Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants!

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

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

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

Till then, good morning!

1. Lamb chops at Deja Brew

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

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

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

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

319 Brockley Rd, SE4 2QZ

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

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

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

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

1. G.Neko, Colchester

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

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

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

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

94 Military Rd, Colchester CO1 2AN

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s Six of One by Denai Moore, Marie Mitchell, Andrew Corbin, Ivan K-T, and Gavin Cleaver, is all about London’s Caribbean specialists.

The ‘Caribbean food shop’ has long been a fixture of eating in London. It started in the 1950s and 1960s with the casual ‘cook shop’, run out of people’s houses (a tradition that continues at places like Maureen’s in Brixton), which soon morphed into Jamaican takeaways as we now know them, with menus that any Londoner should be able to recite like the shipping forecast: fried chicken, brown stew chicken, oxtail, curry goat, ackee and saltfish.

Today’s newsletter is about these takeaways, although not exclusively. Within London’s Jamaican scene itself there is huge diversity — from bakeries and fine dining, to barbecue and Ital specialists — while the city is also blessed with a large number of Trini and Guyanese roti shops, along with takeaways like Cool’s Kitchen in West Norwood where St. Lucian dishes are hidden on the menu. This Six of One happens to be Jamaica-heavy, but we would love to feature more writing on London’s wealth of Caribbean specialists this year: if you know these cuisines intimately and would like to contribute to Vittles then please email us at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com. No prior writing experience is necessary.

If you’re new to Six of One then you can look through the archives, and find a map with more than 400 restaurants featured here. Finally, a reminder that you can still buy Issue 2 of our print magazine here:

Buy Issue 2

1. All Nations Vegan House

As a part-time city girl, All Nations Vegan House isn’t quite a quick stop on the bus for me, but whenever I happen to be in Stoke Newington, it’s the first place I go. While the vegan food scene from a Western lens has been whitewashed and repackaged as a new phenomenon, when I think of vegan food, I immediately think of Ital. The word derives from the English word ‘vital’ and was rooted in Rastafari culture long before the word ‘vegan’ was coined by The Vegan Society.

At All Nations, you are met with warm hospitality. It’s like coming home for dinner with the smell of hearty thyme-heavy stews drifting through the air. As I walked eagerly towards the restaurant, partly to rush through the rain but mostly with the hope that ackee would be on the menu in any form, I felt a rush of joy seeing it paired with butterbeans on the specials board.

All Nations has a rotating menu of its own classic dishes that change throughout the week. If you’re like me and are always craving pumpkin soup (the route to my heart) with lots of spinners (dumplings), be sure to come on a Saturday for the full menu. The best way to order is to get a mix of dishes of the day. On this occasion, I opted for a smoky lentil stew, pumpkin curry, ackee and butter beans with coconut red rice, which I ate at the pace of someone who didn’t want the meal to end.

As a chef, I’m often itching to eat something new, something that will surprise me. However, it’s the familiarity of both the food and the surroundings that makes All Nations Vegan House so special. There seems to be a great deal of pressure on restaurants right now to create algorithm-friendly hypebeast food that is far away from its traditional origins, but All Nations remains authentic to what Ital food should be. Denai Moore

41 Stoke Newington High St, N16 8DR

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s Six of One is a Myanmar special, with contributions from David Jay Paw, Ned Sedgwick, and an introduction from the writer and author of Mandalay: Burmese Food & Beyond, MiMi Aye.

I was seven years old when I saw my first nude. It was one of 12 in a dog-eared calendar that graced a door inside a cabin inside a ship docked at Tilbury in Essex. It belonged to a tattooed thinbaw-thar (sailor, literally ‘ship’s son’) who was being harangued and haggled at by my mother for ingredients brought over from Burma, aka Myanmar, to make our favourite dishes at home.

This was a rite for many of us for decades; the only other place you could find Burmese food was the now-closed Mandalay Golden Myanmar, a stalwart on Edgware Road run by the Ally family, or at the Thingyan pwè festival that we’d hold to celebrate Burmese New Year.

But in the last few years, dozens of online Myanmar grocers have appeared, making it easy to get that pickled tea hit, and every time I look at Facebook, somewhere else is serving Burmese cuisine. Most specialise in catering or delivery (the latter by post), but a handful are restaurants – new ones, ones that have pivoted or ones that have quietly offered it all along.

A caveat: when you’re mired in the food world like I am, you know too much about everyone, so when there’s a new opening, I check if the chef is a knob. This is a next-level concern for Burmese restaurants – the coup and consequent civil war in Myanmar have led to division in the diaspora, so I actively research if they support the military dictatorship (not as infrequent as you’d hope). I can safely say that this isn’t the case for the restaurants I’ve mentioned below. MiMi Aye

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1. Nway Oo Pokhara

A brisk walk from Kilburn station takes you to Cricklewood, home of Nway Oo Pokhara, which bills itself as a ‘Nepalese, Burmese and Indian’ restaurant. The decor speaks to all these influences, though the soundtrack leans heavily towards golden oldies from Myanmar.

A couple of Burmese dishes feature on the predominantly Nepalese menu, but it’s at the weekend that Ko Nawarat, owner and head chef, puts on a full Burmese spread. Perhaps I’m biased, but Ko Nawarat hails from my mother’s hometown of Mogok near the Shan State in Myanmar, so his rendition of steamed sticky rice parcel hin htote is an addictive, umami powerhouse; both variants of Mogok noodles are a must-try and his a-kyaw-zone (‘all the fried things’) is an abundance of crisp morsels. You may even be lucky enough to get pennywort fritters, a rare treat I hadn’t eaten in years.

Ko Nawarat started offering Burmese food in 2023 shortly after he opened what was then Pokhara (named for the second largest city in Nepal) ‘after recognising a growing interest in Burmese flavours and the lack of representation in the UK as a whole’, but he added the Nway Oo (‘Spring’) prefix in 2024 to signify a new beginning and a stronger connection to his Burmese roots and identity (‘I am Nepali by heritage and Burmese by birth. Myanmar is my motherland, and I carry her pain and hope wherever I go’).

Ko Nawarat’s next big plan is to run regular Chetty restaurant sessions where everyone gets a banana leaf that is constantly topped up with their choice of Indo-Burmese curries and sides, a manner of eating much beloved in Myanmar. His ultimate dream, though, is to allow his diners to graze throughout the day, Burmese teashop-style, starting with breakfast staples like hsi htamin (golden sticky rice), sugared naan, yellow peas and ee-kyar-kway (youtiao), all washed down with both black and milk Burmese tea – his take on the latter is fabulously ‘cho seint’, heavy with condensed milk. MiMi Aye

68 Cricklewood Broadway, NW2 3EP

Behind the paywall: Two more recommendations from MiMi, as well as ones from David Jay Paw, and Ned Sedgwick. Plus, a reminder: You can access the Six of One map which now features more than 400 recommendations on where to eat in London and beyond.

You can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to restaurant recommendations, reviews, Jonathan Nunn’s 99 Best Restaurants in London and more from the last five years.

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Just over a year ago, we started the first of our six-month mentorships intended for restaurant writers (or soon-to-be-restaurant-writers) in London. The standard of entries was so high that we decided to take on four writers, two more than we had intended! Since then, we have has the pleasure of working with Emefa Ansah, Riana Austin, Saira Banu and Vitória Croda on various pieces of writing, some which have been published on Vittles already (like Emefa’s Three’s A Crowd and Vitória’s essay on encountering the British meal deal), and some which we hope to publish later this year.

