This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project.

This is the penultimate piece in this two-week series. We hope you’ve enjoyed it. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please click here. And please share it far and wide! Note, the guides in this project are for subscribers only.

To read the companion to this guide, the 10 best all-round bakeries in London, please click here.

To find a map of all 66 bakeries in the project, please scroll to the end of the article.

Around London in 56 Bakes

A Vittles London bakery guide, by those who know their bakeries. Illustration by Alex Brenchley.

The history of baking in London is about as long as that of the city itself, with the Worshipful Company of Bakers claiming it ‘subsisted in the city under the Roman occupation’ around 43-47AD. Since then, bakeries have been integral to the structure of the city. Wheat arrived from outside and would reach the outskirts of London where it would be milled (at places like Three Mills by the River Lea), made into bread by bakers, and then sold in the markets. The Great Fire of London, whose aftermath completely reformed the layout of the City, began in a bakery; and many tales of London’s modern immigration could be told in a list of breads, cakes, pies and pastries.

The more recent history of baking in London is similarly tied up with the forces dictating the direction of the city: capital, development, 16:9 verticality and bubbly bread bros. It’s also full of paradoxes: the Chorleywood Bread Process, devised just outside the M25 in 1961 to make more bread more quickly for less money, symbolises how bread used to be; sourdough, with a history spanning millennia, symbolises the woke excesses of modernity. The best baked item at London’s most famous Modern British restaurant is French, Percy Ingle is a figment of the past, and the most mentioned ‘best bakery in London’ on Topjaw is Pophams.

The city remains a panoply of baking excellence, as demonstrated by the 56 places featured here, plus the ten that make up our ‘best of’ guide. There’s truly delicious sourdough, but also Agege bread, Persian sangak and Filipino pandesal. There are London takes on American and Italian pizza, but also pide and lahmacun across north London, and manaeesh in west. Perfect lamination can be found in London’s best croissant or its best rugelach or its best baklava. A fried piece of dough, an item almost universal to every cuisine, could be a hyped, stuffed, American-style ‘donut’, a lokma, a pishi, a sonho, a dumpling, a pączki or a plain sugared doughnut from a neighbourhood bakery that tastes of childhood. Equal pleasure can be found in an exquisite, four-layered millefeuille sold for £14 out the back of the most exclusive hotel in London and a hot dog bun that’s a quid at a Chinatown bakery. 

There are many more bakes that could have made into this list on the turn of a block of  dough. In order to give us this day our daily bread after all, we must be forgiven of our trespasses.  

Contributors

JW – Jessica Wang
JH – James Hansen
JN – Jonathan Nunn
HL – Harry Lambous 
AKK – Adrienne Katz Kennedy
AH – Angela Hui
ZyA – Zayneb Al Asaadi
IL – Isobel Lewis
ZhA – Zahra Al Asaadi
IR – Isaac Rangaswami 
MC- Mark Corbyn
ME – Melek Erdal
MM – Marie Mitchell
RP – Riaz Philips 
CT – Christian Theodorou
RT – Ruby Tandoh
AD – Alex Douglas
AC – Adam Coghlan
GN – Glenn Nunn
KT – Kasia Tomasiewicz
SL – Sadie Lee
EP – Emma Louise Pudge
DL – Dan Lepard
MP –  Michaël Protin

Photos are by the author of each entry unless stated otherwise.

Categories

Bready – loaves, pide, pizza, banh and manaeesh
Flaky – croissants, rugelach, baklava and mille-feuille
Cakey – Tottenham, chocolate, panettone and bienenstich
Sweet – pastel de nata, sablés and buns
Savoury – tarts, bibingka, borek and buns
Fried – doughnuts, pączki, bofrot, dumplings and lokma

Bready

Sangak at London Sangaki

There was once a menu on London Sangaki’s website, but it’s been removed, as if they realised that it was little more than trolling. This is since Ealing’s London Sangaki makes one thing – Persian sangak –  in two forms, plain, or topped with sesame and nigella seeds, cooked in a rotating metal oven with a pebbled cooking surface, which mimics the river stones that give the bread its name and texture. It is a remarkable feat of engineering, from a bread tradition that took root in the necessary inconvenience of heating hundreds of pebbles to form a makeshift oven. It’s hot every single time. There’s little more to say. JH

5 Leeland Rd, W13 9HH

Banh mi at Banh

A banh mi qualifies as a banh mi because of the bread, not the filling. Whereas a jambon beurre refers to its construction, banh mi alone refers to either a fully-fledged sandwich or the bread itself – never a specific filling. Just one quick WhatsApp photo of Banh’s on-site deck ovens was enough to convince me that this place understood the significance of bread in a banh mi. It turns out that Banh, in Dalston, was the solution to a very personal problem. Christine, Banh’s owner, loved baguettes. However, her sensitive gums did not. In identifying that the future of her baguette consumption was unsustainable, the graduate of Le Cordon Bleu became determined to find her own alternative. It took her a whole year to develop her optimal baguette recipe, but the return on the investment was priceless: exceptional banh mi for life, with a crust that compresses under the mere pinching pressure of an index and thumb, cracking into a mosaic of bread. JW

592 Kingsland Rd, E8 4AH

Pandesal at Panadera

If a restaurant group as vast as Maginhawa – which runs establishments as diverse as Donia, Mamasons and Guanabana – could be reduced to one thing, it would be its sweet, versatile pandesal dough, which emerges somewhere at every one of its establishments in a unique form. Kentish Town’s Panadera, which translates to “female baker” in Tagalog, honours the mothers of Florence and Omar respectively, the bakery’s founders, and pandesal takes centre-stage in untrendy, sweet white bread. Most notable and popular on the menu is its trio of sandos – Japanese-inspired sandwiches stuffed with Filipino-centric fillings like corned beef, although it’s the bread that stands out, its warmth and texture greeting you with a sweet tactile hug. JW

