Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Today, we’re publishing an essential piece of service journalism by the writer (and now knafeh expert) Aina J. Khan. Last year, Aina asked us if she could eat at as many places in London that serve knafeh as she was physically able to — an enviable task. We can’t think of many single dishes as beloved as knafeh, or as many whose merits are as debated over. The result is this guide, which takes in various styles of Arabic knafeh, along with Turkish künefe — primarily in London but with two exceptional examples in Manchester and Bradford that we couldn’t leave off the list.

If you have never eaten knafeh before then we hope this list is the start of a new obsession; if you have, then let the debate begin!

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My love of knafeh began on the cobbled streets of east Jerusalem in 2016, two weeks after Britain voted to leave the European Union.

Bitter over our divorce with Europe and the ubiquitous presence of armed Israeli soldiers at almost every entrance, corner and street of the ancient streets of the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem, I found myself drowning my sorrows one evening inside Jafar Sweets, a Palestinian-run sweet shop opened in 1951 only three years after the Nakba that expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland.

Buzzing with families sharing sweets and ammus sipping pensively on cups of black tea and mint, it was there I tasted my first ever slice of knafeh, a savoury dessert made from a base of akawi: a phenomenally stringy, stretchy, and mozzarella-like cheese that originates from the Palestinian city of Akka. The steel-pan hot cheese is topped with either a layer of baked, orange-coloured semolina na’meh, or a crispy vermicelli-like khishneh. Both variations are bathed in a moat of sugar syrup and ghee-like butter, topped with a verdant green crown of ground pistachios. Without any prior knowledge of this sweet, I opted first for the knafeh na’meh.

I can’t articulate the precise sensations that flooded my multi-hyphenate British, Londoner, Bradfordian, Pakistani, Pashtun tongue. All I know is that, in that moment, knafeh upended my culinary world. As a diaspora kid of Pakistani-Pashtun origin growing up around Iraqi, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish and Sudanese kids and often shopping at Damas Gate, the Syrian-run supermarket opposite Shepherd’s Bush mosque where as a girl I’d buy bags of falafel and trays of baklawa, by some miracle, I had never taken a bite of knafeh until that moment. That’s when the obsession began.

Knafeh. Knafah. Kunafa. Kunefe. Knaffeh?!

The English transliterations of knafeh from Arabic to English are as varied as opinions around its origins, and which version is the greatest. Because as I learned tasting dozens of knafeh around the world – in Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and even in Uganda at a Somali-run dessert parlour - knafeh invokes visceral culinary nationalism: My Egyptian friends will inevitably tell you the origins of knafeh are… Egyptian. They even go so far (sacrilegiously in my non-biased opinion) to say that only those topped with crispy vermicelli-like kata’if pastry, the knafeh khishneh… is knafeh. No cheese, just the khishneh layer, as my Cairene friend Omnia insisted. When mango season swings around in the summer, Egyptians add slices of mango to their ‘knafeh’; Palestinians generally defer to knafeh Nabulseyeh – named after the Palestinian city of Nablus – as the best knafeh. As a journalist, my peers prize ‘objectivity’: a false veneer of neutrality that is often a euphemism for how white, middle-class men view the world. But I have no shame in admitting that Palestinian knafeh is the best in the world.

In the last 10 years I have tried dozens (to the extent that by this point, I’ve lost count) of different knafeh slices around the world. During this time, I’ve developed a methodology to determine a good knafeh. Is it fresh from the steel-pan? How crispy is the khishneh layer? Is it soggy? Is it drowning in sugar syrup? Is the semolina na’meh layer stodgy and too thick? Is the akawi cheese base hot with a glorious stretch once the spoon plunges in? Does the akawi taste like a diluted version of mozzarella? Or does it have that silky, subtle depth to it only the best akawi has?

Despite all of this, it has been near-impossible to find knafeh in the UK as good as the ones served fresh in Palestine and in Lebanon where demand means multiple trays of it are made fresh, particularly in the mornings. Nevertheless, the last 12 months I’ve conducted reviews of knafeh joints from the Turkish and Arab diasporas in London, Bradford and Manchester. I tried knafehs of three different regional variations: Palestinian, Syrian and Turkish. No Nutella gimmicks, no ice-cream innovations. Just traditional knafeh in its naked, cheesy, original glory (sorry Egyptians, no Egyptian knafeh review here for now).

Knafeh

1. Palestine House

After spending a month in Lebanon last year eating my way through as many knafeh joints as I could in Beirut, the southern cities of Saidah and Nabatieh, and Tripoli in the north, I was comparing every knafeh in the UK to the high standard I’d experienced in Lebanon, where knafeh is made fresh by the steel pan every single day. Knafeh is to the Lebanese what toast is to us Brits. But to paraphrase the late Sinéad O’Connor, nothing compared. Every knafeh I ate in the UK felt like a microwaved imitation.

Anyone who knows knafeh will tell you that one of most fabled ones is from the northern Palestinian city of Nablus that it’s named after. The slice I had in Palestine House was the real deal. I let out an involuntary exclamation of ecstasy, satisfaction and praise – ’La Illaha Ill’Allah!’ (‘There is no God but God’) the Islamic declaration of faith – for the Palestinian chef responsible for its creation. Finally, it felt like I had come home.

113 High Holborn, WC1V 6JQ

2. Arab Quarter

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You asked, we delivered. Here’s Jonathan Nunn’s list of the 99 best restaurants in London in one post, along with their addresses.

The Vittles 99

In 2005, the American food magazine Gourmet prematurely named London as the best place to eat in the world, citing a new feeling of optimism that infused everything from the ‘freshness and simplicity’ of St. John to a resurgent Borough Market. Reading it now, 20 years on, it’s startling to see how much the city’s food has progressed and put down its roots. ‘London cuisine’ has become a mix of lineages, each one as important as the next, from the the modern British movement that has revolutionalised the city’s relationship to native produce, our own peculiar takes on French fine dining and Mediterranean ‘peasant food’ and the explosion in casual wine bars and gastropubs, to the pioneering Turkish ocakbaşi and Cypriot taverna that have become North London institutions, the Jamaican cookshops and Nigerian takeaways in South that formed the bedrock of the city’s Black cookery, meat-forward Punjabi and Pashtun grillhouses, all-veg Gujarati and Tamil canteens and a hundred other cuisines vying to make their own legacies. This bewildering diversity is what gives London its character: an endless cycle of old traditions being supplanted by new energy, new people and the generative creativity that comes from their intermixing. Today, in 2025, there isn’t a single pocket of the city untouched by great food.

The Vittles 99 is my attempt to write a guide to everything interesting about eating out in London right now, from the upper echelons of fine dining to restaurants that exist first and foremost to serve their communities and neighbourhoods. To produce it, I have spent the last two years revisiting all my favourites and filling in large gaps in my own knowledge – particularly regarding London’s Michelin-starred restaurants. From a shortlist of around 3000 meals eaten during the last seven years of writing, I’ve whittled the final list down to a round and unreasonable 99, presented in order. While composing the list, I have been asked how it’s possible to compare, say, The Ritz to Kaieteur Kitchen. My answer is that each restaurant is skilled, and has an unwavering commitment to what quality means to them. Ultimately, it is all food and hospitality. The sole metric I have used to order the list is one that has always served me well: how excited would I be to go eat there tonight on my own dime?

London is not a perfect food city. High rents, increasing food costs and ever-slimming margins mean that restaurants are constantly squeezed, compelled by forces beyond their control into a kind of homogenisation. The 99 restaurants on this list are all different but share one key characteristic: amid pressures and fleeting trends, each one is committed to serving the food that they want to cook. Despite everything, their individuality and personality shine through. London’s food, after all, is defined by its people. For the last seven years, these people – chefs, cooks, waiters, porters, developers, suppliers – have kept me fed and provided me with my living. This list is dedicated to all of them. JN

The Rules

• It’s trickier to define a restaurant than it might seem at first glance. For the purposes of this list, a restaurant is a place where you can sit down and eat a full meal for money, or take one away. Bakeries have been excluded, as have pop-ups and delivery-only ventures.

• To avoid repetition, I set out to limit myself to one entry per restaurant group, unless there are two restaurants in that group that serve radically different food. I have also ended up breaking this rule, but it’s fine, because it’s my list.

• I have paid for all the meals on this list and done my best to steer clear of freebies, although being known as both a writer and a supplier of tea means that it has been tricky to avoid absolutely everything without being rude. Over almost two years, I have logged a few glasses of champagne, some extra courses in a tasting menu and, in one case, a bottle of rapeseed oil.

• Three of the entries on this list are run by people whom I consider friends and about whom I could not possibly be objective. To balance things out, I have also included restaurants run by people who hate me.

• Despite my best attempts, there are still some restaurants in London I have never been to, or didn’t have time to return to. My apologies to all of them – I’m already working on next year’s list.

• This is a highly personal list, and I would be alarmed if anyone agreed with every entry. Dissent is very much encouraged. See you in the comments.

99. Oslo Court

Oslo Court, an absurd cream puff of a restaurant on the ground floor of an International Style housing block in St John’s Wood, is the one place on this list where the food is a bystander to the experience. Some of the truly great restaurants are not about food at all, but about comfort and fantasy. The real draw of Oslo Court is things being precisely as you remember them (if you’re old enough) or the delight of unearned nostalgia. It’s a place where Melba toast comes unbidden, where the most avant-garde main is steak Diane, where at least one table will be celebrating an 80th birthday, and where sides (including genuinely excellent latkes) are technically unlimited. A word of warning: if the legendary septuagenarian dessert waiter Neil Heshmat is on duty, recommending the best dessert on his trolley, which he’s saved just for you, Oslo Court reaches some kind of perfection; if it’s his night off, the whole thing might fall down like a pale pink house of cards.

Oslo Court, Charlbert Street, NW8 7EN

98. The Quality Chop House

I once heard the legendary French chef Olivier Roellinger say that the template for every great chef must be the image of a mother nourishing a hungry child. Shaun Searley at Quality Chop House is not a nourishing mother: he has the mien of a chef out to kill his customers. My most memorable meal here showcased every known shade of brown plus a few that the restaurant invented: a game broth that tasted like Bovril if you gave it a knighthood; a tranche of brill spine cooked hard to stand up to a glossy Sichuan-ish sauce; grouse (a mahogany breast, a study in brown in its itself) with trimmings; brown bread fried in something unholy; plum jam the colour of sin; a scoop of liver parfait as smooth as chestnut gelato atop dripping toast; gravy. I am only in the mood for this cooking once in a blue moon, but, my god, if you want to feel like a boy being fattened up by a witch in a Brothers Grimm tale, nowhere else will do.

92–94 Farringdon Road, EC1R 3EA

97. Sonora Taquería

There are now plenty of good individual tacos in London: the lengua from Guacamoles, the taco paisa from Comalera, the al pastor from El Pastor. But Sonora is the only London taqueria that passes the ultimate test: would I stake the city’s reputation on bringing the most annoying American person I know? I would relish it. Since being refurbished this spring, Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier’s Stoke Newington restaurant has been operating on a level close to some of the best in New York or LA. The aggressive caramelisation on the carne asada, the sticky, concentrated jus of tongue and head in the cabeza, the translucent, lunar quality of the flour tortillas: all these small touches are reminders that making great tacos is an exercise in miniaturism. The tiniest item on the menu, the bean quesadilla, is a must order, perfectly honouring the tortilla, which is so delicious I would happily call it a roti.

208 Stoke Newington High Street, N16 7HU

96. Core

When you go to Core, you’ll be asked to choose between two menus: ‘Classics’, which is made up of tried-and-tested dishes, and the more experimental ‘Seasons’. If you go as a pair, you should order both, which will give you a chance to glimpse the light and shadow of Clare Smyth’s three-Michelin-starred cooking. I prefer the heavier Classics menu – particularly how Smyth fashions a silk purse from the sow’s ears of potato, dulse and herring roe, creating something that feels decadent with humble ingredients. But what marks both menus out from the ‘international fine dining’ aesthetic that plagues this genre are a sense of style, limpid and playful, and a strong sense of place, thanks to the focus on British ingredients. If you can’t afford a tasting menu, fear not! You can order Core’s best dish at the bar: an update on the Malteser that solves that chocolate’s central problem – its harshness on the teeth. With a Wonka-like flourish, the kitchen conjures a cloud of malt that sits atop the dessert like a fascinator and dissolves like cotton candy.

92 Kensington Park Road, W11 2PN

95. Little Nyonya

When Kelvin Chan and June Fan reopened their 14-seater cafe Little Nyonya in Sutton in 2023, almost exactly as it was in Quarry Bay 6000 miles away, they invented something new – not a diaspora restaurant, but a whole restaurant in diaspora. Little Nyonya may be the only restaurant in London operating on Hong Kong rules: a cramped kitchen putting out six dishes for around three hours a day, queues round the block, cash only. Its customers, mainly from the new Hongkonger community, aren’t looking for traditional HK comfort food but for what Little Nyonya was famous for back home: its elegant laksa, with broth the colour of virgin sand, either enriched with the marine funk from the heads of three prawns or by the QQ texture of glossy fish balls and homemade fish and pork beancurd rolls. I’ve often had the feeling eating here that, next to the gestalt of Little Nyonya’s laksa, other soup noodles are mere bowls of broth with toppings.

82A Westmead Road, Sutton SM1 4HY

94. Udaya

As East Ham’s Kerala scene spirals, offering statement short rib mandis, fish nirvanas and other hybrids with the food of the Gulf, restaurants like Prajeesh Kumar’s Udaya feel reassuringly old school. This is simple drinking food that comes in three modes – stir-fried, deep-fried or battered to an absolute crisp – designed to pair with beers in the lazy heat of a coastal city. Seafood is a particular strength here, from a crab fry that will have you scraping the shell with your teeth to get as much of the coating as possible, to a platter of devilled squid, mussels and fish that is closer in spirit to popcorn chicken than it is to the seafood platter at Bentley’s. So many of the dishes here are excuses to eat crispy onions with parotta or appam, particularly the full chicken fry, which resembles what might happen if a KFC bargain bucket, a blooming onion and a whole shelf of spices got into a fight.