To mark a year of the mentorship, we have put together our first mentee written Six of One: six restaurants loved and recommended by all four writers. It covers Taiwanese food in Islington, Nigerian food on the Old Kent Road, two Korean restaurants that showcase the best parts of living in London, and two Caribbean fusions that could only occur in a city like ours. We hope you enjoy the writing, and that you visit some or all of these great places!

We will be announcing the next round of Vittles mentorship applications in the spring of this year. In the meantime, we can strongly recommend that new and unpublished writers apply for the Guild of Food Writers Newcomer award, which is open to people who aspire to be food writers, but have never had anything published on a paid basis. Entries close on Monday 19th January.

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1. Caribbean Delight

I order takeaway for more than the convenience of not doing the dishes; I do it for the chat that will inevitably spill into the containers. So when I walked past the sign that announces ‘Caribbean (and Chinese Crepe) Delight’ just across from Camden Road station, I was so ready. Double the cuisine, double the options, double the chats.

Run by two women brimming with conversation and ready to dole out (sage) wisdom and (coriander) crêpes and curry, Caribbean (and Chinese Crepe) Delight is really made up of two separate, delicious entrepreneurial efforts sharing a name and a pot of chopped herbs in the middle. Aunty#1 (Kim) slathered ghee on the plantains she was frying fresh for me as she told me cocoa butter was the secret to her soft skin. I told her I loved sweetness in my savoury curries, so she insisted I get the brown stew chicken and prescribed the right ratio of plantain to chicken to rice and peas, tailoring the meal to my palate.

Aunty#2 nudged me with the sizzle on her crêpe. She let me choose what colour batter went in which concentric circle – like reverse engineering a rainbow. She told me under no circumstances to choose lettuce as a filling, shattering my illusions of health, and directed me towards bean sprouts. She then violently shook the five-spice seasoning into the chicken mixture, which convinced me of the vestigiality of measuring cups as a Western invention. She topped it with sesame seeds and kalonji (nigella seeds) to stop my hairfall and congratulated me for not having the cilantro soap gene. I left the shop with food for the next two days and advice for the next decade. Saira Banu

124 Camden Rd, NW1 9EE

2. Kuma

As one of many trapped in London (by obsession, greed, family), I often spend weekends marching around, entertaining any visiting friends I’ve lost to the great attractions of the north (clean air, affordable homes). With my own interests at heart, I focus on showing them the best London has to offer in an effort to convince them to ditch their comfortable, roomy lives, and that always, always, means a trip to Kuma, a Korean and Japanese restaurant in Kennington. It’s a place you’d easily not notice. The outside is understated – unmemorable even – but inside is filled with a comforting low buzz. It’s a bit quirky, but not too weird; the bar is plastered with hundreds of stickers from Studio Ghibli films, while sweet figurines are plopped around, eyes blank, silent hosts judging tables plied with food for gluttonous guests.

Kuma lies in the Korean belt of south London, an area filled with cosy restaurants like Jihwaja, Daebak and Taeyang Pocha, but the food there stands out – it’s a place where every dish that comes out is saltier and crispier than the last. (A crescendo is only reached once the waiter stops bringing dishes to the table.) At Kuma, surrounded by good friends, I eat freely, because the food deserves to be eaten without holding back. Plates of bulgogi arrive sizzling, heat roaring from the cast-iron plate, always tempting and habitually resulting in a burn. Buoyant rice cakes swim around seaweed noodle rolls in the glossy red sauce of the gimmari ttokboki. Chopsticks move quickly as you attempt to grab pieces of salty stir-fried izakaya cabbage.

So far, I’m yet to convince a friend to move (though many have wobbled and demanded to visit again on their next trip). Thankfully, it’s walking distance from Jihwaja karaoke, where I sing away my woes and get my friends to make drunken promises instead. Emefa Ansah

305 Kennington Rd, SE11 4QE

3. Dodam Korea

Good council-estate parades are my kind of gravy. The one by my aunt’s near Old Street is justly famous: it’s got olive and lavender trees, a caff, a flat-roof boozer and a fish and chip restaurant that happens to be Fish Central, all of which are truly loved by locals.

Most importantly for me, it’s home to Dodam Korea, a sleepy gem with an intriguing menu and an excellent K-pop soundtrack. When I’m after a full Seoul-by-City Road experience, I use it as a chaser to a spa session at neighbouring Ironmonger Row Baths (jjimjilbang culture is huge in Korea). After the heat of the sauna, I’ll keep it light with barley tea and either seaweed and oat porridge or its £10 lunch special of marinated tofu, black rice and banchan (side dishes).

In the evenings it’s fun to go as a group and put the menu to work. Last time we had a vegetarian-adapted hotpot with tteokbokki, ramyeon, boiled egg, dumplings and gimmari. Generous, bubbling and addictingly spicy-sweet, it’s even better if you drink soju with it. Meat-eating friends can try ugeoji-tang (hangover soup) of beef and preserved cabbage, or four different versions of volcano fried rice.

What I appreciate most is you can come as you are: solo, rowdy or post-spa with dripping wet hair. The music is loud, the staff are chill and it’s never that overcrowded; just like faithful barflies, this is a place for regulars who wouldn’t change a thing. Riana Austin

131-133 Central St, EC1V 8AP

4. Salpiké

Last time I visited Salpiké in Brixton Village, I was expecting to encounter a different restaurant from the one I initially found. In the two months since I first ate there, it had gone viral on TikTok after a marketing professional made a pro bono campaign for William, its owner. Maybe this time, I thought, he wouldn’t come to my table and offer me his homemade scotch bonnet pepper sauce. Perhaps his jerk chicken with Colombian ‘yellow sauce’ wouldn’t be quite the same. Maybe he wouldn’t even be there at all, yelling, amid empty tables, ‘Come here, our food is the best in Brixton Village!’

Salpiké has indeed changed a bit since that initial visit. This time I couldn’t see William, and I was lucky to find a spot for my group. I kept looking for him while we browsed the menu, which spans lomo saltado, oxtail stew, and other Latin and Caribbean dishes I can find elsewhere in Brixton Village, yet never all in the same restaurant. This eclecticism is partially explained by William’s hometown of Cali in southwest Colombia, known for its salsa culture and intense fusion of flavours from its Black heritage and the country’s neighbours on the Pacific coast.

As soon as our food arrived, however, William appeared with his homemade sauce: ‘I know you like pepper,’ he said to me, remembering my previous lunch. This time, it perfectly fit the smoky comfort of the lentil and chorizo stew, a personal favourite from his tapas selection. Soon, a drum band playing maracatu passed by the front door, and William quickly stood up to check their music while keeping an eye on his customers. I quickly realised that, despite its success, Salpiké’s spontaneity has stayed the same. As the streets of Brixton Village filled with drumming sounds, we finished our lunch and joined William to dance. Vitória Croda

6 Granville Arcade, SW9 8PR

Behind the paywall: more recommendations from our mentees! Plus the updated Six of One Map with 414 recommendations on where to eat in London and beyond

You can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to restaurant recommendations from the last five years, including the Six of One map.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Issue 2 of our print magazine is officially out this week – if you’ve received it, please let us know what you’ve been enjoying!

You can buy Issue 2 - titled ‘Bad Food’ - on our website here, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers.

The magazine will also start to hit shops in the next few days too – you can find a full list of stockists around the world here. If you are a shop or restaurant and wish to stock Issue 2, then please get in touch with us, or our distributor Antenne Books at maxine@antennebooks.com or mia@antennebooks.com.

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The Best Shawarma in London

The origins of this newsletter started with an observation that the shaved meat scene in London is, perhaps, not as good as it could be. Identikit shawarma. Bought-in döner. Who was putting effort into the construction of a great meat wrap?