83 Kentish Town Rd, NW1 8NY

Lahm ajeen at Albeit Al Arabi

There are dozens of manaeesh spots within a 50-metre radius of Albeit Al Arabi in North Acton, but the lahm ajeen here stands out as it has succeeded where many others fail by having a dough base that is just the right thickness (many of its neighbours are much too thick) and perfectly cooked meat (there is a prevailing tendency to slightly undercook the meat at many Syrian and Lebanese manaeesh bakeries). The meat is also beautifully flavoured rather than just relying on the taste of lamb to carry it, with hints of pomegranate molasses. This simple trio makes a winning formula that is, as per my extensive lahm ajeen field research, surprisingly rare to find. I like mine topped with cheese and stuffed with complimentary pickles. ZnA

26 Chase Rd, London NW10 6QN, United Kingdom

Spinach manaeesh at Yasmina

I have sampled manaeesh across most corners of London and the Middle East and I am on a never-ending search for the perfect spinach version. In Acton, Yasmina comes closest as it delivers in its ability to provide the tart sourness from sumac and pomegranate-coated onions and citrussy spinach, a concoction that feels like a slap in the face (in a good way), waking you up in a way coffee could only dream of. Even as Yasmina sits directly on the not so glamorous A40, once inside its mint tea and manaeesh will transport you away from the world of Ulez and into a warm, homey embrace. Note: Yasmina is closed until 21st September. ZnA

18 Western Ave, W3 7TZ

Mince flatbread at Ararat Bread 

Ararat’s plain and sesame breads, Dalston’s worst-kept secret, can be found at an increasing number of popular street food wrap joints, taken out surreptitiously from plastic bags and passed off as their own. But despite its roaring wholesale trade, the best version is still in person at Ridley Road, on the spot, smeared with a coarse mince that pops with coriander seeds, spun at 33 rpm on a rotating oven and folded back on itself in a swirl that resembles a cinnamon bun made of lamb – crisp and piping hot with the meat just at the point of caramelisation and a small whisper of heat that blooms in the mouth. JN

132 Ridley Rd, E8 2NR

Sujuk and cheese manaeesh at Zeit and Zaatar

There are now many Levantine bakeries in London serving various manaeesh. If you are a fan of these oven-hot flatbreads, then you will surely have your favourite bakery and your ideal topping (zaatar, akkawi cheese and mincemeat are the classic). Zeit and Zaatar has long been mine (the Shepherd's Bush branch is the original but the Ealing is somewhat more spacious) and as well as the usual toppings, it does a sujuk and cheese version which is the regular exception to my never-eating-cured-meat rule. The deep maroon spicy sausage vivid against the bright gooey cheese supported by the flaky flatbread is the savoury baked good of your dreams. ZhA

215 Uxbridge Rd, W13 9AA

Hard dough bread at Cornfield Bakery

Unless you hail from a particular part of deep South London, the chances are you haven’t heard of Cornfield Bakery. But for those who are from Thornton Heath and Croydon, especially those of Caribbean descent, Cornfield has been part of local folklore for decades. It serves the gamut of Caribbean baked classics like Jamaican patties and spiced bun, which provoke long, meandering queues out the door at Christmas and Easter when these are overwhelmingly in demand. That said, what keeps the bakery ticking year round is their staple Jamaican style hard dough (hardo) Bread, a simultaneously firm but soft loaf that goes with anything sweet or savoury. RP

51 High St, Thornton Heath, CR7 8RW

Angels bread at Angels Bakery

Angels calls itself a bakery, though with a bain-marie loaded with jollof rice, Nigerian stews and a constantly roaring grill firing up suya meat, it could really call itself whatever it wants. It does seem though that all these culinary joys are the sideshow to the main seller, which is loaves of soft ‘angels bread’, their own take on agege bread, which pairs fantastically with some Ghanaian shito, a spicy fish paste available from any of the small grocers nearby. Angels bread is available at all the bakery's locations. RP

Various Locations

Agege bread at Agege Bread (London Bakers)

A common theme here for Nigerian bakeries in the UK is come for the bread, stay for the additional bevy of food. Agege bread, simply named after Agege in Lagos, is another classic Nigerian soft-bread favourite, equally as tasty as a sandwich or torn and dipped into a hot stew. Those of Caribbean descent will quickly recognise this as a slightly softer version of the oft-confusingly named hard dough bread. At its namesake in Lewisham - Agege Bread (London Bakers) -  the agege bread is especially good. RP

32, Deptford High street, SE8 4AF

Pide (or lahmacun) at Karadeniz Pide & Lahmacun

Karadeniz may be the only place outside the Turkish embassy in London – or the British embassy in Ankara – to display portraits of Atatürk and the late Queen Elizabeth, and of the three, Karadeniz serves the better pide. What is pide? ‘Brother, it’s Turkish pizza but it’s older than the Italians,’ the owner explains to newbies. Either way, the view is the same as that in Di Fara, the legendary New York pizzeria: an elderly person (in this case one of the team of three aunties, who switch between rolling dough, stuffing gozleme and prepping the bases) hunched over the electric oven, paying close attention to the brownness of the dough as if it was a lump needing an accurate diagnosis, and brushing fat (butter, in this case) onto the crusts so each one comes out properly burnished and crispy, a salty longboat of hot dough and hot cheese. JN

253 Hertford Rd, Enfield EN3 5JJ

Vegan Pizza from Your Neighbourhood Za

In his endeavour to create a vegan pizza that wasn't simply a simulacrum of a great pie, home baker Youness of Your Neighbour Za in Turnpike Lane spent 120 days straight crafting and perfecting his vegan ’za. Sweet and slippery pomodoro sauce is smothered with a three vegan-cheese combo of casadei, gondino and plant-based cheddar merging to create a veg-milk magma mottled in all the right places. All on top of a hybrid base and crust, which is quite possibly the apex in corcicione. With a perfect char and chew, glazed in splashes of golden olive nectar, the no-knead wet dough is slow-baked at a 73-77 percent hydration. A pizza so good that it is not just a substitute but a preference for the two days a week (Friday, Saturday, occasionally on Thursdays) he opens his doors. His search for personal pleasure becomes ours. AD