105 Katherine Road, E6 1ES

93. Café Japan

The list of prestigious sushi restaurants that fish wholesaler Atariya supplies has always been its assurance of quality. But most impressive is its own restaurant in Golders Green, where short supply chains means a £48 omakase – something of a London miracle. Make sure to sit at the small wooden counter at the back and chef Shigeru Fukushima, or his deputy, will send across 14 pieces of nigiri in a half-hour businessman’s trip. British fish are prioritised here: turbot, Dover sole animated with yuzu, red mullet, barely charred to emphasise the sweetness of its ruddy skin. Tuna comes four ways: lean early on, fatty at the midway point, medium-fatty at the end and, best of all, chopped finely onto a hot crispy block of rice, so it melts like a sundae from the residual heat. In a city full of high-end omakase and Itsu branches, Café Japan is a rare win for the middle, and the one sushi restaurant I consistently want to return to.

626 Finchley Road, NW11 7RR

92. Regency Cafe

Every city needs a tourist trap that is legitimately good. New York has Katz’s, Paris has Breizh Café and London has the Regency. You’re now more likely to overhear Americans than black-cab drivers (who have decamped to the Astral, over the road), but the various cycles of Regency hype and recent change of ownership (it is now owned by the Turkish Gungor brothers) have not affected the food, which remains superb. The fry-ups are its trademark – real, fat sausages, eggs like milky glass eyes, slabs of bubble crisped up on the plancha – but what really sets the Regency apart is the care taken on the non-breakfast items. Come early afternoon, after the tourist rush, and a perfect rectilinear pie with braising steak and gravy will be your reward. Meanwhile, the bronzed chips, served with the pie, or with thin slices of cooked ham, or with the Friday fish, are as recognisable a Regency calling card as its green-and-white gingham-patterned tables.

7–19 Regency Street, SW1P 4BY

91. Toklas

Art-world-adjacent side project, Italian-ish canteen cooking, thespian diners, balcony by the Thames: it has not escaped me that Toklas is what The River Cafe might be had it not chosen to live out its life in stately isolation over in West London. This is also a testament to Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover (of Frieze Art Fair) for fashioning one of the great London dining rooms from a vast, resounding rectangle of concrete, as well as chef Chris Shaw who, since taking over in 2023, has pushed the food in crowd-pleasing directions. Toklas’s culinary lineage is the Cafe itself, combined with the painterly impressionism of Spring, Petersham Nurseries and Sessions Arts Club. It’s evident in the saffron orange of mussels escabeche, the butter yellow of good pasta and emulsified sauce and the seemingly endless supply of primary-coloured Todolí citrus animated from still life to uplift meat, fish and desserts. This is watercolour cuisine at its best.

1 Surrey Street, WC2R 2ND

90. Master Wei

Guirong Wei didn’t need to open Master Wei, having already mainstreamed Shaanxi cuisine at Highbury’s Xi’an Impression, but the name is a statement of intent. We know from experience (see A.Wong) that when a Chinese chef in London puts their own name on a restaurant, they’re no longer messing around. I’m not sure there is a single noodle dish in the city I love eating more than the pork biang biang with tomato and egg, an order for the indecisive that combines the caramel sweetness of the meat and its juices, the textures and acidity of tomato, a coddled cloud of egg and perfectly al dente belt noodles. And yet if there is one, it might just be Master Wei’s cool, polytextural liang pi, which is the noodle equivalent of sticking your head in an ice-cold bath. And these are just the main courses; I like to treat the (under-ordered) salt and pepper squid as dessert.

13 Cosmo Place, WC1N 3AP

89. La Barra

The calling-card of La Barra, a Colombian restaurant under the railway arches at Elephant and Castle, was given to its original owner Maria-Luisa Riascos Solis by one of her chefs: a recipe for pica pollo, the Dominican version of fried chicken. That recipe has followed La Barra through each of its iterations and ownerships, the one Dominican dish on a Colombian restaurant’s menu – a passing of the baton from one version of Latin London to a newer one. Recently, I returned to La Barra to find Maria-Luisa’s son Juan serving and the pica pollo as good as ever: five pieces of chicken with a thick jacket of batter that, in its death throes upon contact with hot oil, has twisted and spluttered into dark brown curlicues. At the weekend, you’ll find the restaurant packed to the rafters, the speakers blaring music from Cali as families share soups, bandeja paisa and excellent empanadas. Near them, inevitably, will be a table of young men tackling the biggest pica pollo available.

147 Eagle Yard Arch, Maldonado Walk, SE1 6SP

88. Chez Bruce

Food writers with a time machine only want one thing: to go back to Harveys in 1987 when Marco was sweating noradrenaline and taste the meal that launched a thousand imitators. Chez Bruce is the closest thing we have. It occupies the same space on Wandsworth Common and shares the same restaurateur in Nigel Platts-Martin, but there is something of the land that time forgot about it, with a menu reassuringly 20 years behind trends. Fay Maschler once said that Chez Bruce, for its unwavering consistency, is a more impressive restaurant than Harveys, and the dishes I want here are the ones that feel like you’re ingesting that technique-led lineage, particularly the impossibly-rich stuffed trotter (taken from Marco, who took it from Pierre Koffmann), which is usually only on the menu in February. A special shout to the cheese board, which is the dictionary definition of ‘well kept’, and the first one that has ever made me understand having cheese as a course.

2 Bellevue Road, SW17 7EG

87. Zeret Kitchen

In truth, almost any Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant in South London would be at home on this list – we’re blessed with Rhoda, Ge’ez, Habesha, Saint Gabriel and countless more. But Zeret Kitchen on Camberwell Road is the one I keep gravitating to, partly because it’s one of the few that can attract both the art students and aunties wearing netelas, and partly because its owner Tafe Belayneh is a constant, reassuring presence, greeting you across the threshold as if you’ve entered her home. Belayneh works alchemy with lentils: her misir wot has an uncanny meaty depth of slow-cooked ragù, while the defin misir wot has the acidic butteriness of cottage cheese. The veg dishes are so strong that Zeret frequently gets mislabelled as a vegan restaurant, but the meat is equally good, particularly the spiced tartare of Belayneh’s special kitfo, or dulet – kidneys and tripe finely chopped into springy anonymity – which could win over even the most ardent offal sceptic.

216–218 Camberwell Road, SE5 0ED

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For all those waiting for a full list with links and addresses, we will be publishing it on our website later today. But that can wait, here’s number one:

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10. Ikoyi

When Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale opened Ikoyi in St James in 2017, they managed to kid themselves – or kid their PR – that they were opening a West African restaurant. Now that it’s on the Strand and no longer serving pink-glitter plantains, it has given up the pretence of being tied to any one region of Earth. Instead, it showcases Chan’s Martian cuisine – galactic black plectrums of dried citrus, squid chewed up and repurposed as marshmallow – equal parts menacing and beautiful.

The best of Chan’s food, particularly the self-contained smaller dishes that come earlier in the menu, has the quality of great perfumery – in that he is able, through the accretion of tiny, molecular details, to create new contours of flavour. Where Ikoyi differs from its competition is its almost-reckless use of titanic ingredients (long pepper, aged meat, saffron, chilli), balanced across multiple axes in an attempt to create something daintier than the sum of its many parts. Of course, the £350 question is whether Ikoyi is worth this kind of money. What meal can be? But if you have the cash and you want to try the pinnacle of this kind of virtuosic cooking, then you won’t find a better version in London.

180 Strand, WC2R 1EA

9. Kaieteur Kitchen Original

One measure of greatness is the highest level someone is capable of achieving. Another, which the goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel once used to discuss the greatness of Paul Scholes, is when a person’s ‘bottom level’, their worst performance, is so high that it barely registers. Using this metric, Faye Gomes, who is incapable of cooking a dish that isn’t at least an 8/10, is one of the greatest chefs in the city. When her Guyanese food business Kaieteur Kitchen moved from being a one-woman takeaway to a restaurant, you might have feared a slip of quality control, but instead the food is somehow even better. It’s the cooking of someone who is not looking to impress, or to impose their will, but to feed – with all the holistic qualities that entails. Most people don’t bother ordering and just leave it to Gomes to choose what’s good: fried fish, spiced pumpkin, spinach rice, roti – things you’d be happy eating everyday for the rest of your life. The pepper pot on Friday, however, is a once–a-year treat: meat and cow’s foot cooked down with orange peel and thyme for two days until it’s the colour of vinyl, with a phenomenal bittersweetness that comes from cassareep, a thick treacle made from cassava root.

If you told me you’d had a bad meal at any of the other restaurants on this list – even great ones higher up – I would commiserate and accept that they’d had an off day. If you told me you had a bad meal at Kaieteur Kitchen, I would simply shake your hand and tell you that I can’t help you.

Note: Kaieteur Kitchen is currently closed due to a dispute with its landlord, but you can find Faye cooking at Walworth Living Room on Fridays, including tonight. It remains on this list in the knowledge that form is temporary but class is permanent.

8. St. John Bread and Wine

If the original St. John was London’s Dogme 95, as much a manifesto as it was a restaurant, then Bread and Wine was Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver finally breaking their vow of chastity. At Bread and Wine, the menu is a more living, breathing thing than at the Smithfield mothership, freer to move with the times and with the sensibilities of its head chefs, who have included Lyles’s James Lowe and FKABAM’s Lee Tiernan. For the best part of a decade, Bread and Wine has been anchored by head chef (and the author of Parsi) Farokh Talati, who combines the spartan philosophy set down by Henderson with a freewheeling eclecticism, seeing how far the ethos stretches before breaking point (I have even seen one special with bulgur in it).

No other London restaurant contains so many different perfect routes through a menu. If solo, go for the cod roe and egg – which comes, unannounced, with the same layered confit potatoes that Quality Chop House later made viral – and perhaps some cuts of roast mutton, or a faggot in gravy; if in a pair, get a whole pie to share, beef dripping chips and a bowl of steamed greens; if there are more of you, order every pudding on the menu and a dozen madeleines. 15 years after the fact I still recall, with crystalline recollection, my first meal here as a young student who knew nothing: a breakfast of thick-cut bacon on homemade toasted bread, iced orange juice and black coffee – the hypervivid taste of real bacon, real bread, real orange juice, as if waking up from a simulation.

94–96 Commercial Street, E1 6LZ

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40. Levant Book Café

I once went to Fosselman’s, the legendary Alhambra ice cream parlour where customers eat sundaes by twilight, and mourned London’s lack of late-night dessert culture. I then had to check myself for my lack of patriotism. On a summer’s night in Park Royal, when the MOT garages have fallen silent, you’ll find Levant Book Café full of light and life: old men playing backgammon on ornate wooden boards, the trickle of water from a fountain and ‘Sa’altak Habibi’ on the stereo. Here, owner Sameh Asami has not just written a love letter to Damascus, but recreated a shard of another city in an industrial park. It is also, as Ruby Tandoh has noted, the best ice cream parlour in London, specialising in booza, the piney, mastic-heavy Syrian ice cream that is cut into slices rather than scooped. On weekends there is savoury food, but I always leave space for the halawet el jibn – fresh milk curds scented with rosewater and stuffed into rolled semolina and cheese dough.

39. Camille

When it opened, Camille was unfairly lumped into the ‘French brasserie named after a woman’ moment of 2023. In reality, Camille is the most successful of the St. John bastards, a group of modern London restaurants which have pushed the idea of ‘nose to tail’ to its seams and whose argot is as at ease with supermarket condiments as with regenerative agriculture and whole-animal butchery. Chef Elliot Hashtroudi has a love of monumental flavours: smoked fish and crustacean heads become condiments for meat, while offal is sometimes used as a provocation (if you order snout, you will get something that looks like a child’s drawing of a snout). However, there’s real technique anchoring it all – a dish of calves brains with purslane, for instance, could honour any trad bouchon. There’s something admirably freewheeling about Camille, a sense that it is making things up on the spot; it’s this spirit that stops its disparate elements from remaining clichés, instead becoming something wholly original.

38. The Devonshire

One of the most striking things about 2024’s buzziest restaurant is that it’s so easy to see The Devonshire in 20 years’ time as a Soho institution, as lived in and just there as Quo Vadis is, a place you can take your godmother post theatre because steak and sticky toffee pudding never go out of style. (As it happens, The Devonshire serves the same menu, almost beat for beat, as London’s oldest restaurant, Rules, and does every dish better.) Stripped back from the hype, restaurateur Charlie Carroll, publican Oisín Rogers and chef Ashley Palmer-Watt have created that most difficult of things: a restaurant that has no concept apart from being very good. Scallops with homemade bacon and malt vinegar is a perfect use of British flavours and ingredients, a reminder that the best of what we do holds up to anywhere on the continent. A pile of langoustines is just that, fire and sweet flesh. The bread and butter pudding, almost a soufflé, may well be the best you’ve ever had – it is certainly mine.

37. Tasty Jerk

When the wind catches the smoke right, you don’t need to worry about directions as you walk up Whitehorse Lane in Thornton Heath – the scent of barbecued meat from Tasty Jerk’s chimney extraction will hit you from a mile away. There was a time, when its founder Murphy Lawrence still worked there, that I would have told you that eating the Tasty Jerk jerk pork was one of the top three things you’re legally allowed to do in public in London. Although it doesn’t always hit those supreme heights under new management, nowhere else has taken its crown. The jerk pork doesn’t need sauce: bite into it dry and you can taste the long, careful cooking of the meat, the sting of Scotch bonnets, the breakdown of connective tissue, the fat rendering and crisping – soft as chicharrón and sweeter than the best siu yuk – decades’ worth of seasoning from the three blackened drums, and notes of char, soot and petroleum that rush up your nose and down your throat. The chicken is good too.

36. Mountain

What do you do when your first restaurant becomes the most-liked place in the city? Open somewhere as baffling as Mountain, of course. Tomos Parry’s difficult second restaurant is less people-pleasing than Brat, but it’s the one that keeps compelling me to return, its vast menu begging the question of what the best version of Mountain actually is. It’s not the grill, which you can go to Brat for. It could be the dishes that display recherché technique, like the Maillard-less patina of a spider crab omelette, whose money shot once provoked a table next to me to dissolve into raptures of delight. But I think Mountain is best experienced through small assemblages of cutting-edge produce that show off its sourcing, such as cured dairy beef with enough lactic funk to be its own self-contained cheeseburger, and through its braises, particularly a garnet-coloured tripe dish filled with so much collagen it sticks your lips together. I wouldn’t mind if restaurant three just did stews.