This led to two things: a shawarma crawl around West London, which is described later on in this newsletter, and a trip to Hassos Döner on Green Lanes, which is not technically recommended in this edition, but we would suggest going anyway, even if just to calibrate it against its competitor over the road, Antepliler Döner. We had whittled this down to three solid recommendations we can stand by, but since Feroz Gajia recommends at least four (4) places to get shawarma or döner, this is now a Six of One.

But before we get to Feroz, here’s Ibrahim Salha and Mohammed Ali Salha on two of their favourites.

Pasha Shawarma

Over the last few weeks, I’ve woken up regularly in the midst of a dream about going on Subway Takes, telling Kareem my vile food opinions and getting cancelled. But seeing as that’s not realistically in my future, I’m writing in Vittles to get cancelled instead. So, without hesitating too much, here it is: I don’t think that punters should rate restaurants using numbered scales. I think TripAdvisor should be shut down. I think Google Maps ratings should cease to exist. Because, ultimately, what good do any of them do?

This thought was spurred on when contemplating the untrustworthiness of ratings and how they’re cooked. I’ve been catfished too many times by clever marketing and unscrupulous, pushy owners. So it was with a lot of trepidation, and a little bit of hunger, that I hotstepped to Pasha Shawarma after a hot tip from Ibzo, my brother and co-author on this article. I was fascinated by how a relatively new spot (it opened in February) could have amassed more than 290 reviews and a rating of 4.8/5 on Google. And in Willesden, of all places. No shade to Willesden, of course.

But speaking of being catfished, there’s something we need to acknowledge. Pasha Shawarma is not a shawarma restaurant. It serves döner – yaprak döner to be precise. This is a style exemplified by its layered cuts of beef and lamb that create leaf-like slivers of contrasting textures and flavour. The restaurant itself has distinct Ottoman and Turkic styling, spicing and flair that distinguishes it from its neighbours, who have turned the high street into a thriving recreation of Damascus. There’s no tahini nor toum in sight. It’s a garlic sauce and ayran paradise. It feels like calling it shawarma was an attempt at ensuring diners’ associations with flaccid and grey elephant leg döner didn’t stick.

So here’s the rub: is this a spot that’s approaching perfection, or has the hype machine gone into overdrive? The truth is somewhere in the middle. On my first visit, I was willing to believe the hype: I ordered an iskender, the beef-lamb ‘shawarma’ on a Turkish roll, and a metal tankard of impossibly frothy ice-cold ayran. The shawarma was stacked like a New York deli sandwich, and it was also bold in its delivery with no sauce accompaniment. The strips of interwoven fat and flesh were blistered by the charcoal to create a textural mosaic that really didn’t need a sauce to elevate it. The charcoal didn’t really impart its flavour to the proceedings, and the seasoning was a little under, but I put that down to chef’s choice. Overall, the first few bites made it feel like the Google raters had it right. The iskender overcomes the seasoning issue by layering melted salty butter, a thick tomato sauce and refreshingly tart yoghurt on top of the shaved meat with overly large cubes of Turkish bread. While it eats well, some small tweaks to the ratios could render it a must-eat.

On my subsequent visits, there have been issues with inconsistent portioning and some heavy-handedness with the carving of the meat. But on my last visit, accompanied by my wife and kids, we dared to try the shawarma pizzas, which reminded us of trips to Pizza Hut in the ’90s but without the thick oil coating on the base. The pizza is a novelty, but one that you can probably ignore if you’re sober. The iskender was still good, and we also enjoyed some pretty good homemade lemonade.

Overall, this is a restaurant that’s not perfect, but a very welcome addition to the area and to the wider London scene. It offers an elevated döner experience and prides itself on its craft. I hope they find their flow, because when it’s good, it is really very good. Okay, that’s enough from me, I’m off to leave my four-star review on Google. Mohammed Ali Salha

61 Walm Lane, NW2 4QR

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Six of One: South South East London Special

If you look at the Six of One map, you may spot a big gap in the south eastern boroughs of Bromley and Bexley. This has vexed us for a while. We believe that there is good food in every pocket of this city if you look hard enough, even if feedback from Bromley residents suggests that this isn’t the case.

So in this special issue, we have decided to focus solely on the far south east reaches of London, with recommendations for Korean, Turkish, Vietnamese, Nigerian, Indian cuisine, plus a smattering of Great British cakes from a collection of writers who in one way or another call this region of London home.

1. Caffé Nuovo

The Southside Allstars- Southside Riddim ‘from the early Noughties was one of those secondary school grime tracks that became an anthem for anyone living in south at the time. Particularly Nyke’s famous verse where he basically reels off every relevant place in south London – Streatham Common, Roehampton, Tooting Bec Common / Lyrics like this blud ain’t too common. As one YouTube comment puts it, ‘1st bars are a geography lesson’.

One glaring omission, however, is Sidcup. It’s one of those ridiculous-sounding names that people from outside of the London/Kent borders use to illustrate how bumpkin you are. I was excited then, when a friend and fellow bumpkin texted me, ‘just had good kimchi and coffee… in Sidcup’. They were referring to an Italian/Korean medley called Caffé Nuovo out by the station.

Korean cuisine has become so ubiquitous in the UK that it’s not necessarily a surprise to see proper Korean food this deep into subtopia. However, Caffé Nuovo hasn’t been set up to cash in on this boom. It initially started life as an Italian deli in 1994, opened by Korean/Italian couple Margaret and Ivan, and they’ve been steadily changing the palettes of their customers ever since. The offerings have grown to reflect these changes with a combination of posh fry-ups and finely tuned meat sandwiches alongside comforting jjajangmyeon and pork jeyuk. It’s not unusual to see someone dip focaccia into their bowl of ramyun, and why not?

Margaret tells me that at the beginning locals were reluctant to try her cooking, but now their monthly Korean street food stall has gained so much popularity that the Mayor of Bexley has been showing up. At one such event, I saw elderly couples sharing gimbap and paninis and football lads picking up Korean fried chicken and iced lattes. As I leave, one couple tells me they tried to move out of Sidcup ten years ago but found themselves unable to detach themselves from the gravitational pull of Caffé Nuovo. I’m beginning to think Nyke might need to add a couple more bars to his verse. Gary Doherty

123 Station Rd, Sidcup DA15 7AJ

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Earlier this we announced Issue 2 of our print magazine on the theme of Bad Food. The issue features more than 150 pages of all-new features, interviews, essays and restaurant content, including a round table with critics Helen Rosner, Pete Wells, Chitra Ramaswamy and Jonathan Nunn on bad restaurants and bad reviews, and an interview with Andy Hayler on whether Michelin makes restaurants worse. You can read more about the contributors and content here. If you pre-order the magazine before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers. Pre-order now!

Pre-order Issue 2

Today, it’s time for another special edition of Six of One — in this issue you’ll find London restaurant recommendations for celebration meals from Ealing to Islington and Cockfosters to Tooting. With the writing from three Vittles first-time contributors, there’s koobideh (for kids), Hunanese pork liver and pak choi (for all ages), chapli kebabs (for your mates), chilli paneer (for your mum), sheftalia, jeyuk bokkeum, and much more for anyone you know who loves sharing food.

Bottoms up.

1. Persian Palace

In London, access to the best Iranian cooking is gatekept. Not in the traditional food media sense, but because so much of it happens inside people’s homes. Having been together with an Iranian for more than a decade now, I’ve come to understand that taarof (basically, the expectation of going beyond expectations) has a good deal to do with it, like it does in so many aspects of Iranian culture. Properly making koresh or dips like kashke bademjan is time-consuming. Tahdig needs to be made fresh for each serving. And when you factor saffron ratios into the equation, taarof can be measured by the gram.