238 Sirdar Road, N22 6QS

Strecci at Toklas Bakery

I recommend visiting Toklas Bakery’s understated and elegant space just around the corner from 180 Studios on the Strand often enough that you learn to alternate between the bitter chocolate honey hockey puck and the tahini ‘cookie’ that is more like a boulder of halva, adding a warm cinnamon bun on occasion. Founded by the Frieze magazine and art fair founders in 2021, Toklas is a good spot to take these things away down by the river and the seating through the back is a nice place to while away an afternoon. If you decide to do so, consider the very good-value strecci, crisp and stretchy flatbread, topped with understated and elegant (yes, again) combinations of ingredients like tapenade and potato or courgette and salsa verde. JH

9 Surrey St, Temple, WC2R 2ND

Pizza, any of them, at Crisp Pizza

In recent months, there has been an attempt to define the pizzas coming out of Gracey’s, Vincenzo’s and Crisp as ‘London Pizza’ – a style distinct to the city, in the same way as ‘New York pizza’, ‘Neapolitan pizza’, or ‘New Haven pizza’ (if New Haven was a real place). Some might argue that two of them aren’t even in London, but more pertinently, it’s not true: these places are anomalies, pizzas with cooked out bases, verging on burnt, that exist in opposition to most London pizza. Of the three, Crisp in Hammersmith stakes the biggest claim to being a new style because it’s so distinct. It’s clearly American-inspired, from the base to the toppings, but with something extra: digestibility, a 0 degree flop, and a crunch that rattles round your skull as you bite in. It is the best pizza London has seen since ASAP, and if they start playing around with the toppings in the same way as Pam Yung did, then we can really start talking about London pizza. JN

25 Crisp Rd, W6 9RL

Flaky

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This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project.

This is the last piece in this two-week series. We hope you’ve enjoyed it. To read the rest of the essays and guides in the project, please click here. And please share it far and wide! Note, the guides in this project are for subscribers only.

Subscribe now

And to read the companion guide to this top 10, what we’ve called Around London in 56 Bakes, please click here.

The Vittles London Bakery Guide

The ten best all-round bakeries in the capital. By James Hansen, Jessica Wang, Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh, and Adam Coghlan. Illustration by Alex Brenchley.

From cakes and cookies to buns and loaves of bread, spanning sweet and savoury, artisan and wholesale, these are the 10 bakeries in London, which our group of writers and bakery enthusiasts deem to be the best all-round in the city: the places that most faithfully reflect London as a truly great and plural capital of bakeries.

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Categories

The Best Cake Bakery, by Jonathan Nunn
The Best Nordic Bakery, by Jessica Wang
The Best Bread Bakery, by James Hansen
The Best Vittles-Adjacent Bakery, by Jessica Wang
The Best Neighbourhood Bakery, by Jessica Wang
The Best Wholesale Bakery, by Jonathan Nunn
The Best Industrial Bakery, by Adam Coghlan
The Best French Bakery, by Jessica Wang and James Hansen
The Best English Bakery, by Ruby Tandoh
The Best All-Rounder Bakery, by James Hansen

The Best Cake Bakery 

Lincoln’s Patisserie

Recently, I turned up to a wake in Edmonton with no food to offer, so I made a quick detour to Lincoln’s Patisserie, a Caribbean bakery on an estate near Silver Street. Online discussions of Caribbean takeaway spots are usually hyper-critical of perceived failings, but Lincoln’s is one of the rare few I have never heard anyone say a negative word about – a reflection of its unimpeachable patties and its exceptional range of simple cakes. This time I came hoping to get a few slices of the carrot cake, but was told it was cheaper to get a whole cake at £15 (!), which was enough to feed a dozen people, easily. This is a cake that looks unassuming but reveals its brilliance in the mouth – the integrity of the crumb, the moistness of the interior, the balance of spice and sugar. After I left, I got a phone call from my dad asking me where the cake was from and telling me that everyone at the wake was talking about it – it’s one of those cakes. Jonathan Nunn

287 Brettenham Rd, N18 2HF

The Best Nordic Bakery

Bageriet

Statistically, I am more likely to be Bageriet-bound from Leicester Square station than any other place, even Chinatown. Sandwiched between Covent Garden to its right and Piccadilly to its left, this Swedish bakery boasts an accessibility score of 10/10 and a street name – Rose Street – that renders it all almost too idyllic to be true. 

For most first-timers, it is the heavily alluring Nordic scent of kanelbullar that draws them through the bakery’s door. However, Bageriet was first brought to my attention as ‘the biscuit shop’ by a fellow baked-good-enthusiast. Get baker/owner Daniel’s line-up of bitar – traditional Swedish miniature tarts which make the extraordinary out of what I assumed was ordinary – and also the vaniljhärta: a film of shortbread encasing a gooey vanilla custard heart, the daintier Swedish answer to the Great British custard cream. Crucially, tucked away in the refrigerated counter at the back of the bakery is the unassuming krämbulle, which has soon become, out of all of Bageriet’s treasures, my favourite child. A deceptively simple ‘cream bun’ to the eye, the krämbulle – an insulated mass of thick, chilled vanilla cream under the protection of a sweet cardamom-scented dough – is so much more. With a scatter of sugar to finish, it becomes everything the perfect doughnut aspires to be, but very rarely is. Jessica Wang

24 Rose St, WC2E 9EA

The Best Bread Bakery

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This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.

Tomorrow, look out for the definitive, subscriber-only, two-part London bakery guide out Friday!

