dining scene more than siblings Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina Sethi, whose portfolio includes singular institutions Gymkhana, BiBi, Trishna and Brigadiers, plus the chain favourite Hoppers. If the plan was to eventually get me to write about their latest venture, given my writing on British Punjabi culture and my next book – a memoir about uncovering the legacy of Punjab’s partition in London – then I guess it worked.

On the evening of Friday 16 August, within forty-eight hours of partition’s seventy-seventh anniversary, Yasmin and I were wedged between two other couples in the dazzling main room. The music was a playlist of trappy bhangra, 2000s Punjabi garage and desi rap, an extension of the club space in the basement (whose decks have been occupied by the likes of Panjabi MC, Yung Singh and Nitin Sawhney for a regular event series called AMBASSY, curated by fashion designer Sukhchain Singh Sohal). I love this power move, but it was so loud we couldn’t hear each other talk. As the waiter warmly explained the menu’s cross-border origins – all complimentary, in exchange for feedback – I wondered how other diners were making sense of the restaurant’s premise. Did they care about what ‘food from an undivided Punjab’ meant? Any more than Tim Hayward of the FT cared when he spent the first half of his review attacking the booking system rather than acknowledging anything about the regional specificity of the food being served to him? Any more than Giles Coren cared, closing the opening paragraph of his review in The Times with the line, ‘These days, if Esther and I fancy a curry, we get a Dishoom delivered and eat it in the kitchen with a middling shiraz like everyone else’? Any more than Eating With Tod – the man whose viral videos hum with the smug triumph of an East India Company captain writing home about the pillaging of another coastal settlement; the man who calls every South Asian restaurant he visits the ‘most authentic’ – cared?

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review by Simran Hans is about the second branch of Bar Italia at Outernet, the diverging fates of I Camisa and Lina Stores, and what this all says about the survival of Italian Soho. If you enjoyed this edition, please also listen to Lucy Dearlove’s podcast on the Lost Food of Soho here.

A reminder there is only one more week to pre-order Issue 1 of Vittles. From 24 April, we still stop pre-orders and revert to the RRP of £20. Copies have been selling fast so we would highly recommend ordering one if you wish to guarantee a copy.

Finally, we have assembled a panel at this year’s British Library Food Season dedicated to the question ‘What is the point of a cookbook?, featuring Ozoz Sokoh, Rukmini Iyer, Sophie Wyburd, and Ruby Tandoh. The event will take place at the British Library on 28 April at 7pm. Tickets are £10 and you can buy them here.

Issue 1

British Library Food Season

If you’ve ever been to Bar Italia, your memories of it might have a cinematic, sepia tinge. I remember one particular Saturday night during the summer of 2017. It was 11pm and the sky was pouring out rain. The film had just finished and all the pubs were closing; a group of us made a dash for it. We wove through Chinatown and into Soho, beckoned by the neon glow of a familiar red and green clock. I remember cramming into Bar Italia’s long, narrow room and dripping over its tiled terrazzo floors. Everyone was drinking Peroni. I had mine with a cannolo.

Established on Frith Street by the Polledri family in 1949, Bar Italia has something close to mythical London status. It opens early, closes late and was immortalised in a song by Pulp. It is rich with Old Soho history and rooted in time. The engineer John Logie Baird hosted the world’s first demonstration of television at its address in 1926 (his legacy is honoured by a blue plaque, and by the Polledris with a large, flatscreen TV). In 2006, when Italy won the World Cup, dried pasta rained down on the 5,000 revellers who had gathered outside to celebrate. Inside, there are strings of Italian flag bunting and boxing gloves that once belonged to Rocky Marciano hanging proudly above the bar. The classic Gaggia coffee machine was recently replaced with a newer, shinier model, but otherwise, Bar Italia is unchanged.

Up until now, Bar Italia has been one of the few Italian institutions in Soho which has managed to resist selling out or closing up. The same cannot be said for its neighbour Lina Stores, which opened as a deli on Brewer Street in 1944 and in 2018 expanded into a fresh pasta chain restaurant backed by ‘hospitality incubator’ White Rabbit Projects. Yesterday, Lina Stores opened its tenth location, in Manchester. Meanwhile, its longstanding Little Italy competitor, the deli I Camisa & Son, announced it was closing its doors last summer after more than 60 years of trading. If this is the forecast, the climate looks bleak. How will Bar Italia survive? 

In a recent podcast interview, the place’s industrious owner Antonio Polledri teased what sounded like a plan. ‘It will be all hands on deck to get it up and running,’ he explained of his decision to open a second, smaller café. When I learned where it was, I giggled. A five-minute walk north of Old Soho, next to Tottenham Court Road station, is Outernet, an ‘entertainment district’ and corporate advertising space that I’d best describe as future dystopian. From a distance, it looks like a hulking, sci-fi cube, panelled with Times Square-style digital billboards. This ‘immersive brand experience’ houses an art gallery with floor-to-ceiling wraparound screens and two music venues in its bowels. It’s a clinical £1 billion spectacle, but dodge past the soulless brand activations and tourists catching augmented reality butterflies on their phones and you’ll find the second Bar Italia, nestled among blaring screens. 

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Mohammed Ali Salha.

Before we get to today’s review, a reminder that you can still pre-order issue 1 of Vittles magazine through our website here if you’re in the UK or US — it is currently discounted to £18 (or £16 if you are a paid subscriber). We’ve been blown away by the response since we announced – thank you so much to all of you who have ordered so far! In that time, the preorders from the UK alone have exceeded what we expected our entire print run would be, so we’ve had to re-adjust our expectations. If you wish to order we would highly recommend doing so before preorders close on April 24th.