35. Towpath

The sighting of Towpath open after its four-month hibernation is the East-London-white-person equivalent of spotting the Eid moon – a sign of renewal. Lori de Mori and chef Laura Jackson’s canal-side cafe has consequently become synonymous with a style of light, vernal cooking: small plates of green things, undressed asparagus spears with a dip, fizzing, bright salads. And yet, I would like to make a case that Jackson’s best cooking is her sometimes entirely unseasonal larger dishes that seem to have wandered in from another restaurant entirely: a golden matzo ball soup of unimpeachable clarity, chicken meatballs with beans and parmesan that makes a case for the supremacy of spherical chicken, brisket with tzimmes that could put Reich’s out of business. I sometimes wonder what Jackson is doing for the other third of the year – there’s a great Ashkenazi Jewish deli hiding here, and the fact that there’s nowhere cosy to have her winter cooking is a minor London tragedy.

34. Sikatiô

A diasporic Ivorian restaurant as accomplished as Sikatiô should, by rights, be in Paris. And yet, improbably, it’s here in Brockley, where Lynda Beble and Brice Assemian are putting out some of the most skilful fish cooking in South London, including croaker in a deep-fried chainmail of skin – a show-stopping piece of soul food that tastes like if Colonel Sanders moved to the coast from deep Kentucky – and the soupe du pêcheur, a Satanic bouillabaisse of gently poached fish, crab and prawn with a broth that winds you with each gulp. There’s a strong sense of coup de grâce here, which extends to the meat dishes – lamb and guinea fowl suffused with wood smoke, or brisket in sauce graine, a gothic peanut soup made from the palm nut. My favourite thing on the entire menu might just be the fried plantain: cut on the diagonal and perfectly ripe, each piece has the same shape and sweetness as a teardrop.

33. Leo’s

Bright, the much-missed London Fields restaurant headed up by chefs Will Gleave and Giuseppe Belvedere, could never have lasted: it was like Simon and Garfunkel if there were two Paul Simons. While Gleave is now at Margate’s Sargasso, Belvedere has continued where he left off, at Clapton’s Leo’s, where he is putting out his most assured cooking to date. Eating here, in a city of mediocre pasta restaurants, can be a reminder of exactly what it is about Italian food that we’ve all fallen in love with: its generosity, directness and cheat-code flavour combinations. Riso al salto, the Milanese version of tahdig, is a simple dish – it’s just crispy, saffron rice – but adding a layer of fonduta transforms it into a decadent, savoury kind of truffle. Sharing mains, like a lasagne of gamey white ragù served with the spoon still in, or pork with a molten layer of Coombeshead ham, make it feel like you’re being cooked for by a friend who is secretly trying to seduce you.

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75. Roketsu

Despite its being the single biggest outsider influence on modern Western fine dining, true kaiseki has never really taken off in London. In the last 30 years, both sushi and ramen have become explicable, commonplace, but kaiseki remains as impenetrable as a koan: painterly, full of symbolism and radically seasonal in a way Natoora can only dream of. A meal at Roketsu, a tiny ten-seater room in Marylebone run by Daisuke Hayashi, is probably the best place in London to experience it. The illustrated key to the hassun course, detailing a tableau of tiny bites, can feel a bit like reading the DVD clues David Lynch gave for Mulholland Drive: baffling and oddly beautiful. In January, when I last visited, these included batons of burdock, herring roe like popping candy and a single cured metallic sardine. You don’t need to be told, though, that the sly film of translucent radish on top of a duck broth symbolises a frozen pond: it’s just sort of breathtaking.

Note: since this was written, Roketsu has changed menus and chefs, and we can no longer recommend it without a revisit.

74. Antepliler/Antepliler Doner/Antepliler Ciger & Beyran/Antepliler Kunefe

Picking a Green Lanes ocakbaşi is like supporting a football team: you get to choose once and then you’re stuck with it for life. Antepliler is an exception, because it offers something the others don’t. When its founder Ahmet Üstünsürmeli opened it in the early nineties, it was as a baklava shop; since then, he has added shopfront after shopfront of specialised businesses, from the main restaurant and takeaway lahmacun to, in quick succession, an offal specialist (now reopened after a decade hiatus), kunefe shop and doner restaurant. The result is that, across five businesses, you can pick and choose some of the best dishes on the street: İskender, cut thin from two vast and trunkless legs of lamb and covered at the table with hot melted butter; thin skewers of liver and sweetbread, served St. John-style with a punchy parsley and onion salad; and its unimpeachable lahmacun, as close to a true North London pizza style as we’ll ever get.

73. Saffron Kitchen

I once lamented to the LA Times’ restaurant critic Bill Addison about the lack of great khoresh – Iranian stews – in either of our cities’ restaurants, but that was before Saffron Kitchen miraculously opened in Finchley in 2024. The khoresh here rotate daily and read like a greatest hits of every province’s favourite dish. On lucky days you might find the viridian seafood stews of the south where owner Sam Hoseyni is from, like ghalieh meygoo, a Gordian knot of marine funk, sweetness and acidity; or northern dishes from Hoseyni’s wife Sima Valipour, including koofteh tabrizi, a Tabriz speciality of two huge rice-bound meatballs, each about the size of a baseball, stuffed with plum, barberries, fried onions and a single walnut. Every weekend, you’ll see older men with bald pates who all look like Salman Rushdie ordering bowls of kaleh pacheh, a lamb head soup most younger Iranians will tell you they can’t stomach. Make sure you finish with Saffron’s housemade bastani: saffron ice cream, frozen clotted cream and pistachio, a whole world in a scoop.

72. Nissi

Like dim sum restaurants, Cypriot tavernas in North London seem to exist on a spectrum: at one end are places that prioritise good food, and at the other are those that deliver great vibes in rooms covered in New River bougainvillea. Andy Panayiotou and Carlos Charalambous’s Nissi is slightly too prim for a proper, vibey Palmers Green taverna, but the food is even better than anything I remember from my childhood. At some tavernas you fill up on too many bought-in dips that bloat you before the fish arrives; at Nissi everything is timed to the second, from the dips and vegetables (fasolakia that actually tastes of the bean; salty, intense tarama) to the hot starters (a globe of kolokithokeftede that collapses like a soufflé; unimprovable fresh calamari). The fish course in particular is a barnstormer – a small gang of crispy red mullets, and a skewer of swordfish so burnished by the grill that the char forms a second skin. On food alone, this is the best taverna in the city.

71. Sollip

There is a version of Woongchul Park and Bomee Ki’s Korean-ish restaurant that I would want to eat at every week, which is a strange thing to say about a restaurant as intricate and corseted as Sollip. It would involve a large portion of Park’s sot-bap (which arrives seething in a cast iron pan, with a layer of crispy rice ready to be scraped out with a paddle), and a side of something barbecued – perhaps a pork jowl glazed in doenjang, with a layer of fat as thin as the gel in an After Eight. Then there would be a course of Korean teas with Ki’s magical desserts, ending with an oozing black sesame madeleine or a Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-green mugwort madeleine. However, this is London, so this lunchroom–teahouse hybrid doesn’t exist. Instead, Sollip has to be content with its Michelin star and operating one of London’s most elegant tasting menus, while I have to be content with Sollip being a once-a-year treat.

70. Phở Thuý Tây Café

Thúy Nguyễn may not serve your favourite phở in London, but she serves mine: a quiet, unassuming northern-style phở with a crystalline broth that I could drink for breakfast. Since Nguyễn first opened Phở Thuý Tây in Deptford in 2013, she has been a flagbearer for dishes popular with young Vietnamese students in Hanoi and now in London – steaming goat hot pots with plastic bags of rau răm, or intestines dipped in mắm tôm, a bureaucratic grey paste that tastes like the funk of a thousand prawn heads reduced to the density of a neutron star. Now the restaurant has moved again, from Old Kent Road to Surrey Quays, I have gravitated away from offal and towards Nguyen’s simpler cooking, like the crispy noodles bound together into round, rösti-like pucks, the cinnabar-warmth of the thit kho, or her unadorned phở. And as more Vietnamese students come to the UK looking for home comforts, Phở Thuý Tây increasingly looks like the future.

69. Vasantha Vilas

If you’re stuck for choice on what to order at this East Ham Tamil canteen, whose menu runs longer than some religious texts, then Vasantha Vilas offers a salve for the indecisive. The first is the mini tiffin, which gives you a dosa whose edges taste like a toasted cheese crisp, a lightly-spiced vada, two idli, a selection of chutneys, and (my favourite) pongal, which has the stiff consistency of a cream-heavy rice pudding. The second (if you ignore the Indo-Chinese and north Indian stuff) is the south Indian thali, which gives you six faultless vegetable curries (usually okra, spinach, beans and something else), whose complexity is only undermined by the likelihood that your favourite single bite will be the taste of plain white rice covered in a teaspoon of sweet ghee. Owners Kannan Murugan and Mohamed Thasleem have recently expanded the restaurant into Surbiton and Orpington, which means that Vasantha Vilas may soon be our own homegrown Saravanaa Bhavan.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s newsletter is a new 99 Guide, which covers London’s central neighbourhoods of Farringdon, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the Strand and Fleet Street.

To view the whole guide and map, you can subscribe to Vittles below for £7 a month or £59 for the year, which gives you full access to the back catalogue of features, essays, restaurant guides, recipes, and reviews.

Last year, we updated our bumper guide of 99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren’t Pret, which has often been described by our readers as the single most useful guide we’ve ever done. The goal was not to produce a destination guide, but rather an everyday guide for weekday lunches at places where you might be able to use the 30, 45, maybe 60 (if you’re lucky) minutes allotted to you to carve out some kind of small pleasure from the working day. These restaurants and cafés serve meals where efficiency and value are the highest virtues – things which Pret excels at – but are also places where you can take a pleasant lunch break and actually enjoy some hot food.

That first guide was for the West End because it was the place I knew best and I could draw on my own experience of working in the area for a decade. However, this second guide, to what estate agents call ‘London’s Midtown’, and which comprises Farringdon, Clerkenwell, Holborn, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the Strand and Fleet Street, plus the southern end of King’s Cross, has taken us longer. While the West End is a neighbourhood of leisure, these are neighbourhoods of institutions: UCL, King’s College, SOAS, the Inns of Court, the British Library. As such, there are an overwhelming number of restaurants and cafés that focus on lunch, serving the nearby working populations. It’s taken a year of eating and research, along with the help of many contributors, but I think this is our best guide yet: it contains recommendations for the new Chinatown of Bloomsbury, sandwich shops and wrap stands, the city’s most interesting street food market, tons of falafel, excellent Vietnamese and Korean takeaways, and many many more.

We have also updated our West End guide, which you can find here. There is a brand new map — if you have the old map saved to your phone it’s now out of date and you can download the new one below.

We will publish the third central London guide, to the City, Barbican and Finsbury, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, later this year. Until then: eat slowly, take an extra ten minutes of lunch break and always, always take a shit on company time.

All entries by Jonathan Nunn unless otherwise stated.

Contributors:

BB – Barclay Bram, SW – Sean Wyer, YS – Yanyu Sun, EP-H – Ellen Peirson-Hagger, JB – Jonathan Beckman, CW – Charlie Wright, KLW – Kylie Lysette Warner, GH – Grace Hall, ST – Sandrine Tiller, JW – Janis Wong, LS – Luca Spiller, JA – Joyce Arnold, MA – Maurice Abboudi, MA-C - Montague Ashley-Craig, TO – Toyo Odetunde, TaO - Tara Okeke, GK – Geraldine Krall, HP – Hoagy Pollen, GC – Gavin Cleaver, CJ – Cristina Jerney, LC – Lucy Carter, CM – Caroline Marques, SQ – Siqi Chong, NC – Naseer Chia, SS – Sejal Sukhadwala, SB – Saira Banu, VC – Vitória Croda, KP – Kelly Pochyba, EF – Ed Fenwick, RA – Riana Austin, LT - Liz Tray, IR - Isaac Rangaswami, NB - Nick Bramham.

Holborn, Chancery Lane and Fleet Street

Lebanese Grill Express
The uniform at Lebanese Grill – the most famous restaurant on road, if that road is Leather Lane – is blacked-out shoes, black tracksuit and black balaclava, although they’ll let you order a fantastic half chicken, chips and spicy rice if you’re off-theme. There is no relation to the Elephant and Castle takeaway of the same name, apart from having the same menu. 84 Leather Lane, EC1N 7TT

Leather Lane Market
If I wrote out everything you could get at Leather Lane Market there would be an extra 30 entries, so it’s worth a guide in itself, but I will say this: no other market in the city gives as much insight into the eating habits of Londoners than this one. Grilled chicken, wraps, katsu, grilled chicken wraps, katsu grilled chicken, grilled chicken katsu wraps and much more. Gebeta, one of the few good central Ethiopian restaurants, also runs a stall there. Leather Lane, EC1N 7TJ

The Tempeh Man at Leather Lane Market
Tempeh can be tricky to get right when cooking at home, but William Mitchell, the titular tempeh man, has spent years honing his craft to offer two perfected dishes: the tomatoey cumin version and the creamier, coconutty lode. Whichever you pick, this stall will convince even the most tempeh-sceptical of the joy of soy. Two carb-y sides are on offer (rice or a flatbread) and the portions are generous, coming in at just £7.50 a box. The stall is only there on a Tuesday and has a consistent yet fast-moving queue, making it perfect for a first-day-in-the-office treat. As Mitchell told me as he handed over my giant box of rice and stew: ‘This will do you good.’ LC Leather Lane, EC1N 7TR

The coffee shops of Leather Lane
It’s not exactly lunch, but Leather Lane is blessed with three of the most interesting coffee shops in London. Prufrock Coffee, one of the originators of the London coffee scene, is now a brunch spot that still has excellent coffee, while Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood’s Colonna and Smalls has opened at the top end, a second branch of his Bath original. Most intriguingly, the Chinese-owned Comp Coffee has recently opened, and its list of special drinks – ristretto with freeze distilled milk, fermented pineapple syrup cold brew – are every bit as good and silly as a Los Angeles coffee shop.