1762–2024: A History of London’s Biggest Sandwich Moments

The London sandwich timeline, by Hester van Hensbergen

Many of the greatest meals between two slices of bread never become trends. The sandwich is one of the most accessible forms of culinary invention, and some of London’s best might be those known to only a handful of people – something sparked by what was lying in the fridge one Sunday afternoon, eaten over the chopping board to a hum of surprised delight; an idea that stuck, a recipe never written down.

This timeline of iconic sandwiches doesn’t tell these stories. There are few home kitchens here, except for those written into the pages of a newspaper or recipe book. Instead, there are private members’ clubs, coffee shop franchises, and cooking shows. There are no quiet moments of private appreciation; these are sandwiches that announced themselves, generating queues and crowds and noise, from hollers in the streets to streams of hyper-colourful Instagram photos. This is a potted history, not of London’s greatest sandwiches over the last two-and-a-half centuries, but of the most iconic ones. The ones that gathered heat – usually through the exercise of cultural and economic power – and created a collective thrill across the city. 

1762 – THE PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUB ONE
The ‘sandwich’ was a trend from the start, but not a genuine invention; using bread as a vessel for other food is literally one of the oldest tricks in the book. In the eighteenth century, you would’ve had to have lived an incredibly sheltered existence to find this way of eating novel, which is why it was John Montagu, 4^th Earl of Sandwich, and his coterie of aristocratic friends who got to name it. The Earl’s habit of ordering ‘a bit of beef between two slices of toasted bread’ when at the gaming table at London’s private clubs was an innovation in manners for the upper classes. Soon, this ‘new’ dish of salt beef in bread – which may have also been inspired by the Earl’s recent tour of the Ottoman Empire – was ‘highly in vogue’, observed French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley on a trip to London in the 1760s. 

1850s – MUSTARD! MUSTARD!! MUSTARD!!!
By the mid-nineteenth century, according to historian Pen Vogler, sandwich bars had become hugely popular for London’s middle-class men. Joining the ‘hot and hungry’ crowds as they flooded out of performances at the Lyceum or Drury Lane after midnight, the flaneur George Augustus Sala – a contemporary of Charles Dickens – didn’t have need of the theatre. His entertainment was the cacophonous mass, ‘clamorous for sandwiches’ and piling into the shop on the corner of Bow Street to cries of ‘mustard’ and stacks of freshly cut ham, beef, and German sausage sandwiches. The scale of the sandwich fever was astonishing: according to journalist Henry Mayhew in 1851, in addition to the sandwich bars, there were also dozens of ham-sandwich street-sellers outside the theatres. This booming trade had been ‘unknown’ a decade earlier, and yet now there were over thirty of them, plus many more ‘anxious to deal in sandwiches’ who couldn’t muster the modest capital required. 

1870s – THE UPPER-CLASS CUCUMBER COOLER
The upper-class afternoon tea – with little cakes, toasts, and sandwiches – was instituted gradually, from the end of the seventeenth century, according to historian Diane Purkiss. The fever for crustless and minute cucumber sandwiches, however, came on fast – ‘a sudden fashion’ of the 1870s, she goes on to note. These light and refreshing dainties were only available in summer, which meant the moment for them coincided perfectly with the social season for London’s high society. They arrived just in time for the first Wimbledon in 1877, were favoured by the officials of the Raj in India for their cooling properties, graced the tables of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, and were most probably on the Ritz’s first menu when it opened in 1906. 

1948 – THE BRITISH RAIL SANDWICH
Signs that the trend for sandwiches would begin to trough were evident soon after their mid-nineteenth century peak, though. For the snobbish London elites, predictably, it was when the dish travelled beyond the city that it started to lose its appeal. A sandwich on the move, procured at an unassuming railway station, was the lowest of all, utilitarian and stale. In 1869, Anthony Trollope derided the railway sandwich’s ‘whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within’ as the ‘real disgrace of England.’ It certainly compared unfavourably to the French alternative, whose ‘nicely fitting slice of ham’ in a fresh, crusty loaf ‘made with the whitest and best flour’ and neatly tied with ribbon had been enough to set Dickens into a reverie three years earlier. Over the decades that followed, the British railway sandwich became something of a perverse national treasure – always so ripe for satire and denigration – and when the railways were nationalised in 1948, it graduated, too, to the ‘British Rail’ sandwich.  

1959 – SALMON AND CHAMPAGNE
Reviving the glamour of the sandwich required a distinctively new setting. The visionary Lincoln’s Inn hostess Hilda Leyel had declared it so in 1925: the ‘proper accompaniment’ to a sandwich should not be the ‘railway station coffee, but a glass of champagne.’ But Leyel was ahead of her time, and a key ingredient of elegance was missing from her repertoire: smoked salmon. The cured fish was still something of a rarity in London in those days. It had arrived in the nineteenth century by way of East End smokehouses, which were set up by European Jewish migrants for making Scottish salmon. By the 1920s, it was on offer at the exclusive counters in Harrods Meat and Fish Hall, and found a home in Jewish delis like Panzer’s in St John’s Wood when it opened in 1944. But the sweet spot for the smoked salmon sandwich arrived in the late 1950s, with no one better to declare it so than Leyel’s great admirer Elizabeth David. Writing in Vogue in 1959, David imagined her perfect Christmas day at her Chelsea home ending with ‘a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed.’

1960s – AS YOU LIKE IT
Londoners had already been clamouring for German sausage sandwiches slathered in mustard on the strand in the 1850s. So, when Paul Rothe migrated from Germany and set up one of London’s first Deutsche delicatessens in Marylebone in 1900, he had an eager crowd waiting for the ‘continental comestibles’ he sold. But according to its current proprietor, the shop didn’t start selling sandwiches until the 1960s, when the area became less residential and more business-oriented. The menu was – and remains – an extension of the delicatessen’s cornucopia: pretty much anything you can imagine, you can have in a sandwich. Though experimentation is encouraged, it’s worth starting the journey with the deli’s classics, like hot frankfurter with German mustard and sauerkraut, or egg mayo and four anchovies.