But if stews and tahdig are best eaten in living rooms, there is one section of Iranian cooking that should only be eaten in restaurants – chelow kabab. And nowhere does it better than Persian Palace in Ealing. For those wanting a familial environment, you’ll get it there, too. You’ll find plenty of large tables here, as well as a welcoming reception. And taarof definitely comes into play – £17.50 will get you two footlong kababs (the minced lamb koobideh is my family’s go-to) on a bed of saffron rice. A gigantic portion somehow still manages to be incredibly delicate and light – to the point that even my four-year-old can knock back a whole portion. But it’s not just quantity: the koobideh, kneaded with grated onion, arrives perfectly grilled, retaining more than a note of the charcoal.

Make sure to ask for extra butter for your rice and order doogh to wash down the kebabs. Starting with sabzi o panir, a refreshing platter of whole herbs, walnuts, radishes and feta cheese, is essential. We don’t usually order the dips or stews, but then again, we have them at home. Romano Pizzichini

143-145 Uxbridge Rd, W13 9AU

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, we’re publishing another special edition of Six of One — an issue that hones on six places doing one thing extraordinarily well. Below, you’ll find London recommendations for Punjabi-style samosas, Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, kakigori, haniid and more.

But first, we want to introduce Riana Austin, one of our 2025 mentees and whose first piece of writing we’re publishing today! In Riana’s application, she opened with the line: ‘I like bitter melon, snacking and the Holloway Road.’ It was immediately clear that Riana was not only well placed to write about food in London, she was suitably well versed in the mechanisms of the attention economy, too.

“Growing up as a confused kid in a multicultural but not always integrated London, local diasporic restaurants were gold to me,” she wrote. “If outside their walls the faultlines of tolerance were all-too-often exposed, inside – cheeks pinched and asked after by owners who knew our names – I actually felt like I could belong.”

We hope that you enjoy her writing as much as we do. But before we get to her entry on an excellent Japanese cafe on the Caledonian Road, I asked Riana to say hi to you. AC

Hi everyone, I’m Riana. I was born in Indonesia but I’m a longtime Londoner. My love for diasporic restaurants goes way back: as a transracially adopted kid, meals out were everything because they delighted my tummy and made me believe I could belong. Aged 8, while having an eating contest with my brother in Wong Kei, I decided being a restaurant reviewer would be the best job in the world. I therefore feel like I’ve won the lottery to switch up my tunic (I work as a carer) for an audience with Vittles connoisseurs.

1. Ikoi – Japanese breakfast

Growing up in the 90s, the Caledonian Road I knew was notorious for its working girls, gangsters and rogues. My childminder’s dad would drive me about in a white Rolls-Royce, and I wonder what he’d have to say about Mr Corcoran and his postcard whatnottery, but times change. In the last five years, as the scaffolding rose on Google’s million sq ft HQ near King’s Cross station, restaurants suddenly appeared like barnacles on a whale.

Of these, the one I’m loyal to is Ikoi. One block up from the Yellow Bittern, it’s got heart without fanfare and does the kind of Japanese food that’s still very rare in this city.

Operating out of a tiny kitchen, Mika Harrop and her four children serve ofukuro no aji, or ‘mother’s home cooking’. Opening at 9am (until 4pm each day), their Fukuoka-style breakfast of rice with mustard greens and sesame oil (plus miso soup, kobachi and pickles) is a tribute to simplicity.

With everything at Ikoi, the care is in the details: not just in the quality of the food, but in the wabi-sabi sincerity of mismatched crockery, imperfectly shaped onigiri and remnants of crust on the bulging-yet-weightless egg sando.

And though the Japanese breakfast here may well be the move, my favourite dish is the spicy tofu udon. The broth is a next-level consommé: delicate and finely judged, it’s also an umami-maxed wallop spurred on by chilli. Mika says she doesn’t do restaurant food, but the skills on show here are fierce, honed by years raising her young and working as a caterer. I’d gladly pay out, but nothing on the menu costs more than £10.

Ikoi means ‘rest’ or ‘relaxation’ and at Mika’s the takers are broad, from time-pressed workers in the week to small groups and Japanese regulars on a Saturday. Against the backdrop of Big Tech and rapid change, its mix of birch wood, unhurried movements and Mika’s cooking cocoons and restores. Riana Austin

102 Caledonian Rd, N1 9DN

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One rule that we have when we’re writing about restaurants at Vittles is ‘never assume where the reader lives’. What might be a mission for you may also be another reader’s home – this is just the way that London is. (We exclude Neco Tantuni from this rule, which is always 90 minutes away, including from other places in Enfield) 

We’re going to slightly break that rule today. As a London publication, we do have a mostly London audience, and the following six restaurants have been chosen as potential places to visit while enjoying a day trip from the city. However, we hope that this guide remains useful to people who live nearby too. In our first Half a Dozen of the Other, Sing Yun Lee writes about one of the best dim sum parlours in the country, as easy to get to from London as it is from Essex; Ed Fenwick recommends what you should have for dinner if you make a lunch trip out east for oysters on Mersea Island; Lucy Dearlove argues that Hastings is not the culinary backwater that some restaurant critics would have you believe; Cheryl Cheung lauds the extraordinary-ordinariness of an Oxford Japanese restaurant; Sejal Sukhadwala praises homestyle East African-Gujarati cooking of the type that is dying out in London, but you can now find in Brighton; and Ruby Tandoh remembers the old ways, with scones and jam out in the country. 

We hope you enjoy today’s edition, which wasn’t sponsored by Thameslink but probably should have been. JN

1. The Britannia & Gurkha Restaurant & Bar

If you’ve gone to lunch at The Company Shed on Mersea Island in Essex, then The Britannia should be the place you go for an early dinner. In short, The Britannia is a traditional family pub with the addition of a Nepalese restaurant run by a very proud ex-Gurkha, Captain Umesh Pun, and his family just a 15-minute drive away on the southern outskirts of Colchester. 

My parents have been going here for years and are in love with it. The pub section has everything you’d want from a pub in that it has the feeling of a family’s front room; walls are covered in family military photos and Gurkha regalia, there are photos of Nepal and Essex, and, of course, the royal family. Pun opened the pub in 2013 after 31 years of service, wanting to change what he saw as a fairly ‘unwelcoming’ barracks pub into a pub for everyone, families with children and dogs; a British pub that tells the story of the Gurkhas. (Colchester is home to a large British Army garrison with a sizeable Gurkha community, who settled there after gaining the right to live in the UK in the early 2000s.)

The food is amazing. The restaurant only serves a Gurkha khana meal consisting of what Pun wants to make that day. It might be poppadums with turmeric sauce, then starters of samosas aloo dum, momo or pakora, then a chicken curry, a changing meat (goat, pork, lamb, venison) veg curry, a daal, a naan or paratha, plus a Nepalese dessert of rice pudding, kulfi or laddu.

It’s a beautiful pub and a beautiful restaurant, run with the attention to detail of an ex-soldier. Spend a day watching the football and drinking in the bar, then do dinner. Important note: you can ask for more of anything at no extra cost at any point in the meal before you go and sit at the bar under the Gurkha Kukri knife by a sign that reads ‘better to die than be a coward’. Ed Fenwick

42 Meyrick Crescent, Colchester CO2 7QY

Behind the paywall: one of the country’s best dim sum parlours, and many more recommendations. You can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to restaurant recommendations from the last five years, including the Six of One map.

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Vittles Issue 1 is now back online! We have sold 95 percent of the print run and we will not reprint, so these are the last copies available. We’d recommend ordering now if you’d like to get one before we move onto Issue 2 later this year.