Mugen
I went to Mugen for the first time last year for research during my review of Hase-Ya, as it was one of the few other restaurants in the city serving matsumae sushi, with its lightly cured mackerel and a thin layer of kelp. The matsumae here is as good as Hase-Ya’s, and if you come with someone, it makes an ideal dish to share with a couple of teishoku sets. 9-15 Leather Lane, EC1N 7ST

Kin
Kin ticks all the boxes of a fusion restaurant: variety of options, aesthetically pleasing dishes, nicely designed interiors and overall good quality meals. It also works for more formal occasions, such as lunch with your manager. LS 88 Leather Lane, EC1N 7TT

Assenheims
We don’t talk enough about how weird Assenheims is: a pan-Latin American chain with a German name whose branches mainly congregate around the City. The order here is chicken – cooked on the grill until the skin is snappable, with rice and green sauce. It’s Lebanese Grill, but for people who know about high-yield bonds. 4 Holborn, EC1N 2LL

Dilieto
Not to be mistaken for the similarly named Di Lieto café in Oval, you will see the line for Dilieto’s stretching down Fleet Street before you see the shopfront. It’s essentially the type of Italian-ish sandwich shop that you get across Mayfair and the City, but done better. I am a creature of habit and usually just get a number one melt. Half a sandwich is actually enough for one person. 175 Fleet St, EC4A 2EA

7 Floor
A brilliant assam laksa specialist in Holborn Food Hub. The prawn mee, the hor fun and particularly the sweet chee cheong fun are crowd-pleasers (and honestly, I prefer them), but the assam laksa is dark and dank, ‘pekat’ (thick) as Malaysians like to say, and more stew than soup. I wish it did curry mee on weekdays, but it’s a weekend-only special. 78 Southampton Row, WC1B 4AR

Dapur
A nasi campur specialist and arguably the best Malaysian restaurant in London. I love the lesser-seen dishes from Johor, like the pinkish ayam ros Johor, or its steamed tofu dipped in egg, then deep-fried and stirred into sambal. The unsung heroes of the menu are the vegetables, like stir-fried green beans that still retain a snap, or squash cooked down in coconut milk until it is almost baby food. Get here early, as the best dishes sell out. 13 Lamb’s Conduit Passage, WC1R 4RH

Pho S82
Most Vietnamese restaurants around central, understandably, specialise in bánh mì and easily takeawayable meats and rice. Pho S82, tucked around the back of Holborn station, is one of the few that really specialises in pho. The first time I went there, it served me the best beef pho I’ve had in London outside of Hoxton, Surrey Quays or Deptford (the slow-cooked beef pho is also great). 10 Little Turnstile, WC1V 7DX

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles! We hope that you’ve had a wonderful Christmas.

Today is the second part of our review of the year. To listen to part one - our end of year podcast with Adam Coghlan, Jonathan Nunn and Hester van Hensbergen - then please click here. If you wish to access all paywalled articles in full, including Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday, then please subscribe below for £7/month or £59/year – each subscription helps us pay writers fairly and gives you access to our entire back catalogue.

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The best and worst of London food (media) in 2024, by Jonathan Nunn

If I had to sum up the last year in the London food world, the first word that would come to mind is ‘charlatanry’. 2024 has been the year of gold leaf dosa, tuna fight club, chocolate covered strawberries, luxe jacket potatoes, 90 minute queues for inedible sandwiches, the Ilford biryani wars, the Ilford mango soft-serve wars, the New Haven pizza wars, adana kebabs sold by the metre, the Imran Khan-themed biryani shop, and short-lived micro-trends so absurd that the era of Salt Bae has started to look like a relatively conservative and stable interregnum. Hidden gem culture has spiralled into farce: this year I witnessed the food hall inside Battersea Power Station, a £9 billion development so huge that TfL redrew the zones of the Tube map to fit round it, get called a ‘hidden gem’ on an Instagram reel. At the time of writing, the single biggest London trend on TikTok is a sandwich shop in Bromley that puts mashed potato in between bread.

This year has also seen the biggest transformational shift in British food media within my lifetime. The most influential archivists of London’s food are now Gobble PR and Jolly, a YouTube duo with 4.2 million followers whose videos depict amazed British people pretending to eat Five Guys for the first time for the benefit of Americans – an act of treason that would, in happier times, see them sent to Tyburn. Meanwhile, three of what would have historically been the most influential positions in London food media – the Observer restaurant critic, the Evening Standard restaurant critic, and the editor of Observer Food Monthly – are either vacant or abolished, with no clarity on whether these jobs will continue to exist in 2025. This radical transfer of power – from traditional to social media, from guys who went to public school to guys who went to slightly less impressive public schools – is now complete.

There was a time, not that long ago, when I might have been more even-handed about this shift; that maybe this is the price that needs to be paid for the overdue democratisation of taste-making. But I was kidding myself: this is a moment of steep decline, equivalent to the critical gutting that has happened across other cultural media. Food writers used to shape culture as much as they documented it; over the last five decades, the Standard and the Observer alone have given us Jane Grigson, Nigel Slater, Fay Maschler, Delia Smith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It’s hard to see where their replacements are going to come from – not because there isn’t talent on social media, but because there is little ambition left in print media to take the subject of food seriously in the way it once did. Maybe this is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a gurn and an undisclosed paid-partnership.

I often think about the favourite line of a certain restaurant critic: that the only job of being a critic is to sell papers. But what do you do once the papers stop being sold? What do you do once the paper itself is sold? Now we know the answer: sell McNuggets.

2024: The Year in Charlatanry

Comedown of the year

11.00am

11.05am

Meals of the year 10-6

Note: I have left off a few meals that I plan to write about next year

10. Dried shrimp rice roll, at West Rice Roll King (New York)
9. Roast suckling pig on rice, at Peach Garden (Birmingham)
8. Lapin à la moutarde, at Josephine Bouchon
7. Tablier de sapeur, pike quenelles and rhum baba, at Le Garet (Lyon)
6. End of year Christmas meal at 40 Maltby Street

Observation of the year

Most eaten dish of the year

In the first half of 2024, I got into a habit of ordering the khumb palak from Kokum in East Dulwich, an exceptional side-dish-turned-main of spinach and mushroom. But it’s too expensive to justify eating regularly, so I switched my allegiance to Z’s Dera on Rye Lane, a Pashtun take-away whose palak sabzi is the goth mirror version of Kokum’s, long-stewed, dun-green and absolutely delicious on rice. The general standard is almost as good as Afghan Grill in Bethnal Green, and when combined with their excellent chapli kebabs and kabuli pulao this combo has been a constant life-saver when I’m out of all other options.

Freudian slip of the year

Further sections in this newsletter

Comedown of the year
Meals of the year 10-6
Most eaten dish of the year
Observation of the year
Freudian slip of the year
Poster of the year
Letter to the editor of the year
Influencer of the year
“My father would womanise; he would drink; he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.”
Most creative gaming of Google Reviews
Most ‘will this do?’ moment in 2024 restaurant criticism
Restaurant of the year
Collab of the year
Biggest fall from grace this year
Least dignified Topjaw appearance of the year
Meals of the year 5-1
Favourite articles of the year
Surprise of the year
Fiasco of the year
Predictions for 2025

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. This is the second in a two-part series on how the accession of the EU8 countries to the European Union twenty years ago changed British food culture. On Monday we published a cultural history of the polski sklep, which you can read here.

Today’s guide is written by Kasia Tomasiewicz (KT), Marta Zboralska (MZ) Stephen Buranyi (SB), Barclay Bram (BB), Pawel Glodowski (PG), Jonathan Nunn (JN), Gavin Cleaver (GC), Jelena Sofronijevic (JS), Marianna Janowicz (MJ), Mehlaqa Khan (MK), Isaac Rangaswami (IR), Harry Lambous (HL), Sean Wyer (SW), and Sam Wilson (SaW)

Also a reminder that our selection of six art prints made in collaboration with illustrator Sing Yun Lee and photographer Michaël Protin are available to buy via our website. Today is the last day you’ll be able to order them with the possibility of Christmas delivery.

Shop Prints

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A Vittles EU8 Restaurant Guide

Where to find the best food from the EU8 countries in London restaurants

In 2004, the European Union expanded to include eight new countries – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia – opening up a whole swathe of Eastern Europe to the West, and vice-versa. In the 20 years since, the UK has left Europe but the EU8 have left an indelible mark on Britain, including, to various degrees, its food culture. This influence is diffuse, complex and often hidden – the most obvious legacy has been its effect on the British hospitality and agricultural labour markets, but also the resurgence of the polski sklep, now a mainstay of the British high street, and whose cross-culture appeal has turned it into, in the words of Kasia Tomasiewicz and Marta Zboralska, ‘a Polish hub, a British corner shop and a pan-East European space’.

In London, the influence extends further, particularly into community-oriented restaurants in heavily Polish and Lithuanian neighbourhoods such as Streatham, Ealing, Acton, Beckton and Leytonstone. Across the city there are Polish bakeries, Lithuanian pubs, Czechoslovak beer halls, Hungarian grocers, Latvian bars (well, one), British-Polish milk bars, Balkan shops selling Slovenian produce, innumerable social clubs and, still, remarkably, almost no Estonian food. This 20+ restaurant guide, compiled and written by Vittles contributors, intends to be a rough guide to all of them, albeit with a couple of exceptions. Barclay Bram’s vegan Polish pop-up Bracia (which he co-runs with Karol Adamiak) and Pawel Glodowski’s Polska Kitchen are both ineligible, due to being contributors, but are each pushing their cuisines in new directions and show, in their own ways, a future for the food of the EU8. After two decades of growth and a population that has exhausted its capacity to be surprised by spice, it feels like we’re at the start of a city-wide culture shift that moves this food from the permanently untrendy to sought-after. The long arc of history does, after all, bend towards dill. JN

Czech and Slovakian

Bohemia House

Like the bridge club a few doors down, Bohemia House in West Hampstead occupies a building with three floors and a lot of history. Since 1946 this grand detached house has been a meeting place for Czech and Slovak people, including the soldiers and airmen who fought with the British against the Nazis in the Second World War. As you come through the front door, you pass a brownish-red plaque commemorating them. In the main dining room, another metal plate says čest jejich památce!, or “We honour their memory!”

Two years ago I tried my first řízek, goulash and knedlíky here. But I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t drunk any lager at Bohemia House until last month. When I went back, its calm, function-room-like energy was just how I remembered it, aside from the addition of a tinsel-draped Christmas tree. As Mariah Carey played, I learned that Budvar Dark tastes like Coke and that a glass mug of Radegast should be poured with at least 30 per cent foam. I also ate my first Slovakian halušky, a deeply satisfying potato dumpling dish enriched by sheep’s cheese, crispy onions and generous lumps of bacon. IR

74 West End Lane, NW6 2LX

Lithuanian

Berneliu Uzeiga

Beckton was once a mythical realm for me, a place where my dad told me everything I flushed down the toilet would end up. Since then, I’ve learnt Beckton is real and has rebranded as an East London destination for dry slope skiers and retail park shoppers. Today, the most interesting thing about Beckton is that it is the centre of Lithuanian London, which is why the chain pub Berneliu Uzeiga chose to open here (with a second branch in Leytonstone). Berneliu Uzeiga markets itself as a pub with decor somewhere between a castle and a school holiday chalet: lurid pink-orange walls, plush benches, melancholy Lithuanian electro-trash, and Guy Fieri on the TV. It’s a riot. The meny is an exercise in how many combinations of pork, potato and dairy it’s possible to eat before exhaustion sets in (with enough sauerkraut and beetroot horseradish, you can get through all of them). The best and most evil of all options can be found in the snacks: soldiers of brown toast rubbed with raw garlic and covered in grated cheese. This is cuffing-season food. JN

16 Mary Rose Mall, E6 5LX

Lt Kebabai Kimo Street Food

If you get off at Dagenham Dock rail station and walk down the inhospitable A13 into central London, you will pass warehouses, builders’ merchants and London’s second-largest go-karting track. You will walk until you find a small cabin located in a car park with an unusually large stream of people waiting outside – mostly people in cars, or builders working nearby. They have come for Lithuanian doner kebabs: thinly shaved pork and beef, all served in lavash or on a plate with chips and pickles, smothered in garlic and chilli sauces – it’s similar to what you get in a Turkish kebab shop, except with 1,200 percent more dill and the addition of fried dumplings. It would be supreme late-night-drinking food if it wasn’t for the fact you’re most likely going to eat it stone-cold sober in the afternoon. JN

Barking, IG11 0SN

Triple One

The Pakistani part of Triple One, a dual Lithuanian and Pakistani café in Lewisham co-owned and run by Rasa and Kasha, is a display cabinet packed with Tupperware of chicken biryani, carrot halwa, keema, haleem, nihari and mutton samosas, all cooked from scratch by Kasha’s mum in the back. The Lithuanian part is best represented by šaltibarščiai, the dayglo-pink, kefir-based, chilled beetroot soup, teeming with dill and cucumber, a chopped boiled egg lurking beneath. The piquancy of the kefir is augmented with sour cream and sweetened with earthy beetroot; the addition of milk balances it and creates a satisfying viscosity and throat-coating chill similar to a Yop.

There’s also dessert. ‘People make a special journey back for it,’ Rasa says, beaming over a fat wedge of medutis, a Lithuanian honey cake of gently spiced sponge layers with intervals of sour cream frosting. Rasa is tentative but passionately optimistic about bringing Lithuanian food to an area otherwise totally bereft of it and plans to expand her own offerings considerably. But she needs to be sure there’s adequate (and deserved) clamour for it first. SaW

111 Loampit Vale, SE13 7TG

Niam Niam

A well-made cepelinas – a kind of Hindenburg-shaped potato dumpling – should have the heft of a comical weapon, like a water balloon filled with sour cream. The ones at Niam Niam, a new Lithuanian restaurant in Seven Kings, are textbook examples, although, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t see how even two people could get through a whole portion here given the amount of cheese, cream, bacon and meat loaded into the potato dough. Solo diners should probably go for the pork kotletai – meatballs pitched somewhere between Ikea-sized and a burger – that come covered in cheese sauce on dill mash, or go for the schnitzels which arrive with a girdle of melted cheese and mushrooms, and Thousand Island dressing. They also have the benefit of coming with a lesser seen item on Lithuanian menus: vegetables.

It’s still early days for Niam Niam, so some items on the menu are out, but I would love to come back specifically for the kugelis, a potato and bacon cake – a highly un-kosher version of its etymological sister dish. JN

731 High Rd, IG3 8RL

Krantas

You would be forgiven for walking straight past Krantas, a cosy, unassuming restaurant situated among the hustle and bustle of Europe’s longest outdoor street market down Walthamstow High Street. Yet, for the last 16 years, this family-run restaurant has been a pillar of the sizable local Lithuanian community.

The fried rye bread and cheese is everything you could hope for in a starter: crispy, crunchy, chewy, garlicky and salty. I then got a little carried away when I ordered the two most filling items on the menu, pre main course. The waitress kindly smiled at me, knowing full well what was in store. The cepelinai and the house special, kranto dumplings, were both topped with ladles of garlic sour cream, bacon and spring onion. The wonderfully satisfying chew of potato dough and accompaniments brought to mind two simple adjectives: hearty and delicious.