We also now have distribution worldwide via Antenne Books, which means that the magazine will be available upon release via bookshops. For trade orders, both in the UK and abroad, please email maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com (or harass your local bookshop into ordering some copies!)

Issue 1

Every Sunday felt the same. At least that’s what I remember about going to Whiteleys Shopping Centre in Queensway at the end of every week. Like a lot of not-quite-first-generation families, Sunday was the one day when our parents took a break from the hustle and hassle of looking after three kids. During the late ’90s, we’d go to the same McDonald’s in Whiteleys, where my parents would meet their friends and order us a McChicken Sandwich meal before setting us loose to terrorise the shopkeepers one floor at a time.

Once the novelty of our escapades had worn off, we were hastily shepherded up Queensway towards Hyde Park. On the way, I lusted over the lacquered and tanned roast meats in the windows of the Chinese restaurants. My dad would tut ‘ack, haram’ under his Marlboro-scented breath. But that never put me off, it just delayed the inevitable. As I got older and returned to the area, I was finally able to visit Four Seasons for roast duck before hotstepping to Gold Mine for its all-day dim sum. It was a chance to experience the Queensway I got to know as a child, before the faces and shopfronts shifted and changed.

We now live in a new era and one of the cultural networks keeping the gastronomic history of the area alive is the Malaysian diaspora, which has made Queensway its own. Stretching from Putera Puteri on one end all the way up to Normah’s in Queensway Market on the other, you would be correct in thinking this locale is becoming a little KL in its own right. Still, my current favourite place to eat – for its obsessiveness and clarity of expression when it comes to classic Malaysian street foods – is also located on the uneven floors of Queensway Market, past the computer fixers and birdcages.

It’s hard to call Cham Kampung Boy a restaurant. It’s more of a corner stall with scattered seating that often gets moved out of the way during Friday prayers. But the food that the titular Cham produces (mostly off-site, at home) stands out. For what it’s worth, Cham is indeed a Kampung Boy. Like the popular book and cartoon, he too hails from Malaysia’s northwestern Perak state. Cham is from the city Ipoh, but his is a journey that took in stints working for large American food companies across Singapore and Thailand before he landed in London. It’s a blessing that he did. Across four visits, I ate through his short menu and revelled in the attention to detail that lifted some of his star dishes from good to great.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Hester van Hensbergen.

Before we get to today’s review, a reminder that you can still pre-order issue 1 of Vittles magazine through our website here if you’re in the UK or US — it is currently discounted to £18 (or £16 if you are a paid subscriber).

We are also excited to announce that we now have distribution worldwide via Antenne Books, which means that the magazine will be available upon release via bookshops. For trade orders, both in the UK and abroad, please email maxine@antennebooks.com and mia@antennebooks.com (or harass your local bookshop into ordering some copies!)

Issue 1

PSA: We have reached peak Pasta Boyfriend. The Pasta Boyfriend is Brooklyn Beckham gouging the creamy heart out of an entire parmesan wheel and filling it with spaghetti for his lactose-intolerant fiancée. The Pasta Boyfriend is the legion of men on Hinge who believe their ability to make fresh pasta is the essence of their sexual appeal. The Pasta Boyfriend is convinced he is partly Italian (occasionally he is Italian). And the Pasta Boyfriend wants his spaghetti at a little place he’s just discovered, which is called Regency Café. Somewhere nearby, perhaps even terrifyingly close, is your Pasta Boyfriend, and he’s telling you in dulcet tones that saving the last of the pasta water is the secret to a silky sauce, while he gently cracks an egg into a well of flour and gazes into the rising white dust.

The Pasta Boyfriend’s Pasta Boyfriend, though, is chef Jordon Ezra King. Formerly a star of recipe platform Mob Kitchen, the now fully certified Independent Mobster and ‘45^th Generation Roman’ is cooking shapes the other Pasta Boyfriends have never even heard of and posing with shiny loafers and trainers at E. Pellicci, London’s most storied East End Italian café. He knows the virtues of dry pasta as well as fresh, and he knows how to hold a phone to his head and look busy with it. He’s also an inquisitive, funny and sometimes lyrical food writer. But the question is, how well can the Mobster cook?

To find out, I went to the opening night of King’s chef residency) at The Standard Hotel’s restaurant Isla, near King’s Cross. It’s the former site of Camden council’s offices and a majestic feat of brutalist (formerly) public architecture. Now, the downstairs restaurant, which is next to the Seventies-style reading lounge stocked with books from the closed council library, runs regular residencies with chef-influencers. King’s stint is sponsored by Campari and follows on from Ixta Belfrage’s well-publicised three-month residency last year; likely no coincidence since they share the same talent agent in Juiced World’s Nas Sherifi.

Our table at Jordon King x Isla was ready soon after we arrived. It wasn’t the one we’d booked on the terrace, since that was now occupied by a private party, but another one next to the roaring fireplace inside. Looking at the surrounding empty tables, and then at each other, we made a silent agreement to commit to the night’s fever dream, peeled away all but the last layer of clothing and sat down. Our waiter explained that King was a ‘culinary extraordinaire’ with Roman heritage. ‘I like these,’ said one of my friends about the four water glasses she set down on our table. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you put one in your bag,’ she replied. With a glint in her eye, she then suggested we could have the wine glasses too, before padding quietly off, not to be seen again until after dessert. Our food, unfortunately, arrived quickly.

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