1980 – THE BOX-FRESH ONE
Central London’s 1980s were years of boisterous shoulder suits, big mobile phones, and boxed sandwiches. It all started in the Marble Arch Marks & Spencer store in 1980, when a shop assistant at the cafe decided to wrap up some unsold sandwiches and sell them to take away. Soon they were boxed up in plastic triangles and sold across several stores, with tomato and salmon being the first offering (the arrival of farmed salmon in the late 1960s had made it more affordable and available); a year later, the hugely popular prawn mayonnaise was introduced. By 1985, Boots had invented the Meal Deal, and the way the city’s workers lunched had changed irrevocably. 

1980s – THE ALL-NIGHT BAGEL 
In the same period, Londoners seeking the counterpoint to the functional fridge-cold triangle could take a late-night trip east for a bagel on Brick Lane, where smoked salmon, lox or herring bagels were the most popular items. At some point, a new bagel appeared: an unwieldy muppet mouth filled with teeth-tangling salt beef, gherkins prone to flying out like detached plane propellers, and mustard made for chin drizzles. Nothing about this dish was new: from the Earl’s beloved salt beef and the bagels boiled in Jewish bakeries since the 1800s, to the mustard so loved by the strand theatre crowds in the 1850s, London had seen this all before. But it was in the 1980s that Beigel Bake – which had opened in 1974 –began a twenty-four-hour operation and became an epicentre for this sandwich, serving crowds of revellers crying out for mustard after midnight like it was 1859. 

1980s – THE GRILLED SLIPPER
Italians are notorious for their food conservatism: the old always trumps the new. But on the rare occasion that a novel food does find its way onto the Italian culinary map, they embrace it hard. Ciabatta (which means slipper in Italian) and panini sandwiches became popular in the 1980s due to simultaneous developments in Venice and Milan. Modern-day ciabatta was invented in 1982 by Arnaldo Cavallari, a miller from Veneto, as an Italian alternative to the baguette that he hoped would make him rich (spoiler: it worked). In Milan, meanwhile, the motorcycle-riding, Timberland-wearing paninaro youth subculture movement was gathering speed and embracing the panino as a meal that could keep pace with their lifestyles. By the end of the decade in London, the ciabatta panini was becoming increasingly widespread, available anywhere with a griddle, and helped by the rise of fast-sandwich spots like Costa Coffee and Pret a Manger (which opened their first shops in Westminster in 1981 and 1986 respectively). 

1991 – THE EAGLE LANDS A STEAK ROLL
When The Eagle opened in Farringdon in the bracingly cold winter of 1991, it offered warmth in the form of space heaters and a steak sandwich. The pub’s first flyer listed the ‘Bifana’ at £4. The combination was simple – rump steak, salsa verde, cos lettuce, and a stone-baked Portuguese roll – but the effect was outsize. The sandwich became the rock steady of the pub’s otherwise changing menu. It’s been there every day since, as the pub has graduated legions of successful chefs – starting with Sam and Sam Clark, who met there before setting up Moro round the corner in 1997 – and moved from journalists’ canteen to culinary pilgrimage site.

1998 – NIGEL AND NIGELLA MAKE TRENDY FOCACCIA 
In 1925, when Leyel envisaged the multitudinous possibilities of a good filling, she made just one exception: ‘Never put mushrooms into sandwiches; they are not safe to keep to eat cold.’ By the 1990s, though, the temperature on mushrooms had changed, and there was one in particular getting all the attention. The Portobello had hit London’s markets at the start of the decade, when mushroom farmers realised they could create a new product by letting button mushrooms grow a little longer. The nineties also saw two new trends in London sandwich-making: deli-style focaccia sandwiches, and a greater variety of vegetable-based options. There was no better pair to crystallise the currents of that decade than rising culinary stars Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson. So, when they joined forces in the TV studio in 1998, Lawson chose the ‘fabulous’ oversized mushrooms for a vegetarian steak sandwich in ‘trendy focachee-ya’, as Slater called it. ‘It’s better than the usual vegetarian bap … one of those sort of wholemeal things with alfalfa in’, he mused. ‘It’s like tucking into a futon.’ The pair loved it so much, the recipe made it into both their cookbooks, Real Food (Slater) and How to Eat (Lawson), that same year.

2010s – BAKEHOUSE SOURDOUGH GOES BIG
If the fluffy focaccia and open-mouthed bagel seemed like reactions against the boxed fridge sandwich, for the eaters of the late 2000s they didn’t go far enough: London needed to go bigger, chewier, more manually impossible. Enter the sourdough bakehouse sandwich circa 2005. That’s the year Gail Mejia, who was already running The Bread Factory, a successful wholesale business, joined new partners to open the first Gail’s. Supposedly the team have been using the same sourdough mother for the bread they make their sandwiches with ever since, even as the company has now become a major chain. But the bakehouse boom truly set off in the 2010s, primarily out of east London: E5 Bakehouse opened in 2010, Dusty Knuckle in 2014, and Pophams in 2017. Drawing from a cosmopolitan, Mediterranean-leaning dictionary – from roasted roots to porchetta, dates to pomegranates, romesco to nduja, garlic yoghurt to wild garlic mayo – the new bakehouses all spoke the same language in unison, feeding it into vast wobbly wedges of walnut-brown, crater-surfaced bread. 

2010 – THE NEW BACON SANDWICH
No one but no one thought it was possible to reinvent the bacon sandwich and make the new version a thing. The bacon sandwich is as everyday as it is delicious, and there are few ways to vary it without creating an altogether new dish (such as bacon, lettuce and tomato, or bacon, scallop and black pudding). But that changed in 2010, when Dishoom opened its doors. Here, finally, was evidence that a bacon butty isn’t always a bacon butty. Sometimes it’s a bacon naan roll, fresh from the tandoor, smeared with Philadelphia and served with coriander and tomato chilli jam. 