I wish I could have stayed for the live music but instead I sat back vibing to Island in the Sun by Weezer from out of the tinsel-adorned speakers within what felt like an LED-lit winter cabin dream before making my exit. Believe me when I say that this was the first time in more than 20 years that I’ve not finished my dinner and left with a white carrier bag of defeat. HL

28 High St, E17 7LD

Behind the paywall: where to find Hungarian lángos, London’s only Latvian bar, Slovenian cola, Polish bakeries, Polish milk bars, Polish pancakes, Polish pierogi, Polish-Mexican…

Hungarian

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue — including Normal Country, London restaurant guides, recipes, and all new columns.

This week, Gavin Cleaver, a British man who for longer than he ever thought possible, was paid to eat barbecue across the state of Texas, is here again with some important public service journalism: on home turf, this is his bold bid to help citizens of his former home nation avoid making mistakes when eating around London.

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Clueless No More

Getting important things wrong doesn’t need to be a national characteristic, so here is a guide for Americans eating in London, by Gavin Cleaver

Well that was a rough week, wasn’t it? Maybe you’re thinking of emigrating, or at least spending some of your five days of holiday time away from the US. Perhaps London? Although, judging by my experience of Americans, you’re probably thinking about visiting a more culinary destination. When I was living in Texas and visiting one of Dallas’s many outstanding Vietnamese or Korean restaurants, Americans would often say to me that it must be so exciting getting to try all these new cultures of food! A real break from British cuisine, they suggested, imagining it to be exclusively comprised of some neon orange beans on top of a bedraggled piece of bread. 

This is obviously the wrong way to think about London’s food. I want to put it to you, the standardised unit of American I’m imagining while writing this, that London is one of the best food cities in the world, but it is constantly assailed by Americans posting online about getting terrible food there. The very slim intersection of ‘places in London where you will hear American accents’ and ‘places that are actually good’ consists mainly of Duke’s Bar. This is not our fault, but neither, given what you’re working with, is it yours. Guides for Americans on where to spend your money in London do actually make your life difficult, sometimes purposely so – we have a vested interest in gatekeeping and sending you to visit the same mediocre tourist spots, to buy our most evil football clubs and our most hyped steak sandwiches, leading to content like this, rage-bait which compares a Toby Carvery to a Brazilian steakhouse and started an internet pile-on.

It’s a shame because getting mad at things on the internet has replaced what could be a cross-cultural collaboration and a deeper understanding of the outstanding food in both countries. While I have seen food crimes growing up in the UK, it is similarly true that I’ve seen queues out the door at a branch of buffet chain Golden Corral, where they serve food in open buckets. I have eaten a ‘green bean casserole’ made from mushroom soup, cornflakes and mozzarella. I have enjoyed a ‘green bean casserole’ made from mushroom soup, cornflakes and mozzarella. I have seen a Virginian make a salad with five different colours of jelly and no other ingredients. There is an equivalence here that I don’t think has been explored: a shared heritage of right-wing governments and questionable food decisions. Here is my guide on how to avoid falling victim to the latter.

But first…

Bad decisions Americans make in London

Afternoon tea, fish and chips, Borough Market, American food and more

1. Afternoon tea

Because I live in London, this is not something I’ve ever done. It's a special occasion thing done by tourists which has so much marketing heft behind it (because it makes so much money for the restaurants) that it perpetuates itself as a London Thing. The quality of the food at afternoon tea is moot, really, because you’re doing tea at Fortnum & Mason/The Ritz/Claridge’s so that you can tell everyone you did tea at Fortnum & Mason/The Ritz/Claridge’s. It’s an experiential bragging right. No one is going because afternoon tea is doing boundary-pushing things with sandwiches.

The consensus from friends who have done it was that they liked Fortnum & Mason and The Ritz. The Ritz is booked up six months in advance and has a strict dress code (not even I have the right clothes to be allowed into The Ritz), so I went to Fortnum & Mason, on Piccadilly, for your benefit. It was £180 for two people, it’s a nice room, the food is fine, the tea very good, and they will indeed bring you unlimited sandwiches. However, if you walk a few minutes and go to Brasserie Zedel instead, you won’t get afternoon tea but you will get excellent food (a 1-2-3 punch of pig’s head terrine, coq au vin and île flottante will set you back just over half of one afternoon tea elsewhere) in one of the grandest rooms in London. The problem is that if you told grandma you went to Brasserie Zedel instead of Fortnum & Mason she wouldn’t be very impressed. Make peace with yourself on that front.

2. Fish and chips

If you find yourself in London in a sit-down restaurant (especially a pub!) and one of the items on the menu is fish and chips, it would be a grievous mistake to follow through with your tourist inclinations. It will be expensive and bad, and you will feel confused about why the British like this and then post about it online, contributing to yet more tired online food discourse. If you feel you must, make sure the chippy is off-white and shambolic, and only serves fish wrapped in paper for takeaway. I like Elite Fish Bar in Bermondsey because it’s next to my house, and that is as much thought as the average Londoner puts into fish and chips. That is unless you want to make an hour detour to find the last three London chippies who fry traditionally in beef dripping  – all of which are Cypriot-owned, naturally.

Or you could take a train to the seaside! Whitstable comes with the added bonus of Wheeler’s Oyster Bar, which would instantly be one of central London’s best restaurants if it was in central London. 

3. Going to a pub for roast dinner

On a Sunday, you’ll see that every pub has a sign outside saying they have a roast on. Almost universally, from the fanciest gastropub to the transport terminus-adjacent chain pub, these will feature dry, overcooked meat with vegetables, cooked to wildly different consistencies on the same plate, and under-seasoned lumps of roast potato. There are a lot of operational reasons for why it’s difficult for a pub to make a good roast dinner – it’s like choosing to casually get a Thanksgiving dinner out. Make friends with a Brit and ask to go to their mum’s house. 

4. Pie and mash

Despite the deluge of insufferable American YouTube videos claiming that every Londoner eats pie and mash, I had not been to a pie and mash shop in a very long time before writing this guide. There is a reason for this: eaten plain, the food is exactly as bland as the internet warns (the mash is actively bad). But!

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Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, we’re releasing Ruby Tandoh’s fully updated guide to the best ice cream guide in London. To read Ruby’s project on London ice cream – Beyond Gelato, from 2023 – please click here.

There is a map of all 20 ice creams mentioned in this guide, plus notes on 135 places that didn’t quite make it, at the end of this newsletter. We have also made easy to use maps for last month’s sandwich guide and bakery guide, which you can find here and here. All the maps are available to subscribers for £5/month or £45/year.

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The Vittles London Ice Cream Guide 2024, by Ruby Tandoh

London is not, on the surface of things, an ice cream city. On a ramble through Soho, you will be confronted with the best examples of our worst ice cream tendencies: nominally Italian ice cream heaped in gusty peaks; bad gelato garnished with Raffaello; good ice creams, nefariously funded; lazy novelties; seatless parlours; Biscoff. Still, we do have a fragmented – and often incongruous – scene. In the middle of Park Royal is a café where you can get a long fang of baklava sandwiched with Syrian booza. In the north of the city, there’s saffron ice cream with shards of clotted cream and pistachio, stuffed between two wafer moons. In the east and west, you can find tall towers of mango or sheeryakh soft serve. Some of these businesses are part-time, a side hustle, WFH, self-taught or opportunistic, and call to mind London’s original ice cream vendors: nineteenth-century Italian migrants who sold milk ices itinerantly, on the streets and with an entrepreneurial zeal. They’re a reminder that ice cream can, and even should, be a dissident art.

In the year since I first wrote this guide, ice cream in London has not unrecognisably changed. There is no emerging scene of artisan kulfi makers, bingsu hyperspecialists and businesses making dondurma with the same care that we’ve come to expect from our bakeries. There are, however, a few places where the scene has leaned into its most single-minded, occasionally silly, and therefore best, ice cream impulses. The soft-servification of London has been coming for a while, the consequence of soft-serve machines entering the non-specialist arena in the same way slushie machines did in the early 2000s. The latest iteration has its centre of gravity in Ilford, where a mango soft serve has made Hafiz Juice Corner – a steady and fiercely local juice and kulfi vendor – into a city-wide name, at least among followers of the halal food scene. Across the city in Harrow, Baharistan is making skyscraper cones of mango and sheeryakh-accented soft serve. The fact that they call the latter vanilla – even though it does not taste of vanilla but of cardamom and milk – shows you the existential complexities of the idea of ‘plainness’.

Japanese cafés are also going above and beyond, with a number of them making unnecessarily good ice cream, in small spaces, for absolutely no good reason besides pride in the product itself. You can – and many places do – just buy a cheap freezer cabinet and a starter palette of Marshfield Farm or the now inescapable Hackney Gelato if you want to make a quick summer buck. You do not need to make little orbs of vegan strawberry ice or scoop grassy, homemade matcha ice cream into a little ceramic bowl, or churn red bean paste with cream and sugar, but these cafés do.

For the 2024 version of this guide, I visited each of the original top 16 again, plus most of the new vendors that have sprung up this year. Some have fallen off, others have held rank. It gave me joy to realise that I’d have to expand the list to 20 places, because ice cream in London is getting better, bit by bit, and excellence is slowly diffusing across the city. Each place on this list has something about it that sets it apart from the legions of other ice cream shops in London, a constellation of traits that maps roughly onto the C.U.N.T. (Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent) matrix of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Talent is an ice cream that is technically perfect, with a physically implausible, almost alchemic texture. Some places are here for their Nerve: an incredible attention to detail in creating unusual flavours, or having the pluck to do something, anything, different. The Charisma of a place boils down to whether it is somewhere I really want to be – somewhere that pays attention to the art of serving ice cream, not just the science of making it. Most important of all, though, is Uniqueness: great ice cream is exactly itself, mirroring the dreams, memories and idiosyncrasies of the person making it and the place where it’s made. Every one of the following ice cream makers express both themselves and London through the medium of milk and ice.

Note: unlike last year, these ice creams are listed in no particular order

Finks

There are two genres of ice cream sandwich. The first includes cookies with scoops, saffron bastani in two wafer moons, a slice of neapolitan ice cream between rafts of edible-grade polystyrene and Maxibons. These have the same teleology as any other sandwich, which is just to make a messy thing portable. The other kind of ice cream sandwich is the result of questions that most of us would never think to ask. What if a hot fudge sundae had the build of a Ford Bronco? What would a biblically correct Snickers look like? The outstanding ice cream sandwiches at Finks in Finsbury Park are just this – notably the peanut butter caramel one, bookended with brownie-like, dark chocolate cake.

Fink’s Salt & Sweet, 70 Mountgrove Rd, N5 2LT and other locations

Saffron Kitchen

I first tried Saffron’s bastani last year, when the shop was a juice and ice cream bar on the nape of the North Circular. Since then it has moved to Ballards Lane in Finchley, at a point of convergence of some of the most interesting Iranian food in the city right now. The shop now sells regional stews, but you’ll still find that chewy saffron-gold bastani too. The tubs and wafer sandwiches would be Too Much if not for the delicacy of the add-ins: frozen clotted cream shards, pistachio slivers and the wistful note of rose at the end of a bite. To my mind, Saffron’s bastani is the ice cream gestalt – the world in every bite.

124 Ballards Lane, N3 2PA

Levant

Levant is, by far, the best ice cream parlour in London. When I last visited it was Eid al-Fitr and the place was teeming with families playing board games, sticky-mouthed children fighting over cool pistachio booza sandwiched in warm baklava and guys nursing a single plate of halawet el-Jibn between them while orchestrating a queen’s gambit. It is the only place in London that I can think of that rivals the late-night ice cream culture of Los Angeles. In Park Royal, Sameh Asami has created the elusive sweet spot where as much care is given to how the booza is eaten – at leisure, with the whole family, in comfort – as how it is made. There is a branch of Levant in Shepherd’s Bush (which sells some intriguing mastic-set scoop ice creams as well as the more traditional Syrian booza), but the original in the middle of London’s largest industrial estate is the finest, which goes to bolster the central thesis of this guide: that the best ice cream is seldom what or where you’d expect.

26-28 Standard Rd, NW10 6EU

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This is an updated version of our guide to central London lunch options, which is part 1 in a series of three. It covers the West End — Soho, Chinatown, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, and Mayfair.

To read the entirety of this guide, please subscribe below. There is a full Google map of all entries at the end.

There are lunches you wait for, the ones you’re willing to debase yourself for by standing in a queue that winds through London Fields like a tapeworm. But that kind of destination dining is not the way most people eat every day. A weekday lunch is usually time-dependent, a way of using the 30, 45, maybe 60 (if you’re lucky) minutes allotted to you by the working day to carve out some kind of small pleasure for yourself, a meal where efficiency and cheapness are the highest virtues. Too often, this type of eating means poor lunches that do little except alleviate hunger. Most often of all, it means Pret.

Pret a Manger does not offer value or quality but it does promise something priceless: ruthless consistency. Most of the time we don’t want to take a risk on a bad meal, so we accept a known one. Pret and its ilk – Itsu (Japanese Pret), Joe and the Juice (Scandi Pret), Leon (Pret for anhedonists) – prey on this well-founded fear, and have become so much a part of the everyday infrastructure of our lives that sometimes we can no longer imagine an alternative. We take sandwiches away and sit at our desks, reducing that half hour of freedom to ten minutes of efficient, prosaic eating. It’s food to fulfil a function, and that function is to make you work more.

Taking the time to have a pleasant lunch break and actually enjoy your food is a small adjustment to your day that can have an outsized effect on your happiness. During the ten years that I spent working near Oxford Circus, I used my own lunch breaks to do just this, working out the exact radius that would allow me just enough time to walk to and from a restaurant or café, sit down and savour my food, even if on a nearby bench. Still, of those 2,000-3,000 or so lunches, a significant proportion were a waste of my time and money. This is why Vittles, with the help of a small cohort of contributors, has put together a fully tested and newly updated list of 99 restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and takeaways, all within a 15-minute walk or a five-minute tube ride of Oxford Circus, covering Soho, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, Mayfair, Chinatown and St. James. In this area you’ll find 38 (and counting) Prets, but you’ll also find some of the best katsu curries in the city, Sudanese, Egyptian, Palestinian and Lebanese falafel, Uyghur and Uzbek noodles, and three or four of London’s great sandwich shops.

Remember: eat slowly, take an extra ten minutes of lunch break, and always, always take a shit on company time. 

All entries by Jonathan Nunn unless otherwise stated.