Issue 1

Six of One - Mom-and-Pop Special

One of the most interesting things about Zohran Mamdani’s recent mayoral campaign in New York has been his focus on small businesses, or to give them their over-cutesy American name, mom-and-pop stores. This has meant talking about, lauding, and visiting small restaurants run by first- or second-generation New Yorkers, often serving communities in the outer boroughs — places like AbuQir, the brilliant Egyptian seafood specialist in Astoria, or the city’s Yemeni-owned bodegas. What I find impressive about this focus is that it has never once slipped into transactional notions of these places being worthwhile because they service a consuming-class of New Yorkers, or the liberal idea that ‘immigration is good because the food is better’. Instead, it has tapped into something more universal: a shared sense of civic pride amid a far-right narrative of declinism. Far from symbols of a changing and incomprehensible city, this framing rightly positions these businesses, with their messy, human interactions and specialisms, as the true inheritors of the city’s spirit.

This week’s Six of One is all about London’s own small food businesses and the people and families who own them. It includes Wassila and Hamza who are on a mother-and-son mission to bring Tunisian fricassé to London, Jaime and Cecilia who run one of the City’s most chaotic sandwich shops, Mochtar and Zaineb whose small restaurant serving Johor laksa has the spirit of a warung, Mama Vic whose mixture of West African and Caribbean food is deservedly finding its audience, and two sisters (and their husbands) running a Gujarati snack shop out of an unlikely grocery store.

We’re also delighted to publish the first piece of writing from our second round of mentorships, by Vitória Croda. Vitória moved to London from Salvador in Brazil in 2021; in her mentorship application she wrote that she wanted to ‘write about the community that raised me and how the London food scene brought me closer to them’. Salvador, like New Orleans and Atlanta, is one of the great African-American cities — its food, like acarajé and vatapa, is the result of West African and Indigenous dishes fusing together. As Vitória mentions, there are few Bahian restaurants in London, so it has generally been Nigerian, Ghanaian and Senegalese restaurants where she has felt most at home. Vitória writes that she would like to ‘write about how I found pieces of my hometown in London’. Her first piece of food writing, on Dery and Cathe, and their restaurant Delicathe in Brixton, does just that. JN

1. Delicathe Gourmet

Since I moved to London almost five years ago, I have missed the feeling of finding dishes from where I grew up in the city I now call home. It’s a feeling I envied in other diasporas, who have Keralan or Sichuanese restaurants to call their own, until I walked into Delicathe Gourmet, a counter led by chef Cathe and her brother Dery. Now I can find a taste of Bahia every Friday inside the alleys of Brixton Plaza. 

Like me, Cathe and Dery are Bahian. Although Brazilian restaurants in London often represent our country’s cuisine as a homogenous land of sizzling picanha plates, Brazil has as many regional differences as India and China. Bahia was the first place in the country to be colonised by Portugal, and its capital Salvador is now home to the largest Black population in the Americas, the majority of whom are descended from formerly enslaved West Africans. At Delicathe, the scent of red palm oil fills the plaza’s narrow alleyways. This is typical of Bahia, where you will find rich, spiced dishes that are closer to their Yoruba roots than anywhere else in the country.

At Delicathe, acarajé – barely different from their West African sibling, akara – are served every day as a starter. These black-eyed-pea fritters come with vatapá, a paste-like mixture of stale bread, dried prawns, coconut milk, peanuts and palm oil. The tricky part of cooking it comes from correctly mastering the smooth, creamy but firm paste, which Delicathe has done. It’s even better when topped up with the homemade malagueta hot pepper sauce that will be given at your table. 

On Fridays, Delicathe changes its menu and only serves Bahian dishes, including fish moqueca, chicken xinxim and caruru. This is a custom borrowed from Salvador, where many restaurants change their menu in respect to Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. As I’m eating Cathe’s xinxim, an earthy, peanut-based stew, I eavesdrop on the conversation next to me: it’s only at Delicathe that I can listen to the accent my friends from other states claim I have. 

By this point, I feel like a regular: Cathe and Dery ask me ‘How’s the new home?’, knowing that I have just moved flat. I swallow a bite of my sweet coconut cocada and I finally feel the warmth I had been craving for these past five years. I tell them it’s going really well. Vitória Croda  

414 Brixton Rd, SW9 7AY

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, as well as a regular issue of Six of One, we’ve updated the Vittles Restaurants map — now, a 369-strong list of places we’ve reviewed, plus excellent, less-heralded, places to eat in London from the last two years of Six of One. To view the updated map, you can subscribe to Vittles — which gives you full access to the back catalogue of features, essays, restaurant guides, recipes, and reviews — below.

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Today’s Six of One has contributions from Mohammed Ali Salha, Max Walker, Sejal Sukhadwala, Alexandra Pereira, Georgia Spanos, and Nikkitha Bakshani.

1. Makan Cafe

Sometimes, in those rare moments of idle time, I like to imagine I’m an investor listening to a pitch for a new restaurant and wonder whether I’d actually part with my money. On paper, I’m not sure Makan Cafe would initially convince me – it doesn’t fit neatly into any box. At first glance, it’s a caff where the many characters of W10 gather for builders’ tea and fry-ups. But beneath that unassuming facade and first impressions lies a genuinely good Malaysian street food spot, built around hearty nasi campur and other hawker favourites.

It’s the sort of place you’d do well to understand before stepping inside. Join the queue, survey the array of curries, stews, fried snacks, proteins and sauces, and make a mental note of what catches your eye. When you reach the counter, choose to eat in, ask for a plate of rice, and point to whichever three dishes you fancy on top. If you want a steer, my regular combo is the crispy fried fish, spicy sambal aubergines and stir-fried okra in a punchy turmeric sauce. Or perhaps the ayam goreng, curried chickpeas and garlicky stir-fried greens; it depends on my mood.

If you’re up for something cooked to order, then look no further than the char kuay teow or the chicken satay – both instantly transport me back to sweltering nights in Malaysia, hunched over plastic tables, tucking into some of the best street food in the world. And here’s the thing: chaos is an underrated ingredient in a place like this. It’s the clatter, the queues, the unwritten rules, the squeeze at the counter – somehow, it all makes everything taste that little bit better. On second thoughts, maybe I would invest after all. Mohammed Ali Salha

270 Portobello Rd, W10 5TY

Behind the paywall: Polish sausage sandwiches in Hanwell, Kerala kizhi parotta in Wembley, old-school steak frites and cheap Beaujolais at the oldest French wine bar in London, fragrant biryani and chai in Theatreland, and two-for-one pisco sours in Dalston.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. In this week’s twist on Six of One, Sejal Sukhadwala, Jonathan Nunn, Gavin Cleaver, Feroz Gajia, Nick Bramham and Simran Hans all laud the underrated and unheralded dishes they love at some of London’s most celebrated restaurants, from St. John to Tasty Jerk.

Also, some news! We will be reading at the ‘Independent Magazines on Stage’ event organised by Stack next Tuesday 17th June, along with The Fence, Offal, and The Paper. John Merrick and K Biswas will be joining Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn for readings from their essays on Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver. It should be a fun evening, including some of our favourite magazines in the UK, and you can buy tickets here.

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1. Anglo-Indian mulligatawny soup at Veeraswamy

In the UK, mulligatawny soup is only seen occasionally on the menus of old-school Bangladeshi-owned ‘curry houses’. Along with omelette and fish and chips, I always thought it was aimed at those who find Indian food too spicy, and is perhaps a well-meaning attempt to offer a starter in a cuisine that mostly doesn’t follow that tradition.