2012 – SWEET DOUGH MAKES SWEET DOUGH
In the early 2010s, Londoners eating out at the city’s new burger restaurants – MEATLiquor (opened 2011), Honest Burgers (2011), and Patty&Bun (2012) – started to notice something unusual about the bread buns: they weren’t sesame-seeded crumbling pillows, but rich, doughy domes of brioche. By 2012, these slightly sweet buns were everywhere, even pubs. It was the mildly sickly trend that riled burger eaters from the start, and yet (perhaps reflecting a higher tolerance for sweetness in our palates in general) it has persisted. 

2012 – THE PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUB ONE (2.0)
By the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Earl of Sandwich’s stroke of inspiration, it was high time someone came up with another legendary sandwich in a private members’ club. Chef Jeremy Lee obliged when he joined Quo Vadis as head chef in 2012 and brought a favourite sandwich with him: chunky smoked eel and fierce horseradish cream, neatly parcelled between two playing cards of golden grilled sourdough. Though not by design, there is an irony and symmetry to Lee’s move. Like the Earl before him, he’s taken a neglected working-class food, dressed it up anew, and turned it into a fashion irrevocably associated with his name. 

2018 – THE HOT SANDO SUMMER
Whisper the word ‘sando’ any time before the summer of 2018 and you’d most likely have received a quizzical look. By July, though, TĀ TĀ Eatery’s Iberico pork sando was all anyone could talk about, with Bright soon following suit with its own panko pork and shredded cabbage version. Fast-forward to 2019 and TĀ TĀ Eatery had opened a specialist sando shop, TÓU (now at Borough Market); Soho izakaya Ichibuns had a celeriac version; Nanban was doing miso aubergine; there was sardine at Two Lights; Jidori was doing a cheeseburger one; and Peg was holding down the fort with pork. Nearly all of these restaurants have shut down since Covid, but another dozen spots across the city are now open, so customers can still get their fill. 

2020s – THE DOORSTEP DINNER
The Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were supposed to hail the end of the sandwich: it only took the city’s workers vacating the centre for their homes to (temporarily) topple the regime of Pret’s chewy baguettes. But while one kind of sandwich lunch was on a downward spiral, another was on the rise. In place of utility, there were semolina subs filled with curls on curls of cold cuts – dizzying to look at, like an optical illusion (Dom’s Subs); fried and saucy things in focaccia thick enough to climb (Max’s Sandwich Shop); elaborate banh mi baguettes (Hai Café); and prized small-plates, usually featuring a fritter, squashed into bread (40 Maltby Street). Sandwiches became luxury, and doorsteps the new dining tables. 

2024 – THE WHITE AND FLUFFY ONE
The early 2020s have seen London’s sandwiches growing in complexity and size, but there are also countervailing winds. In sandwich-land, it’s time for cloudy simplicity and sweet childhood fillings, taking inspiration from the cafe and bakery cultures of East and Southeast Asia. There are fluffy and pale egg sandwiches to be had with milk tea at Hong Kong-style cafes, Singaporean kaya toast with creamy coconut jam (kaya) and salty pats of butter, and stacks of perfectly oblong shokupan (Japanese milk bread) at bakeries like Happy Sky (though temporarily closed) and Arôme. 

2024 and Beyond - SANDWICH…SANDWICH? 

We can only wonder blindly about the next great London sandwich moment…

How thick the cut? And how stacked the filling? 

Will the primacy of the visual cross-section finally trump flavour and coherence all together? 

How tautological will the brand name be? 

Where will the far flung culinary influences be plucked from this time?

If trends in London wraps and the terrifying advent of the Yorkshire Burrito are anything to go by, perhaps it’s time for a little more regional influence. Perhaps the New Ultimate Sandwich in London will come from somewhere like…Bristol? Perhaps it will be called…Sandwich Sandwich. 

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Credits

Hester van Hensbergen is a writer with a focus on food and the environment. She writes for Vittles, the Times Literary Supplement, Eater, TANK Magazine and others. She is Programme Manager for the Oxford Real Farming Conference, the annual gathering of the UK’s agroecological food and farming movement. To see what she’s been writing and cooking, find her on Instagram @hestervanhensbergen.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead.

For further reading on the history of the sandwich in Britain, see the relevant chapters in Pen Vogler’s Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain (2020) and Diane Purkiss’s English Food: A People’s History (2022).

This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.

Tomorrow, look out for London’s biggest sandwich moments since 1762 and for subscribers only, the definitive two-part London bakery guide out Friday!

By Them, For Them

The vital history and uncertain future of three generational Caribbean bakeries in London, by Riaz Phillips

The vastness of the Caribbean food scene in today’s London would have been unbelievable to the earliest generations of Caribbeans to arrive in the first half of the twentieth century. In 2024, it spans roadside vans and DIY street-food stalls in inner-city neighbourhoods like Brixton to the south; high-street takeaway shops in Tottenham and Harlesden in the north-east and north-west; and restaurants and luxury hotel residencies in the west and central. Yet for those early communities, foods from their homelands were scarce, both inside and outside the domestic space. Importing fresh ingredients like ackee, jackfruit, yam and plantain from Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and the Caribbean was nearly impossible due to slow shipping times, meaning that savoury dishes from the islands were very difficult to recreate, and Caribbean food spaces were hard to come by.

With limited access to public spaces and resources, it's understandable that many people in this generation became self-employed and started food businesses in their homes. Some of these businesses were bakeries, since baked goods were more easily reimagined in new lands. The early bakeries, which prospered out of necessity and determination, were among the first of this wave of businesses to thrive in the public sphere, enabling people from a plurality of Caribbean backgrounds to start up by themselves. While the media at the time tended to portray these migrants as being from slums – unskilled and reliant on welfare – it often neglected and dismissed their education and skills, which included carpentry, construction, electronics and culinary know-how. 