Contributors

AKK - Adrienne Katz Kennedy
DB - Dan Biddulph
GC - Gavin Cleaver
HD - Hannah Donovan
IR - Isaac Rangaswami
JH- Joel Hart
KLW – Kylie Lysette Warner
KP - Kelly Pochyba
MA - Montague Ashley-Craig
MB - Maazin Buhari
SW - Sean Wyer
TF - The Fence

Chinatown and Leicester Square

Wong Kei
As food blogger bellaphon once put it, it’s the Mother of last resorts in Chinatown – the service is curt and quick, the food is quick and hot, and the tea is hot and free. I usually order the won ton soup (without noodles, with crispy pork), the stuffed aubergine, green pepper and tofu on rice (above), or any of the pork chop dishes. If I was mayor I would roll Wong Keis out across London like Pret. (For more recommendations use the greatest lunch repository on the internet: the Wong Kei Tumblr). 41-43 Wardour St, W1D 6PX

Old Town 97
This is a better spot at midnight than it is at midday, but still, it’s great for hor fun – beef brisket and seafood with scrambled egg sauce especially. Also, it does excellent off-menu fried rice dishes that are more famous than anything on the menu: LSE (pork chop in scrambled egg sauce) and the ah ming (pork, beans and fried tofu) all with egg-fried rice and a fried egg on top. 19 Wardour St, W1D 6PL

Cafe TPT
The best dai pai dong-style restaurant in London. If I’m in a rush I’ll order the beef flank curry on rice (although you have to fight to get them to do this as a one-plate now). If I have time then the baked pork chop Macau-style is my ultimate comfort dish – rice, pork chop, onions and a sauce mornay, baked until oozing and slightly charred, to which I add loads of the house chilli oil. 21 Wardour St, W1D 6PN

Four Seasons or Gold Mine
Going to either of these is like going to KFC when there’s a Chicken Cottage next to it. If I’m feeling slightly rich and willing to spend £15+ on duck, then I’ll order roast meats, particularly the roast duck and siu yuk on rice. I would like to say I have a definitive favourite, but I ordered both simultaneously recently and the only discernible difference was that the Four Seasons one was packaged far more considerately for takeaway, with rice, meat and sauces separate. 23 Wardour St, W1D 6PW and 45 Wardour St, W1D 6PZ

C&R Cafe Restaurant
The best time to go here is Monday and Tuesday, when it does mein fan kuih, a slightly doughy, chewy pasta dish which can be had dry or in soup. Otherwise, I am a creature of habit and either get the wat ton hor (basically char kway teow in an egg sauce) or either the xo ‘carrot cake’ or the lor bak as a crispy snack. Pro-tip: if you sit close to the back you can steal Speedboat Bar’s wi-fi. 4-5 Rupert Court, W1D 6DY

Old Tree Daiwan Bee
Decent homestyle Taiwanese restaurant that moved from Golders Green about a decade ago. In winter I’ll get the beef soup but the most satisfying thing is probably the fried pork chop or chicken on rice, with pickles and a little bit of pork stew. 26 Rupert St, W1D 6DH

Lotus Garden
I used to come here for siu yuk on rice, but I recently bumped into Songsoo Kim, who recommended the prawn and chive dumplings, and a deep cut from their cheung fun menu: a crispy bean curd roll stuffed with sesame and prawn cake. I’ve never seen this item anywhere else and it’s a textural riot. Maybe one of the best single items in the whole of Chinatown. 15a Gerrard St, W1D 6JD

Unnamed Fujianese Place

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue — including Normal Country, London restaurant guides, recipes, and all new columns.

This week, Gavin Cleaver guides us through what is, arguably, pound for pound, the most cynical cuisine in London right now: American barbecue.

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The Misadventures of an Unlikely Texas Barbecue Aficionado in London, by Gavin Cleaver

The worst (and five best) American barbecue restaurants in London

When I lived in Texas, I knew someone who taught people how to do stand-up comedy. Once, he was hired to go and teach in Moscow – it was, I believe, part of an official government programme to introduce stand-up to Russia. Through a translator, the Russians could understand the building blocks of classic Western joke construction, but there was a problem. Every single time someone got up to tell their jokes, they were compelled to justify why they were on the stage – listing their cars, apartments, academic achievements. No matter how often he told them to drop the justification, his pupils simply would not. If anything, the list got longer. The justification for their authenticity became more important than the act itself.

I tell this anecdote because we are largely here today to talk about authenticity. Here is my pre-joke justification for you reading this: I spent, through a series of frankly unbelievable happenings, several years writing about barbecue for the Dallas Observer (basically the Texas version of the Village Voice). This is despite being from Watford. It originally came about because, while living in Dallas, I wrote one blog about Texas barbecue, posted it to r/dallas and the next day the web editor at the newspaper phoned me to ask me if I’d like a column. Pitching myself as a sort of idiot who liked all barbecue, in what can be quite a fraught local shouting match, I spent the next three years travelling across Texas and writing in all caps about how extremely good everything is. I covered thousands of miles and wrote off thousands of dollars of barbecue on my taxes as “research materials”. Therefore, I would like to think I understand, to some extent, Texas barbecue.

Friend, let me tell you, American barbecue in London is a fucking shambles. A confused mishmash of words and meats that seemingly no one at any point of the process understands; a multi-million-pound industry trading off consumers’ familiarity with certain terms while offering them bad food in return, a shared cultural language that is pervasive but, shorn of context, completely meaningless to the product you’re eating. It’s all self-aggrandisement and no jokes.

For this article, I was (un)kindly bankrolled to eat across 23 American barbecue restaurants in London1. Initially, I wanted to understand if London tastes were changing barbecue to a cuisine that’s specific to a place in a way it’s done to any number of Asian, Caribbean or African examples. The final pillar of this optimism tumbled recently after I ordered “brisket smoked over hickory and mesquite” (£22) and was served a plate of oven-cooked beef, underlay-esque in texture, covered in beef gravy. It was pure Toby Carvery fare, and that isn’t to knock Toby Carvery, because that restaurant is at least honest about what it does. 

And that’s what’s struck me more than the many disappointing meals as the most depressing element of this journey: dishonesty and opportunism. In the last few months, I’ve eaten “smoked ribs” that were oven-cooked. I’ve had lamb that tasted like lighter fluid because they’d used liquid smoke in the rub. I’ve had beef ribs where the rib meat has clearly been detached from the bone, oven-cooked and then put back onto the bone. I’ve eaten brisket that was somehow both smoked and rare in the middle, a balancing act I am completely unable to comprehend. I’ve been served what the menu claimed was “barbecue sauce” on the side but turned out to be Bisto. I’ve had “award-winning smoked chicken wings” that were deep-fried. I’ve picked through enough cloyingly sweet sauce, deployed to cover low-quality meat, to fill a bathtub. I’ve even been to Waltham Cross.

Before Americans start to get smug: Dickey’s, a chain of barbecue restaurants in Texas, is worse than everything I’ve mentioned. But the bait-and-switch at play in so many of London’s “American barbecue restaurants” perfectly illustrates how any old cooked protein is being passed off as the real deal for £20+ a dish and it should, honestly, make you angry.

What has gone wrong?

The fundamentals of what’s wrong with London’s American barbecue are two-fold. The first thing is the cooking. But secondly, there’s the issue of language and, by extension, a misinterpretation which results in a loss of meaning. 

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! We hope that you’ve had a wonderful Christmas.

This is part 2 of the Vittles Review of the Year. Part 1 was a conversation between Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, which you can read here. To read the whole thing, you can subscribe for £5/month or £45/year which gives you access to our entire back catalogue of essays, reviews and guides.

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The best and worst of London food in 2023

We’re not out of the weeds yet, but 2023 felt like the first full year of true growth in the London restaurant scene since the start of the pandemic. The spontaneous creativity of those uncertain pandemic-era businesses – perfecting sandwiches, boreks, biryanis – has started to synthesise with a resurgent central London scene and a noticeably mature set of new openings. In that sense, the years it most resembles is the post-crash era of 2009 and 2010, which saw the advent of hyped burgers (check), American barbecue (double check), and reworked comfort food for adults (Bouchon Racine and The Devonshire), but also a genuine sea change in how we eat out. Adding to the sense of an era being passed onto the next generation is that Russell Norman, one of the architects of that resurgence, tragically died this year. For me Spuntino, which Norman opened in Soho in 2011, felt like the first restaurant that had been made solely for me. I remember going there, learning what a Negroni was, eating deep fried olives, and feeling that this is what it meant to be an adult. Norman’s passing leaves a huge hole in London dining. I wonder what that restaurant is or will be for today’s 20 year olds, one that can harness the demand for casual food but package it in a way that makes it feel luxurious – the magic trick of the restaurant.

I have eaten out less this year than in 2022 but I have undoubtedly eaten better. The outer boroughs of London have continued to thrive in ways that have surprised even me. The intimacy between north west London and suburbs of Indian cities is now so close that TikTok food in Delhi might arrive in Harrow by lunch the next day, while the halal scene has become one of the most creative culinary blocs in the city, with restaurants increasingly looking to a pan-Muslim audience rather than a specific diaspora. Chinese students are creating Chinatowns of the future in Spitalfields and Kings Cross, but also new arrivals from Hong Kong could be on the cusp of turning Sutton and Kingston into new New Maldens (more on this next year). Two of my best meals of the year have been West African, with Sikatio and D&K Gambian Chicken and Rice doing as much to shift people’s perspectives as Chishuru and Akara are doing in the centre, while even Green Lanes, a road that has been admirably resistant to neophilia, has started to accept change. And the most hyped and sought after table of the year, for the first time ever, is in Leytonstone. 

Perhaps the best thing about 2023 is that it has made me look forward to seeing how 2024 will build on it. Until then, here are my best and worst things about this year.

Pub lunch of the year

I usually consider pub roasts to be one of London’s more prosaic scams – spending £25 to have your roast cooked in a way you didn’t want it to be cooked, with a twist it doesn’t need. The Waterman’s Arms in Barnes has changed my mind. A recent Sunday lunch there featured a £80 Hereford beef rump big enough for three, but cooked in a way you just couldn’t at home, with the smoke of the grill amplified by a smoked garlic butter. Sides were cooked with the precision of a chef – in this case, Sam Andrews late of The Camberwell Arms – but not cheffified. Bookend it with a martini and the malt custard dessert, and you have something close to perfection.

Best meals of the year 10-6

10. Lamb mechoui and couscous at Chez Abda, Paris
9. Lunch tasting menu at Osip, Bruton
8. Chicken rotisserie at D&K Gambian Chicken and Rice, Forest Gate (eaten at home)
7. Pastrami sandwich at Langer’s, Los Angeles
6. Grilled fish at Argoe (and ice cream at Jelbert’s), Newlyn

Restaurant review that would have been better as an Alan Partridge TV pitch

Eating injera in Middlesbrough with Rod Liddle

Further sections in this newsletter

Pub lunch of the year
Best meals of the year 10-6
Restaurant review that would have been better as an Alan Partridge TV pitch
Instagram influencers of the year
Saddest closure of the year
Supernova: the verdict
The Thomas Straker Award for Diversity Within Restaurants
Cuisine of the year
Worst cuisine of the year
Surprise of the year
Most dependable takeaway spot near to a place I’ve lived
Favourite Topjaw video
Restaurant Critics: A Year in Stats
Best correction of the year
Restaurant of the year
Most inexplicably overrated restaurant of the year
Worst meal of the year
Quote of the year
Best meals of the year 5-1

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2023 has been a busy year for restaurant writing in London. At the start of the year, after nearly six years of publication, Eater London suddenly closed down. Six months later, we launched Vittles Restaurants, our first vertical dedicated solely to restaurant writing. Six months later still, here we are: Jonathan has entered the realm of restaurant criticism proper, with nine columns already under his ever tightening belt. Six of One debuted, with 97 restaurants (and counting), in easy-to-use mappable format. We have published an ice cream guide, a feature on the Punjabi dhabas of Birmingham, and a profile of the extraordinary brothers behind one singular London caff. And we’re just getting started, with much more planned for 2024. 

Before we close out on 2023, my Vittles co-editor Jonathan Nunn and I sat down for a chat about the year we’re leaving behind, and consider what’s on the horizon, not just for restaurants but for food media itself. We talked about what’s exciting in the world of restaurant writing, the effect of TikTok and Instagram Reels on restaurants, Los Angeles and Paris food culture, the force that is the influencer Keith Lee, and our hopes for the London restaurant industry next year. Next week we will publish part two, which will look at the best and worst restaurants and moments in food (media) this year. 

Before we get into it, we’d like to thank you all so much for reading and supporting Vittles and its contributors. It really is immensely appreciated. 

We hope to see you all again, hungry as ever, in 2024. AC

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Adam Coghlan
Firstly, let’s talk about who you’ve been inspired by this year. Who are you reading and how have they influenced you?

Jonathan Nunn
Obviously a lot of restaurant criticism! I am increasingly reading the Americans, like Helen Rosner’s reviews for the New Yorker, Ryan Sutton’s Lo Times, Bill Addison, who just released the 101 Restaurants for the L.A. Times, the team at L.A. Taco, and also Pete Wells’s old reviews. British restaurant criticism and American restaurant criticism get binarised as ‘entertainment vs public service’, but I’m not sure I’ve read anything more gently savage, calibrated and thorough than his review of Peter Luger. 

I’m also really enjoying old British restaurant reviews because it reminds me that we have a long tradition of reviewing that is very distinct from the American way, but also very distinct from the way it's practised now. Old Jonathan Meades reviews, old Fay Maschler reviews, old Charles Campion reviews – I still learn a lot about London from those writers. Also Chitra Ramaswamy up in Scotland — I love reading all these people even if I’m never going to try the food.

Most of all, I've been really inspired by Six of One and the writers who've been published in it, many for the first time. What we're trying to develop, and what we talked about at its inception with London Finds Itself, is to have people writing intimately about spaces that they know, rather than it coming only from the place of discovery. One of the pieces that I'm most proud we published this year is Gurpreet Jivan’s piece on Punjabi dhabas in Birmingham, which did that so well. It came from a place of knowledge and intimacy with those restaurants and those neighbourhood, and that's the kind of restaurant writing that I love to read. 

I’ve also found it’s been vital in helping me interrogate my own biases. Of course, I have my own preconceptions and blind spots. I like to think that I see everything like a panopticon but, clearly, I don't. So Six of One – reading what the writers value and what they see as quality, where they're reviewing, introducing me to areas that I've neglected, cuisines that I neglect – has challenged the way I do things. I know that I have a huge blind spot with vegetarian food, for instance. 