Mulligatawny is, in fact, an Anglo-Indian dish created in British India in the 18th century. Once considered highly fashionable, it was so ubiquitous it became a staple in central London’s coffee houses a century later – an Anglicised adaptation of ‘milagu thani’ (Tamil for ‘pepper water’). Originally made only from chicken or mutton stock, spices, tamarind and onions, over time, butter, flour, coconut milk, lentils, rice and chicken or mutton have been added.

At Veeraswamy, the ‘Anglo-Indian mulligatawny soup’, given its full name, is poured at the table in a tureen lined with finely chopped apples and chives, creating a bit of drama and a sense of anticipation. It has a warming, mustardy hue and a wonderful depth of flavour: just the right balance of spicy and tangy, with judicious amounts of black peppercorns and lemon juice, and a slightly sweet backnote.

But when there are so many other enticing starters on the menu, why choose it? Because, apart from being truly delicious, it’s of historic interest: Veeraswamy is the UK’s oldest surviving Indian restaurant, set up in 1926 by retired Anglo-Indian British Army officer, aristocrat and entrepreneur Edward Palmer. It’s changed hands a few times over the years and was acquired in 1997 by what is now known as The India Collection group.

Mulligatawny is one of only two items from the original 1926 menu. To clarify, it’s not the original recipe made from toor dal (split pigeon peas), which may have been based on one of the many variations in Palmer’s own 1915 cookbook, Indian Cookery (authored as EP Veeraswamy, his family name adapted for his food business). It’s been tweaked by the current chefs to create a more complex flavour, with the addition of a greater variety of yellow dals, cinnamon, coriander stems, curry leaves and curry powder of the Ship brand, which was originally used to make mulligatawny in Madras in the 1920s.

The significance here is that the soup was on the original menu, and it was this menu that was widely copied by London’s early Indian/Bangladeshi restaurants. The contemporary ‘curry house’ menus, with their kormas and biryanis, are based on the one at Veeraswamy in 1926. We don’t know how long the restaurant will be around for, though, as it’s facing a threat of closure from its landlord, the Crown Estate.

And if it goes, an essential part of London’s Indian restaurant history – the very template on which the UK’s Indian dining scene is moulded – could disappear forever. Sejal Sukhadwala

Victory House, 99 Regent St, W1B 4RS

Behind the paywall: Jonathan Nunn on one perfect dish at St. John; Drummond Street’s best-kept secret by Nick Bramham; Feroz Gajia on one of his favourite dishes at Miga; Simran Hans on London salads; and the thing more people should order at Tasty Jerk, by Gavin Cleaver.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Issue 1 of our magazine is still 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

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One has contributions from Aman Lakhiani, Alexandra Pereira, Joe Paisley, Siqi Chong, Guy Dimond and Charles Francis.

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1. Bellyzone

Four years of culinary school, ten years working in kitchens and four years operating a restaurant did not improve my cooking abilities as much as the nine months my wife was pregnant with my newborn daughter did. I found myself cooking all the time, always following her ever-changing taste buds. She previously detested savoury foods that were sweet, such as char siu, or anything doused in kecap manis, but during her golden trimester (three-to-six months), she craved sugar and ate through every packet of Sour Patch Kids, gummies and candies she could find. I used to know how to cook for her, what she would like and dislike, and though the changes were hard, it was so much fun to follow that rhythm. But, naturally, after a few weeks of this, I got frustrated, tired and found myself on the delivery apps, which I frequently open, doomscroll and decide that I might as well cook instead. That was until I discovered Bellyzone, a Chinese takeaway in Vauxhall with only three items on the menu, all of them variations of braised meat on rice: Longjiang pork hock, with or without skin, Taiwanese pork belly and bone-in chicken legs with a side of preserved vegetables to cut the richness.

Setting yourself high expectations for delivery apps is a losing battle; it is best to acknowledge that your laziness has won, and that you, just like everyone else, have settled for mediocrity. Yet, not with Bellyzone. I plunged the cheap wooden spoon provided with the rice bowl into the skin-on pork hock, ripping it apart with zero resistance down to the steamed white rice beneath. Some pickled Chinese mustard greens found its way onto my spoon and I realised I’d found a winner. The accompanying chilli oil was flavourful and light, accentuating the soy-braised meats. The diced pork belly left a film of grease around my lips, hummed by soy and anise. Somehow, it was all just perfect. Since my initial order, I have eaten from Bellyzone more times than I’d like to admit, especially since you can order it 24/7. Its deliciousness even prompted me to visit its now-shuttered stall in Camden. Once I got there, I came to realise that this was really a place meant for delivery. Having been raised in Indonesia, there aren’t many foods that truly take me home, but Bellyzone certainly does. Now, my daughter Althea is five months old and has only just started interacting with food as sensory play, but as I watch her shove purées and vegetables in her mouth, I am already looking forward to sharing a bowl of steaming, soy-braised meats with her one day. Aman Lakhiani

Pod 8, 112 Randall Rd, SE11 5JR

Behind the paywall: An old-school Italian in Waterloo that you may have always wondered about, a neighbourhood tandoori in an expensive part of town, Korean comfort food on the Isle of Dogs, a Sri Lankan institution in New Malden, and a Limehouse caff for the ages.

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During the last five years, a new type of Hong Kong restaurant has emerged in London, mostly propelled by new arrivals on British National (Overseas) passports. Many of these businesses, starting with Aquila in Leytonstone and Hoko on Brick Lane, have concentrated on styles of cooking that are unique to Hong Kong and rare in China, such as the more Westernised dishes of the cha chaan teng. They have been joined, in the last couple of years, by increasingly distinct restaurants: like Blue Sheep in Norbury, Sutton’s laksa specialist Little Nyonya, Wamimichi in Hendon, and Caledonian Road’s Come Back In.

Lately, Hong Kong food businesses, whether they’re cha chaan tengs or even more specialised, have reached a singularity where they’re opening faster than they can be counted. Today’s Six of One, nevertheless, is an attempt to document some of them. In this newsletter, you’ll find French toast and beef brisket curries, but also pork chop polo baos, rice rolls, elite roast meats, tong sui, black sesame soup and stocking milk tea. Enjoy them while they’re rarities: in five years, hopefully they’ll be everywhere.

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Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One has contributions from Jonathan Nunn, Siqi Chong, Zoe Suen, Guan Leong, Angela Hui, and Elaine Zhao.

1. Cha Kee

The looming presence of evil (Stamford Bridge) can sometimes obscure what a genuinely varied place Fulham is. It epitomises one of the best qualities of central London – one which infuriates a new far-right who yearn for the banlieueisation of the city – which is that people from different backgrounds and different classes occupy the same area, though not without some dissonance. The curve of the Thames that isolates Fulham from the rest of London is marked by the River Café in the west and the mighty edifice of the World’s End council estate in the east. And roughly in the middle of it all is one of the city’s most interesting thoroughfares.

North End Road runs from Kensington into Fulham Broadway, and for half of its length it is a brilliant and varied food street: from mid-end Nigerian food at Pitanga to Yemeni dishes at Bab Al Yemen, from excellent Somali cooking at Sufra to Ethiopian food at Abugida. And now there’s Cha Kee. Located in a mini mall of small restaurants, it opened last year and has quickly become a hit with locals. The draw is cha chaan teng dishes: baked pork chops, French toast, HK-style beef curries. It specialises in honey-roasted char siu, slightly sweet, slightly charred, with defined striations of rendered fat. You can get it with rice and an egg, but better to get it scrambled with a glossy blanket of barely set egg, almost like a wat tan hor. Beef brisket noodles are richer and more intense than the baseline version at Wong Kei. It verges on beef tonkotsu, with huge chunks of slow-cooked brisket in translucent broth and, if you want to add them, wobbly bits of tendon to plump up your skin. The sesame prawn toast, carefully assembled, ranks up there with Uncle Wrinkle’s as the best I’ve had.