In due course, the different Caribbean diasporas formed cross-cultural communities and, since a lot of their native foods were similar, venues selling baked goods began to thrive. My own grandfather would often tell of the things that he and his cohorts were able to bring onto the Windrush-type ships, including dried herbs and spices and dried spiced fruits. When combined with flour, water, yeast, baking powder and margarine or butter – readily available in England – these ingredients formed the basis of a whole range of baked goods, like rum cake and coconut rolls, that could be made, served and purchased every day. 

Mister Patty

One London pioneer of Caribbean baking was Roy Fong, a Chinese-Jamaican man who moved to Britain with his wife Cindy in the 1960s. Noting grumblings about the lack of Jamaican patties (snacks inspired by Cornish pasties in their shape, size and form) in his local north-west London community, Fong started to bake them from home in Sudbury. Fong and his family would spend night and day meticulously recreating the French style of soft and flaky patty, which was made prominent by the likes of Bruce’s and Tastee’s Bakery in Kingston, Jamaica. Without his own shop, Fong simply went from door to door selling ‘Patties for 24 pence’ – and soon gained the nickname ‘Mister Patty’. 

Fong set up his own humble ‘Mister Patty’ store in 1972, on Craven Park Road in north-west London’s Harlesden, and the words still adorn the shopfront today. London doesn't have a ‘Little Jamaica’ or a ‘Caribbean town’ like it does a Little Italy or Chinatown, but if it did, I imagine that this stretch of road would be as worthy as anywhere else in the city. In this shop, Roy’s son Rog, who took the reins when his father retired in 2005, continues the tradition of patty-making today. (Roy passed away seven years later.) Often working solo, Rog wakes up at dawn to bake beef patties, chicken patties, saltfish patties, vegetable patties and more, continuing a craft that has long been rendered all but obsolete by the industrial-scale, factory-made, sunshine-yellow-coloured patties most people are more familiar with today. 

Although the shop features a handful of vintage framed maps of Jamaica, the shopfront reads ‘Mister Patty – the Caribbean cook shop’; this frequently-seen signifier unified different people from the region. In many ways, as Caribbean people came to Britain from various islands, they became a homogenous community, despite the distance between some islands extending thousands of miles. In London, this meant there was a close cultural and culinary exchange between communities. Patties, while popular in Jamaica, are much less common in Trinidad & Tobago; likewise, roti, a daily favourite in the sister islands, is rare in Jamaica. Still, for those who came to Britain from other Caribbean islands, the predominantly Jamaican bakeries didn’t always cater to their needs. 

Horizon Foods

Among those left wanting were the Hosein family from Trinidad (now based in Edmonton, north London), who are the proprietors of now-nationwide roti supplier Horizon Foods. The family operates with a team of bakers out of a yellow-capped corrugated warehouse – now marked with the Horizon name on a Trini-red sign – on an industrial estate behind North Middlesex Hospital, just off the North Circular. This large space has enabled the business to produce thousands of roti a day for both small and commercial customers, leading them to become one of the most successful Trini bakeries in London, if not the country.

But things were different in the beginning, Horizon’s director Sheldon Hosein tells me. When they first started out in 1991, it was from home. They had been making dhal puri (a flatbread stuffed with blended dal) and buss-up shut (a layered, flaky, oily roti), both usually served with curries and vegetable stews. By the early 1990s, their West London family kitchen, which had served them well for a period in the late-1980s, was no longer big enough. ‘We outgrew our kitchen quick and the neighbours would start to wonder what was going on, as people used to queue up and down the road to pick up roti from us,’ Sheldon remembers.

It's important to note that the Hosein family come from a lineage of Caribbean people from the Indian subcontinent; they descend from former indentured labourers that migrated in the late nineteenth century. Like their fellow New World residents, they had to re-imagine and recreate the foods of their motherland. Food traditions like roti-making evolved, fusing the availability of British flour in the Caribbean with the non-perishable foodstuffs like dal that the Indians carried on ships. 

Bakeries of Trinbagonian descent play a particular role in the wider Caribbean food scene. The word ‘Caribbean’ is frequently bandied about to describe the foods and wares of several shops and bakeries; however, in Trinidad you would scarcely find a bakery serving Jamaican patties, while in Jamaica you would rarely come across roti shops. In A House for Mr Biswas, Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipaul wrote: ‘Trinidad Indians are now part of a Caribbean culture, and they find the effort to work backwards and “rediscover” India difficult’. Food represents this, playing a large role in the new dishes developed when these communities arrived in the Caribbean.

Rainbow Bakery 

Because Caribbean bakeries were largely influenced by the British and European presence on the islands throughout the colonial period and its afterlife, the food they serve has always been legible to an audience beyond the Caribbean community. This meant bakeries – unlike restaurants, serving bread, which was part of British cuisine as well – remained a more viable option for enterprise. This was perfect for those descending from smaller islands such as St. Lucia, a place both culturally and geographically at the centre of Jamaica and Trinidad. One of the few beacons of St. Lucian pride in London is Rainbow Bakery on Dalston Kingsland Road, which was originally opened by St. Lucian couple Byron Monero and Maria Polina almost four decades ago. Baking was one of Byron’s many skills coming over from St. Lucia, his son Julius tells me, and Rainbow Bakery was an opportunity to showcase this talent. Julius was initially taught to bake by his dad and has since developed his baking skills further by working with a few already-established Caribbean bakers in the UK. After his parents retired, they handed the reins over to Julius and his siblings.