AC
And Italian food! 

JN

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This article is a part of Vittles British Jewish Food Week. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please subscribe below:

1. What is British Jewish Food, really?, by Dan Hancox

2. The Shop, by Laura Goodman

3. Keeping Kosher?, by Martin Francisco Saps

4. The Rise of MiddleEastMediLevantia, by Josh Dell

5. Friday Night Dinners, compiled by Molly Pepper Steemson

6. Where Has All the Tschulent Gone?, by Atar Hadari

7. From Aleppo to Manchester, by Joel Hart

8. The London Rugelach Index, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy

9. A Guide to Jewish Food in Manchester

10. A Guide to Jewish Food in London

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A guide to Jewish food in London

Fifty places to eat: delis, salt beef bars, restaurants, beigel/bagel shops and more

Editors note: If you want to read a full guide to London’s Jewish bakeries, which are not included in this compilation, then please read The London Rugelach Index, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy.

To read our guide to Jewish food in Manchester, please click here.

Delis and Shops

Shalom Hot Bagels Bakery Patisserie Delicatessen
35 Woodford Avenue, Gants Hill, Ilford, IG2 6UF

Shalom Hot Bagel Bakery sits on the side of a dual carriageway off one of the six points of Gants Hill roundabout in an overlooked part of Ilford in the Borough of Redbridge. In the 1970s, Redbridge hosted one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations (around 30,000) and was a microcosm of Jewish life, with kosher bakeries, butchers, restaurants, banks and schools. A thriving community still existed until the mid-2000s, when younger families began moving further out into Essex and beyond but also back to more central areas like Golders Green and Stamford Hill. Now, Shalom Hot Bagels and the Chabad Lubavitch centre, which sits across the roundabout, are the last bastions of the area’s Jewish community.

Shalom doesn’t look like much from the outside but inside it is a triple threat of a counter service (bakery! patisserie! deli!), where display cases are crammed with smoked turkey breast, four types of salmon (Canadian, best, oily and dry), fish balls, latkes, gefilte fish, herring, tubs of chicken matzo ball soup, potato salad (both skin-on and skinless varieties) and shelves piled with bagels, platzels, challah, rugelach and babka. There’s hand-painted signage, dry goods stacked against the wall and fridges filled with fresh pickled cucumbers. Essentially, Shalom is a more compact version of NYC’s Barney Greengrass or Russ & Daughters that – if it had been located in Manhattan – would have already hosted an Aimé Leon Dore photoshoot and welcomed droves of in-the-know tourists, eager to snap the aesthetic of the interior and their haul of nosh for the ’gram.  MA

Deli 98
98 High Rd, N15 6JR

Deli 98 has been serving Ashkenazi-leaning kosher cuisine to the residents of Stamford Hill for the last eight years, during which it has built up a reputation for food that is ‘heimishe’, a Yiddish word meaning a sort of cross between comforting and familiar. It describes Deli 98’s offering well: a blend of deli sandwiches, traditional favourites like stuffed cabbage, all the kugels of the rainbow and a few kosher-inspired versions of other cuisines like Cantonese-ish sweet and sour chicken or pastrami pizza. Like many other Jewish delicatessens, there’s a significant market for take-home items, especially towards the end of the week, which is when 98 really shines. Highly sought-after items like herring and slow-cooked cholent are intentionally absent from shelves until Thursday, when the place buzzes until midnight with a familial energy that feels a little like standing around the deli table at a family reunion, noshing and kibitzing in equal measure.

Deli 98 may seem impenetrable to outsiders, but the manager, originally from Belgium, lights up the moment you ask him a question, offering up menu suggestions and history, pointing out his favourites or suggesting when is best to come to get an even wider choice. It also remains the only place I’ve visited in London that sufficiently meets the expectations set by my late father’s voracious-yet-discerning affection for Hebrew National hot dogs. I hereby officially withdraw my original statement that the UK was devoid of such a thing – this one even comes in an oversized challah bun. AKK

Reich’s
9-10 Princes Parade, Golders Green Rd, NW11 9PS

Reich’s, a small deli at the bottom of Golders Green Road, is named for Nachman Reich, a quiet and reserved man who is exactly what you might imagine if you were casting a Hasidic caterer. He has it all: the size, the beard and the heavily accented English. He’s also renowned for his extreme generosity and kindness, a communal legend who is very much a personification of the food he’s famous for: heavy, hearty, understated, soulful and heimish. Reich’s has been doing this heimish food for almost 40 years and has become the undisputed king of the North London kiddush – the reception after morning prayers. Here, you might find deli staples like salmon and salt beef, but they play second fiddle to the real stars – cholent, kishke and kugel – calorific food cooked overnight so it falls within the limitations of Sabbath observance. This is ‘low and slow’ before East London discovered it.

Growing up, nothing beat the excitement of knowing that you had the full-on fress of a Reich’s catered kiddush coming up. Even now, as an adult with broader horizons and a more developed palate, it still excites me: cholent, a stewy sludge of brown potatoes, beans, barley, brisket and marrow fat, and kugel, an oversized, tray baked rosti. If you can’t get invited to a Reich’s kiddush, go to the takeaway on a Thursday or early Friday (cholent and kugel just doesn’t taste right on other days of the week). Brace yourselves for queues and expect to be ignored by the harassed staff. You may well need to help yourself – that’s what I do because I’m no good at waiting. A bowl will set you back less than a fiver. You might be able to finish it. You’ll definitely need a lie-down. BB

Oren Deli
6c Ada St, E8 4QU

When Oded Oren’s restaurant on Shacklewell Lane first opened, I initially wrote it off as another MiddleEastMediLevantian restaurant to add to the pile. I was wrong. What won me over wasn’t the showstoppers like Barnsley lamb chops with zhoug, but Oren’s way with bread: arayes made from hake stuffed into pita and brushed with lamb fat, the effect somehow accentuating the taste of the fish, like salt on caramel; or oblong flatbreads topped with anchovies, confit onions and sour cream; or a just-baked whole challah, glistening like a bodybuilder on Muscle Beach. There are places in Paris where you would sit through a whole meal to get to the patisserie; you might have done the same in Oren, just so you could start with some pita and tomato.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Oren’s second restaurant is not a restaurant but a deli in London Fields, where you can just have the bread. My favourite thing to do is to buy a challah with dips from the fridge, which veer from a chopped liver so lush you could use it as face cream, to exceptional egg salad and schmalz herring, all the way east to zhoug, hummus and preserved lemons. Add in the hot Sephardi meals to takeaway, the kind of butch, uncommercial stews you’d never get at Ottolenghi (Libyan chraime with hake kofta!), and you maybe have the most complete Jewish food establishment in London. JN

Platters Deli
10 Hallswelle Parade, NW11 0DL

You may think that popping to Platters in Temple Fortune for your bagel accoutrements, just because it’s next door to Daniels Bakery, is an easy thing to do. And sure, it is. But the deli, which is heading into its 44th year of business, would stand very much on its own even if it didn’t have the perfect delivery system for its products just coincidentally sitting on the other side of the wall. If you’re veggie, get the egg and onion, or the cream cheese; if not, smoked salmon or chopped liver. You also need to buy the gefilte fish, both kinds (boiled and fried). The place is always briskly busy, with people shouting for what they need right now before the bagels stop being warm. (There is such a thing in my fam as the ‘bagel window’, aka the optimum couple of hours you get to eat Daniels’ not-quite-cooked bagels before they get cooler and harden, it’s a bit of a dance.) It’s worth braving the queues, especially at the weekends, because the staff move fast and are extremely nice. Get some latkes for the side. LT

Moshe’s Food & Deli
1097-1101 Finchley Rd, NW11 0QB

Moshe’s in Temple Fortune is the kind of shop that seemingly carries one of everything, as if it places orders based on a running community suggestion box. It’s kind of all here: kitsch, functional, modern living mixed with ancient Jewish traditions, a section to pick up Shabbos and yahrzeit (memorial) candles, a Passover-for-one ready meal, ‘Ma Nishtana pops’ in the frozen food section and a pickle section that would warm even the coldest Ashkenazic heart. It’s got a sushi bar. It’s got herring. It’s got pastries. It’s got an entire wall filled floor-to-ceiling with kosher wine and alcohol, a Tupperware and partyware section to match, and enough kosher sweets and pot noodle options to satisfy any child’s after-school needs.

Though clearly purpose-built to serve the kosher-keeping Jewish community, this is the kind of shop I’d imagine anyone would enjoy wandering through, stumbling across something they didn’t know they needed but now can’t live without, like the twirly Passover-themed straws complete with matzo or wine glass characters fixed to them (it’s customary to drink four glasses throughout the seder ritual) that I didn’t buy before the holiday started and have been regretting ever since. AKK

Kosher Kingdom
7 Russell Parade, Golders Green Rd, NW11 9NN

If you are dismayed by single-use plastic, pre-sliced vegetables or dairy-free cheesecake, Kosher Kingdom is not your supermarket. If you can look past those hyphenations, it’s paradise (not to be confused with Kosher Paradise, another, smaller supermarket 0.8 miles away). At Europe’s largest kosher supermarket, you can witness an abundance of foods that came from scarcity, a cuisine born from the wisdom that adding schmaltz makes even the blandest ingredient moreish. Dishes that once took hours to cook are available in family-sized servings. Ingredients once acquired through scavenging are sliced and ready to eat. Dips and shmears once made from scraps in secret are piled high at endcaps. It is an unapologetic display of products invented by those told they had everything to apologise for and everything to hide. 

When I visit, I usually fill my trolley in the aisle devoted to chicken soup accoutrements: bright yellow croutons (delicious) or chicken-flavoured soup mix (mostly MSG, also delicious). However, it’s the fridge, filled as it is with disgusting-delicious Ashkenazi delights – chopped liver, egg and onion, and gefilte fish – which fills my soul. I resist the urge to turn my nose up at Sushi Haven, Candy Corner or the Munch ‘n’ Crunch salad bar. Their less-creatively named, non-Jewish siblings can all be found down the road at Finchley Road Sainsbury’s. 

Kosher Kingdom is the 400m sq heart of London’s Jewish community: bountiful, generous, self-preserving and a little bit silly. At the height of the pandemic, it commissioned Stamford Hill singer Shloime Gertner to record a song. “Let’s stay safe and protect each other” boomed down the aisles of Kosher Kingdom for the best part of a year. No expense spared, the shop even re-recorded versions for Jewish holidays. As we learnt in Love Actually, nothing says festive remix like squeezing in an extra syllable to a line: “If the matzo aisle is busy, go to a different aisle…” TS

Panzer’s
13-19 Circus Rd, NW8 6PB

Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is a sushi bar, greengrocer, wine merchant, coffee shop, falafel stall, bakery, brunch café and (although you’d be forgiven for forgetting this) deli. It is clean, bright, and still basking in the neon glow of its 2017 refurb. It’s not what it used to be, but this is a guide of what is, not what was. Panzer’s is now a New York-style culinary amusement park for the Jew-adjacent, selling the same retinue of products that line the shelves of every trendy deli in London, plus kiddush wine. 

Things change; businesses diversify (see sushi bar), industrial shelving is replaced by bespoke pine, prices rise (a loaf of challah now costs £5). Some things, however, don’t. Panzer’s bagel recipe is the same as it was when they opened in 1944 and the bagels are good. They’re £1.10 each (do not buy one toasted with butter for £3.80 + service). You can still get Baron’s New Green Cucumbers (£4.50, 75p more than at Shalom Hot Bagel), which are the best pickled cucumber a person can buy and, behind the illuminated signs and artfully arranged vegetable towers, tiny Jewish grandmothers are still asking shop assistants to fetch them disposable roasting trays from the jaunty tower on top of the freezer. 

The ‘new’ Panzer’s is a terrible compromise between new and the old, Britain and America, Jews and gentiles. It’s a nightmare, but I love it. I can’t in good conscience recommend it, but I can’t stop going either. MPS

Beigel and Bagel Shops

The White One and The Yellow One
Beigel Bake, 159 Brick Lane and Beigel Shop, 155 Brick Lane, E1 6SB

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This article is a part of Vittles British Jewish Food Week. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please subscribe below:

1. What is British Jewish Food, really?, by Dan Hancox

2. The Shop, by Laura Goodman

3. Keeping Kosher?, by Martin Francisco Saps

4. The Rise of MiddleEastMediLevantia, by Josh Dell

5. Friday Night Dinners, compiled by Molly Pepper Steemson

6. Where Has All the Tschulent Gone?, by Atar Hadari

7. From Aleppo to Manchester, by Joel Hart

8. The London Rugelach Index, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy

9. A Guide to Jewish Food in Manchester

10. A Guide to Jewish Food in London

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The London Rugelach Index, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy

A guide to London's Jewish bakeries via its smallest offering

Many Americans who have emigrated look back on the lack of self-awareness in their earliest experiences abroad with a thick glaze of embarrassment. When I think about my first impressions of British Jewish food, so do I. Since moving to the UK in 2006, I have been faced with the discomfort of my own assumptions about what it means to be Jewish, and how much of my identity exists in context and community. I remember my first trip to Golders Green in North London on a Friday afternoon, some 15 years ago, when I was struck by the assumptions I hadn’t realised I’d been making about the roles and presence of secular Jewish culture within the city; the places I wanted to visit were either closed or were closing for Shabbat. When I began looking for the secular food customs I knew from home – bakeries making their own bagels, the delis that would fill up on Sunday mornings, even the tradition of eating Chinese food at Christmas – I found myself at a loss for how exactly to recalibrate the Jewish American identity I had unknowingly carried with me within a Jewish-British context. What was Jewish British culture? I didn’t even really know what to look for.

Take rugelach, for instance. The name rugelach comes from Yiddish, meaning ‘little twists’ or ‘rolled things’, referring to its shape. Its origins stem from a combination of Eastern European communities and pastries (kifli, kipferl, rogal, rogaliki…), all of which are small, crescent-shaped and, most often, laminated. Rugelach in the US, like a good portion of the American food system, exists because of the World Wars, the Great Depression and the rise of convenience foods that emerged from them. The yeast once present in rugelach was removed to save time and reduce the cost of labour, while cream cheese was added only because of the influence of Philadelphia post-Depression. (This is a staggering example of how powerful marketing can be – it managed to insert dairy into the cuisine of a culture prone to lactose intolerance.)