Cha Kee is already rammed on weekends, with waits of up to 90 minutes (I cannot emphasise enough how few seats there are), but you should be able to walk in easily during weekday downtimes. After a bowl of noodles or rice, you can walk through the food market, past Chelsea FC and shops that promise ‘the haute couture of doorknobs’. There are two sides to Fulham, after all. Jonathan Nunn

347 North End Rd, SW6 1NN

Behind the paywall: Pork chop polo baos, all the roast meats, red bean soup, cheung fun, siu mai, lo mein, and much more.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Before we start, we are excited to announce our contribution to this year’s British Library Food Season: a panel dedicated to the question ‘What is the point of a cookbook?’. If you enjoyed our recent supplement on cookbooks, then this will expand on many of the themes raised about the role of cookbooks in an increasingly online recipe space. To discuss this, we have a blockbuster panel: Ozoz Sokoh, author of the newly-published landmark cookbook Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria; the mastermind behind the bestselling The Roasting Tin series, Rukmini Iyer; and recipe maven Sophie Wyburd, whose cookbook Tucking In straddles the digital and paper worlds. They will be in conversation with food writer Ruby Tandoh.

The event will take place at the British Library on April 28th at 7pm. Tickets are £10 and you can buy them here.

British Library Food Season

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One has contributions from Guy Dimond, Taran Khan, Yohann Koshy, Anto Wu, Hoagy Pollen, and Hester van Hensbergen.

1. Guilin Ramen House

I first came across Guilin Ramen House (桂小卤) last April when the owner Jimmy took over the space on Grafton Way in Fitzrovia. I had anticipated its opening from the day they began renovations for one reason: the Guilin-style rice noodles for which the restaurant was named. To be clear, its speciality is not ramen, but rather a specific, rarely found regional rice noodle dish from the Guangxi province of China – from where my own family hails.

Listed first on a sparse menu of seven noodle dishes, the thin, rounded noodles arrive laden with toppings: crispy pork belly, braised beef, char siu, pickled bamboo shoots, pickled green beans, roasted peanuts and roasted soybeans. Tossed in a ‘master braise stock’, or lǔ zhī, the flavour of the rice noodles is rich with savoury depth, cut through by the acidity of the pickled vegetables and the nuttiness of the soybeans and peanuts. Texture, a dimension that is just as valued as flavour in Chinese cuisine, also takes centre stage: from crisp and crunch to firm and bouncy. It’s delightfully easy to wolf down. Don’t miss the freshly made Liuzhou snail noodles, which these days are most commonly found in instant noodle form in a TianTian aisle.

As a young child in China, I had eaten these rice noodle dishes in dime-a-dozen noodle shops, only to realise the difficulty of finding them abroad after moving, even in Chinese-American enclaves in California. Yet Guilin Ramen House demonstrates an almost reverent adherence to the regional speciality, down to every roasted soybean. And while I was excited to eat the noodles, it was more so the idea of sharing them with my mother, who had planned a trip to London conveniently just in time for its opening. What better way to make her feel comfortable on her first trip to the capital? Turns out that Jimmy had set out with similar intentions: he wanted to make the dish for his wife, who is from Guilin.

Guilin Ramen House, in both name and substance, is as much about coaxing those new to Guangxi cuisine out of their comfort zone (the ‘new menu’ advertised at lunchtime consists of familiar Cantonese rice plates) as it is about welcoming the Chinese diaspora back into the tastes of nostalgia. Anto Wu

64 Grafton Way, W1T 5DP

Behind the paywall: Nihari and the art of ordering well in a Pakistani restaurant; burgers, estates and Henry Moore sculptures; a new venture in south London from the former Pueblito Paisa Café owners; a French-Algerian cafe in a lido that refuses to acknowledge culinary boundaries; and a night out featuring brik a l’oeuf and a boat called Aïoli.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One is a dosa special, with contributions from Samanth Subramanian, Shekha Vyas, K. Biswas, Apoorva Sripathi, Isaac Rangaswami, and Mohammed Ali Salha.

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1. Chennai Srilalitha

As if Chennai Srilalitha were an alternate universe, the rules of dosa mathematics break down at its door. Per the menu, a plain dosa costs £4.49, but pay £6.99 and you can eat as many dosas as you want. For that rate on weekdays, between 11 am and 3.30 pm, a buffet promises several things, including dosa after dosa freshly fried and delivered to your table. On weekend mornings, the price edges up slightly, to £8.99. I believe an asparagus side – barely grilled, with two grains of sea salt and a smear of mayo – can cost more than this in some London restaurants.

Like breakfasts at Tamil weddings, the buffet expounds on the myriad variations of rice and lentils. They can be combined into pongal, which is better than risotto if only for the addition of ghee and whole black pepper; turned into batter, to be fried into vadas that are crisp on the outside but softies at heart; ground up, fermented and steamed into soft, jasmine-white idlis; and griddled into thick, round uthappams studded with onions, green chillies and curry leaves.

But the canonical order is the dosa. Dosas in Bengaluru are butter-roasted to a deep mahogany and come with a bright, spicy, red chutney coating their insides. Dosas in Chennai, and therefore in Chennai Srilalitha (which also has branches in Wembley, Amersham and Finchley), are thinner, and when they cook on a pan, their concentric marks of brown on white recall photographs of Jupiter or the cross-section of a geode. The menu will try to tempt you with abominations: a chilli-chips-cheese dosa, or a chocolate dosa, or the £17.99 jumbo dosa, four feet long. Ignore them. The buffet’s choices – plain, stuffed with a potato-onion mash or, terrifically, served with steamed and spiced green bananas – are all the dosa you will need. If you must go off-piste, order the podi dosa from the menu, its interior strewn with a spice mix made from chillies, sesame seeds and black gram. Once, in an American airport, I had a pack of this podi confiscated by customs officers, who distrust any powder in vacuum-sealed plastic. They had the right idea: it is better, cheaper and far more addictive than cocaine. Samanth Subramanian

196 Kenton Rd, Harrow HA3 8BX

Behind the paywall: Madurai kari dosa, Tolworth masala dosa, lacy rava dosa, diamond onion rava dosa, comically large dosa and more.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will usually share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known.

However, in today’s issue all the entries have been written by Jonathan Nunn who is back from a three month break. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue with over 250 entries here.

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Six of Nunn

Six restaurants to go to and one to avoid, by Jonathan Nunn

One of the first things I learnt when I started writing about restaurants for this publication is that there is a difference between a restaurant you review and a restaurant you recommend. Restaurants worth reviewing are rare. A review has to have a story: something that gives it a resonance beyond the restaurant’s neighbourhood. A recommendation is something much simpler: it is just me saying, if you are in the area or if it’s convenient for you, then I would advise eating here. These are less rare, but also not as common as you might think.

Recently, I have been eating at restaurants I would be delighted to recommend but few I would review. So for this Six of One, I’ve personally compiled six recommendations for restaurants across London that I think you should go to. I have also included one additional restaurant I considered reviewing but decided not to, mainly because it has received far too many fawning reviews already. It is emphatically not a recommendation.

1. Blue Sheep

One of the more interesting recent London phenomena has been the appearance of Hong Kong restaurants that are of a completely different tenor to the ones that preceded them. They have mostly been opened by newly-arrived entrepreneurs on BNO passports who, for obvious reasons, want to distinguish themselves and their cooking from mainland China. This has meant leaning into the more esoteric aspects of Hongkongese culture: namely, the city’s relationship with European and British colonialism, and the influence it has had on cha chaan tengs. This is why, a 20-minute walk from Norbury and Streatham Common stations, you will find a small unit no larger than the average rental living room that’s filled with Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse books, several guides on How to be British (and, ominously, a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), a picture of the late Queen and a menu that spans Hong Kong borscht to fish fillets in cheese and cream sauce on rice.

I have been guilty of saying restaurants are like being in someone’s living room when they really aren’t. But in the case of Blue Sheep I cannot emphasise this enough: almost nothing has been done to it to make it restaurant-ready, including getting rid of the textured, shell-patterned Anaglypta wallpaper. The menu is almost entirely deep cuts: Hong Kong spaghetti, pork chops in sweet tomato sauce and cheese, French toast. The curry fish balls are excellent, with the sauce reduced down so much it takes on the sticky brown of rapidly burning caramel, giving them an unexpected intensity. Pork chops also come with Taiwanese-style mince on rice – a kind of mash-up between lu rou fan and spag bol – with a dusting of jolting Sichuan peppercorn. A curried beef flank with a splash of coconut milk is every bit as good as my favourite version at Cafe TPT in Chinatown. This is great food, and if it means eating it in a room that looks like your grandmother’s underneath a photo of Chris Patten then so be it. 

293 Northborough Rd, SW16 4TR

2. That’s It Grill

I must have first visited this tiny Portuguese takeaway in Clapham North in 2020. At the time I was in the habit of organising food crawls and distinctly remember eating a portion of doubles from (what was then) Roti Joupa on the wall across from That’s It while waiting for some piri piri chicken. Almost seven years later, I no longer have the patience nor stomach for crawls, but I still get pangs of FOMO, so I’ve gotten into the practice of ordering simultaneously from two places that serve cuisines which might go together. This has meant coming to Clapham to specifically get veg roti from Tawa Roti and supplementing it with meat from That’s It. I cannot explain how transformative this has been to my quality of life. 

That’s It, run by Jorge and Maria, is one of those rare places – like Lebanese Grill in Elephant and Castle, or Egi’s in New Cross – serving inexplicably good barbecue, not quite amazing enough to make a pilgrimage for, but the type that you would hope to have five minutes from your house. Although it has a new menu (things like duck rice, grilled quail and broken eggs) its speciality is piri piri, applied either to chicken or pork. Both are worth getting: the chicken specifically as wings, which are halved and blistered up on the grill, and the pork as flat slabs of ribs, fatty and charred till almost burnt, all with more marinade thrown into the foil bag. They will ask whether you want it with chips or rice, but I can tell you that it goes very well with buss-up shut. 

28 Bedford Rd, SW4 7HJ

After the paywall — four more recommendations for London restaurants, plus our most disappointing restaurant of the year so far.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One recommendations are from Mohammed Ali Salha, Christian Theodorou, Ria Parmar, Nick Bramham, Angela Hui, and Montague Ashley-Craig. We have also updated our Six of One map, which is now at 256 entries. To view it, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year.

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1. Yiayia’s Cooking

For some reason, Cypriot restaurants focusing on seasonal home-style cooking have never really gained traction in the London Cypriot community, except maybe for Stelios’s at the Cypriot Community Centre. Instead, it seems nearly everyone and their uncle opens either a taverna or a kebab shop and inevitably reduces an entire cuisine to just dips, calamari and charcoal-grilled meats.

However, Yiayia’s Cooking opened its doors at the end of last year and serves the foods of mums and yiayias: koupepia (stuffed vine leaves), makaronia tou fournou stifado (long macaroni layered with pork mince and bechamel sauce), kolokasi (taro and pork stew), afelia and the wealth of beans and pulses known as ospria that we probably ought to be eating more of. It is also probably the most interesting thing to happen in Cockfosters for a long time.

I took my daughter to eat on Yiaya’s opening day, and we shared some koupepia and pourgouri (bulgur) while local legend and journalist Michael Yiakoumi of London Cypriot newspaper Parikiaki recorded his classic panning Instagram shots in the background around us. Later, we were joined by my sister and we shared an enormous slab of makaronia tou fournou large enough to comfortably feed two. The following day I noticed they had rabbit stifado and a dessert of semolina halva on the specials board – enough to motivate my mum to pop in, grabbing me a takeaway box on her way over.

Rabbit or hare stifado is a personal favourite and I believe superior to the beef versions you often find. Here the sweetness of the rabbit meat and onions balanced by the sharp tang of the vinegar brought back memories of a feast we enjoyed a few years back in the village, celebrating the orthodox holiday of the death and assumption of the Mother of God, or colloquially, dekapentavgoustos. Then, among tables and tables of food, was a large pot of stifado, made using wild rabbit freshly shot by a cousin, held up like a trophy for a photo and shared on Facebook for all to see. Christian Theodorou

7 Heddon Court Avenue, Cockfosters Rd, EN4 0DB

Behind the paywall: We ask, ‘What is a London pizzeria these days?’; a take on the pizza they call apizza; confronting the winter with eddoe curries and parotta in Turnpike Lane; a new Shoreditch noodle staple; and a DIY Korean restaurant that has us remembering Hackney in the 2010s.

PLUS: the Six of One map has been updated to include all 256 restaurants covered in the column to-date.

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.

Today’s Six of One recommendations are all from deep South London, from Ciaran Thapar, Jonathan Nunn, Shekha Vyas, George Wales, Hark1karan and Andrew Corbin.

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1. Malabaarii, Broadway Market Tooting

“If in doubt, go to Tooting.”

I have followed this aphorism ever since I moved out of my family home and into south London a decade ago. Growing up in the Heathrow suburbs, I took my dad’s cooking and the short drive to Hounslow or Southall for granted. Now, if I’m craving the comfort of having South Asian food prepared for me, I hop on a bike and hit Tooting Broadway, usually without an end goal in mind. I walk around and see what calls to me.

A few weeks ago I dipped my head through the slotted, translucent plastic curtain of Broadway Market and navigated around its horseshoe. A tiny unit called Malabaarii, which I'd not seen before, caught my eye. Reggae played loud from the speakers of the Caribbean restaurant next door, soundtracking this melting pot. There were only ten seats, all of them in the corridor looking at the solo chef perched in the kitchen through a window. The menu was bright, colourful and confidently concise. As I often do, I debated internally whether I wanted rice or bread, ultimately landing on the former via the ‘mini sadhya’ – a platter for one, served on a banana leaf. I ordered the seafood option: a mix of vegetables (cabbage, carrot, green beans, potato, achar) with a crisply fried slice of king fish, battered king prawns and squid. Within minutes, I’d chased it all with a chai: my belly was full, my mind at ease.

The next time I brought my dad. We got the deal for two: £35 all in for homemade lemon ice teas, a choice of starter to share (chicken or cauliflower fry), the mini sadhya plus two flaky parotta served with small tasting bowls of lamb, chicken, daal and sambar. The chef grinned and nodded his head at us through the window as we thanked the waiter. In an SW17 sea of much-loved Tamil, Punjabi and Peshawari institutions, discovering such strong Malayali representation felt like uncovering treasure.

If in doubt, go to Tooting. Ciaran Thapar

Unit 74, Broadway Market, 29 Tooting High St, SW17 0RJ

Behind the paywall: Today is a South London special. Below are recommendations for the Polish school canteen of dreams by Jonathan Nunn, as well as bistro food in Upper Norwood; the ‘best croissant’ in London (or at least Furzedown); destination pork pies in Forest Hill; and a decades-old Caribbean restaurant in Norbury doing things the right way.

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