Yet rugelach in the UK is a different thing entirely. Across London there are nuances that depend on the bakery’s community, as well as the personal history of the individual baker. The most commonly found fillings are chocolate, cinnamon and vanilla, while most bakeries produce a yeast-enhanced, laminated dough, like the original Eastern Europe variations. The word ‘rugelach’ can sometimes mean different things in different bakeries: in some it signifies a shape and filling but can be as large as a croissant; in others, ordering ‘rugelach’ can simply refer to any miniature-sized pastry. Some bakeries offer ‘flaky rugelach’ made from unyeasted dough which is then rolled into spirals with fruit fillings. At others, the rugelach are so dense and squidgy with chocolate you’ll wonder if there’s any dough at all.

Unlike its sister, the babka, which has slipped into more mainstream baking culture in both the US and the UK, rugelach has yet to establish itself outside of Jewish bakeries, which makes it an ideal item to understand London’s Jewish bakery scene through. Just like spotting someone with a fresh ice cream cone gives clues as to the proximity of the vendor, so too does a Jewish bakery and its symbiotic relationship with an active community: bread is baked into weekly rituals of British Jewish life. While the late Jonathan Gold once touted the American Jewish deli as the establishment where secular Jewish folks went “to be Jewish” I would suggest that, at least in London, it’s the bakery which distinctively serves as both a hub and a mirror of the city’s Jewish communities, with the ability to touch every aspect of Jewish life whether secular or sacred. And with each bakery comes a separate thread, a tie into the people or personas that have built the business. Many of these now institutions come with a backstory richer than even their most chocolate-filled pastry – reason enough to cross the city for another taste.

The Methodology 

During the course of eight weeks, I ate rugelach at over 30 bakeries, and narrowed down my criteria for what makes a great London version:

• Traditional yeasted or laminated dough that is slightly crisp and flaky on the outside. Some bakeries use an outer glaze, others don’t. Both can be delicious.

• A good amount of stretch while still being fully baked. I prefer a thinner laminated dough but thicker is fine too, although it is easier to underbake. 

• A distinctive filling you can taste, making the inside of the rugelach a bit squidgy and moist. 

• The pastry should make you feel a desire and satisfaction in peeling apart the dough when eating it. It is a visceral pleasure that comes from the twists-meets-stretch and cannot be understated.

An overview of London rugelach

There are as many bakeries in Stamford Hill as there are walking routes to shul, and this dense network mainly caters to the area’s close-knit Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities. The bakes here, however, are not conservative but instead exhibit the widest range of flavours, shapes and interpretations. Even the smallest bakeries offer chocolate rugelach, much to the delight of the groups of Orthodox schoolboys on bikes. At So Real on Oldhill Street, Jewish Stamford Hill’s epicentre, customers flow in and out in record time, each with a seemingly specific pastry in mind. Packs labelled ‘rugelach’ (both flaky and yeasted) offer a choice between plain or streusel and ground almond-topped. Filling choices range from the traditional chocolate and cinnamon to fruit-flavoured, and their yeasted cinnamon swirl with streusel and ground almonds is fantastic in its specificity without being too over the top. At the recently expanded branch of Grodzinski’s, you’ll find a solid example of chocolate rugelach – I only wish it sold individual flavours in addition (cinnamon and vanilla were only available in packs). I did spot on the shelves a ‘Grab a Kokosh’ with a crumble topping whose shape is similar to the American style of rugelach: roll one big log then sliced 3/4 of the way through to be broken off into individual pieces.

Some Stamford Hill bakeries are a bit less visible, or at least less public-facing, catering instead to businesses or for bar/bat mitzvahs, rather than individual customers. At Renbake Patisserie, on an industrial estate near the River Lea, you have to order through the office which overlooks the bakery, where thick catalogues detail the very many catering options. Staff were happy to sell me a box of whatever I fancied from the catalogue, which included three varieties of rugelach: vanilla, chocolate and cinnamon. Meanwhile at Woodberry Down Bakery, which sells wholesale to other local shops, I had to earn my chocolate rugelach with a bit of detective work to find the entrance (the doors are completely unmarked, save for signs indicating the work laws on Shabbat.) I’m told shopping from them in person is a move that has only traditionally been executed by Woodberry’s most loyal customers. But I’d happily do it again. Its distinctive filling, made with vanilla and coffee, creates a perfectly bittersweet and slightly boozy-tasting pastry. 

Golders Green and Temple Fortune have become well-known for both Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities, with restaurants, shops and bakeries serving a wide range of kosher foods from each diaspora. Here, though, the rugelach offerings remain quite traditional compared to Stamford Hill – a likely response to demand and the ability to have wider representation of Jewish foods, rather than deep-diving on one particular bake. At the galley kitchen-sized Parkway Patisserie (cash only) across the street from Golders Green station, exceptionally sticky chocolate rugelach come in packs of 12 (or you can buy one giant croissant-sized version, while at Coco’s, which serves largely Ashkenazic pastries and salad bar items, chocolate rugelach are bulbous, bigger than the size of a hand with outstretched fingers. Daniel’s Bakery was the first place where I overheard other customers referring to some of their other smaller pastries of a different shape as rugelach, which appears to be a London quirk. 

The rugelach belt stretches further north to Hendon and then Edgware, where many of the newer Jewish communities have settled. Edgware is home to the unassuming Yossi’s Bakery, whose owner, Yossi Moses, has quietly become London’s kosher bakery king since acquiring ownership of Grodzinski’s and Carmelli’s. The vanilla rugelach, which comes with streusel on top, has thick pastry, with a slightly creamy, near eggy taste of lokshen kugel. Sharon’s Bakery has customers so loyal they’ll stop an inquisitive stranger on the street to tell them about their products. While I was contemplating that nearby Grodzinski’s had sold out of rugelach, a man told me to cross the street. Sharon’s was by far the best of all the large versions that I tried: soft and chewy on the inside with an intensely dark chocolate filling and nice lamination. Yummie’s in nearby Mill Hill, who have recently acquired the famed Shalom Hot Bagels in Gants Hill, meanwhile, serves as a community catch-all, offering kosher sweets and baked goods alongside imported South African and deli products. The chocolate rugelach comes topped with a hardened chocolate drizzle that pushes the experience closer towards confectionery.

For those who like a bit of electric energy with their pastry, the buzz on a Friday in Hendon Bagel Bakery is a thing to experience. The place is filled with men with kippahs and salt and pepper hair conducting friendly breakfast meetings between seven-foot-tall bakery carts stacked with challah. It’s the Jewish equivalent of a corn maze, with women pacing back and forth behind the bakery counter like a game of duck hunt, keeping the queue moving. When I inquired about rugelach flavours one of them rattled off a list of fillings: the standard chocolate and vanilla, cherry, pineapple and raisin. Like Daniel’s, many of the ‘rugelach’ suggested look like mini Danish instead of ‘little twists’. 

Perhaps the place that summed up the appeal of rugelach and the role of Jewish bakeries more than anywhere else for me is King’s Bakery in Hampstead Garden Suburb. It’s not just that it’s family-run and discoverable only through word of mouth (no website) or that the grandfather-like owner takes it upon himself to interact with customers, oscillating between light teasing and generosity. It’s that this is the only bakery where I witnessed the same behaviour that I remember from my own childhood in America: a local, newly minted two-year-old, having stopped by with his mum to choose his birthday treat. Some things don’t translate, but this is universal.

The top 5:

5. Karma Bread 

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To read the rest of the project, and have access to the entire Vittles back catalogue, please subscribe for either £5/month or £45 for a whole year. All Vittles contributors a…

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Watching Sam Bagshi make sheeryakh is like seeing the body-object synthesis of a great drummer in action. At Watani Sheeryakh, his Afghan ice cream shop in Ilford, he shimmies crab-like around the counter, setting himself up in the tiny nook where he makes – from scratch, by hand and to order – up to 300 ice creams a day. He pours his cardamom- and rose-infused milk base into a bow-bottomed bucket surrounded with salt and ice. Seizing the rim of the metal pan with both hands, he rotates it briskly one way then another with the light, twisting agility of a jive. Out comes a paddle and the splashing begins: an arm is thrust into the depths of the churn and flicks the cooled mixture against the walls of the bucket where it freezes instantly, ice cream accreting in translucent milky layers. He does this again and again, the percussive shake, rattle, splash and scrape punctuating the plaintive melodies of Faiz Karizi playing over the speakers.

At this point the sheeryakh is technically edible, but it isn’t yet sublime. What comes next is a laborious smoothing process during which any nascent ice crystals are beaten out of the mixture. Sam scrapes the now-frozen sheeryakh into a ball before kneading it in long, wave-like strokes against the edges of the copper pan. (This is difficult – I’ve tried it – and the teenagers who Sam hires to fill in for him never seem to last more than a few days.) He works it until the icy striations collapse into creaminess then scoops a heavy cloud of it and inverts the paddle, the ice cream clinging firm to the cool metal. “See – it doesn’t drop.” Sam serves the sheeryakh, teasing it from the paddle first a lot, then a little, then a tiny bit, before pulling deftly away so that the ice cream comes to a tapering peak.

The resulting sheeryakh is implausible: a dense, matte cloud; a shock of pristine milkiness; heavy cream that transmutes into cool, clean air, with the kind of sweetness that dances nimbly across your tongue. It has an ephemeral floral edge and a brightening note of cardamom. It’s topped with pistachios and almond rubble and, if you are lucky, a drizzle of the qaimaq (Afghan clotted cream). This is as good an evocation of pure milk as any fior di latte gelato in Rome, Florence or Bologna.

In London, there are a small number of restaurants and specialist ice cream parlours selling sheeryakh, a reflection of a sizable and growing Afghan population, but it’s not an ice cream that has particularly travelled beyond the immediate community. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. A food doesn’t have to be mainstream to be successful, and Sundaes in Harrow seems to sell more sheeryakh on a grey Monday afternoon than any Amorino (and with better vibes). Still, I feel passionately about sheeryakh because it is, spoon for spoon, the best variety of ice cream in the city. Because of the way it’s churned to order, it is always served at its best. Because it is not something a vendor can land upon by default, its makers tend to be very serious about what they do. But even in a city full of great sheeryakh – Sundaes and Kabul Sheeryakh in Hendon stand out – Watani Sheeryakh’s is a level above. It is like a dream of a dream of a McFlurry: an expression of milk, gently sweet, lightly perfumed, with a gossamer texture that could only come from exhausting, muscular graft. In the residential backstreets of Ilford, Sam is making not just the best sheeryakh but the best ice cream, full stop, in the whole of London.

“In Afghanistan, every family comes from something,” Sam told me. “Our family comes from restaurants.” Sheeryakh runs in the family – his great-grandfather ran a sheeryakh shop in Kabul. His grandfather, Mullah Akbar Khan (whose grainy photo hangs on the wall of the shop) had a restaurant in Murad Khane, Kabul’s old town, and his dad, Maruf Bagshi, followed him into the restaurant business too. Sam was born in Kabul in the early 1990s before his family left Afghanistan as refugees, settling for over a decade in Enschede in the Netherlands and then moving to East London in 2004. There were more restaurants: Afghan Kebab House in East Ham, then a second branch in Newham, before Maruf – overworked, exhausted – decided in 2016 that he was done with the restaurant business for good. By 2019, he was back at it: Sam had been working on an idea for a takeaway modernising Afghan food, a counter to some of the formality of traditional London Afghan restaurants. He drew inspiration from the taut efficiency of McDonald’s production systems, using modern methods to reintroduce a younger crowd to qabuli palow, chapli kebabs and mantu. With the help of Sam’s sister, Marina, Watani Box was born. A couple of years later, they opened Watani Sheeryakh just around the corner.

It took four months to perfect the sheeryakh. Sam left Afghanistan as a baby, so had to rely on Maruf’s memories and his own intuition to feel his way towards an authentic taste. Sam’s parents shared what they knew (Sam showed me a video of his mum helping him churn sheeryakh, during lockdown, at home in big plastic buckets). But British milk – skimmed, pasteurised, homogenised – didn’t behave the same way as the fresh milk back in Kabul. Sam watched documentaries about how milk here is sourced and produced. He agonised over the precise number of minutes to soak peppercorns in the milk to neutralise any musty milkiness without imparting the heat of the pepper. He was adamant that he didn’t want to add milk powder. (“It makes the sheeryakh yellow, and you can feel it in your throat.”) All of this has paid off. Afghan customers can be sceptical, Sam tells me. “But I give them one spoon and they shut their mouth. They say it’s the same texture, the same creaminess, as back home.”

On the walls are old photos of Kandahar, lines of traffic snaking around Kabul’s Massoud Circle, the statues of Bamiyan. Sam plays music in every language spoken in Afghanistan and from all the big stars of the golden age. He is savvy about the nostalgic appeal of this kind of food. “People want to remember the ’50s and ’60s, before war, before conflict.” But although this is unapologetically Afghan ice cream, it is also a profoundly London ice cream, speaking to the demographic and cultural sensibilities of the area it is in. Sam follows the halal fast food and dessert scenes in London with great enthusiasm, and the maximalist creativity of this new generation comes through in his approach. Traditionally, sheeryakh is served with nuts and qaimaq and, sometimes, with jala – angel hair-like noodles which freeze and crunch in contact with the ice. Sam still serves it this way, but his bestseller is the Watani Special: an elaborate construction of baklava (exacting as ever, he asks the bakery to make it with less syrup, joking that he saves them money), pistachios, almonds and homemade pistachio sauce. On Valentine’s Day there is a lurid bubblegum pink sundae, while a brief foray into Salt Bae-dom had him making a “24-carat gold” gold-leaf adorned sheeryakh. (He sold two.) It’s hard to imagine a more London ice cream than this.

“We used to have just Afghans come in here, but now there are Turkish people, Gujaratis, British people. And nobody hasn’t loved it.” Sam has plans to expand the business, but he wants to do things the right way. He recently put up an Afghan flag outside the shop: a beacon for the local community. In a photo he posted on Instagram, he swings the flag in a broad, cursive loop while standing on the roof.

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A note on Watani Sheeryakh’s opening hours: I’d advise checking on Google, the Watani Box Instagram and, if you’re in any doubt or if you have a long journey ahead, calling in advance of your visit. Sam makes his sheeryakh base fresh every day: once it’s sold out, it’s sold out, and Sam will close for the day. Other times, juggling commitments at Watani Box (their takeaway around the corner, which you should also go to) he arrives a little late.

Credits

The Vittles Ice Cream Project is written by Ruby Tandoh, photographed by Michaël Protin, illustrated by Heedayah Lockman, edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and copy edited by Liz Tray and Sophie Whitehead.