At the bakery, the patriotism for St. Lucia is inescapable, with a huge sky-blue national flag raised high in the shop. The selection is broad, with plain and plaited hardo breads, and buns and patties perhaps more familiar to its Jamaican and British-Jamaican customers. To wash this all down, the shop carries a selection of St. Lucian-produced sea moss drink with flavours spanning ginger, peanut and bois bandé, a Caribbean tree bark spice similar to mauby which is popular in Trinidad. Julius explains that while the foundations of the foods from different islands are similar, there are a few things that make a St. Lucian bakery different from its Jamaican counterpart. ‘The bread texture, although similar, is slightly less dense,’ he explains. ‘This is due mainly to the difference in process of creating the “hardough”, and how the dough is milled and refined before moulding and baking. The recipe differs – you will find the “Lucian” bread contains a little less sugar.’ These small tweaks in taste are enough to make people venture from all over the city for their loaf. And although integrated Caribbean communities have been happy to frequent catch-all pan-Caribbean bakeries, there still exist a significant number in London who will travel to support and procure specialist strands of Caribbean bakes.

What ties these three bakeries together is their role as community centres, from their inception to the present day. Inside all three, walls are decorated with flyers for parties, theatre productions, gigs and sometimes even bereavements for people in the community. The flags may be slightly different, and the music blasting on the speakers may veer from reggae to calypso, but the conversations are full of the same patois and creole about trips ‘back home’, as well as the same excitement for the imminent arrival of homely food. Be it a small takeout-style shop like Mister Patty and Rainbow Bakery, or an industrial depot like Horizon, people are still drawn to these bakeries as a place to gather and revel in a specific kind of long-running Caribbeanness in Britain. That these bakeries still survive as magnets for the community says something about an ever-increasing shortage of modes for this sort of self-expression: community halls have disappeared with funding that once sustained them, while the expansion of digital industries means that music venues have waned, along with the genres that bolstered them. 

The populations that filled other equally vital spaces, like barber shops and churches, have dissipated as people – often as a result of inexorable socio-economic forces – move out of the areas around which they have built those communities. As this downturn takes place, it stands to question: What happens to Caribbean identity in Britain?

Sadly, all three of the proprietors mentioned in this article – like hundreds of others I’ve interviewed over the years – share the same concern: their own children don’t share the excitement to take over the family business that they did. In forging their own livelihoods, the third generation have been able to climb the social ladder and enter fields that don’t require the same twenty-four-hour watch as hospitality, nor the early morning starts of a bakery. I sometimes wonder whether the Caribbean bakery will last another generation, with rising costs, changing tastes, gentrification, and the lack of financial investment for black-owned businesses all contributing to the erosion of the institution. For now at least, though, these bakeries aren’t relics – they are thriving spaces. And for the Caribbean diaspora, they are a physical reminder that their culture built something in Britain – by them, for them. 

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Credits

Riaz Phillips is is a writer and photographer who splits his time between London and Berlin. Phillips is the author of several books, including West Winds (2022) and East Winds (2023), which explore the vast diversity of cultures and cuisines across the Caribbean.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead.

This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.

From tomorrow, look out for the history of London’s Caribbean bakeries, London’s biggest sandwich moments since 1762 and, for subscribers only, the definitive two-part London bakery guide on Friday!

To read about the 50 best sandwiches in London, published last Friday, visit the link below.

Far Beyond These Things

The purpose and repurposes of white bread in all its ornate forms. Words and photographs by Isaac Rangaswami.

Sliced bread existed before it was officially invented, it just didn’t have a name. This is because for thousands of years cutting bread into pieces was unremarkable, until people figured out a way to do it in a uniform, mass-produced way. A juddering steel contraption marked this shift in 1928, when it chewed through America’s first machine-sliced loaves. Several decades later, in 1961, British scientists mechanised bread production once again, unleashing the Chorleywood bread process on the world. The new method meant we could make bread more efficiently and economically, but the end product wasn’t really bread at all.

Around that time, other breadmaking practices began arriving in Britain, many of them from countries the UK had colonised in the past. These diaspora breads – naan and pita among them – started to coexist with the ones that were here already, as supermarket shelves increasingly groaned with unnaturally springy, factory-made loaves. Britain’s native baking traditions dwindled, but didn’t disappear entirely.

London is Britain’s most culinary diverse city, yet for every miche, roti, baozi, challah, injera, flatbread and focaccia, there are at least as many loaves of plain white. While some of these are Chorleywood processed, there are also cooks and bakers who make higher quality white bread from scratch – whether it’s tin loaf, Agege bread or hard dough. Some of these sliced whites are ideal as a component part of a great sandwich, but I am as interested in how pre-sliced, factory-made bread is manipulated until it morphs into actual food: fried bread, bread pakora, prawn and kaya toasts, francesinhas, all concoctions that are the very definition of making something out of nothing.

White Bread, As It Is

If you want sliced white but you don’t want sourdough or a mass-produced loaf, you still have options. These include heritage spots such as Ayres in Nunhead, Raab’s in Islington, Dunn’s in Muswell Hill and H Hirst & Sons in Lewisham, improbable surviving village bakeries inside the M25. Here locals queue for jam doughnuts and flaky sausage rolls like they’ve done for centuries, as well as fuller, realer loaves of flour-dusted white bread.

But it’s London’s Caribbean bakeries where white bread really takes pride of place. Shokupan may be trendy, and Agege bread is becoming more common in south London newsagents, but hard dough (hardo) bread has a particularly deep history in the capital. Like brioche and American supermarket bread, hardo tends to be sweeter. It is dense too. And if you buy it from a Caribbean bakery, it has been made by hand rather than by machines.

Camberwell’s The Bread of Life is one of London’s many time-honoured Caribbean breadmakers, some of which are now among the oldest bakeries in the city. Buy a serving of whatever dark, bone-rich soup is on that day, alongside a weighty oblong of bread to take home. Tightly packed yet soft, this is the Platonic ideal of a sandwich loaf. I like to have it buttered and open-faced, with a slice of cheddar.

Fried Slice

Fried bread began to fade away in London a while back, not long after Ceefax, doorstep milk delivery and boxy three-wheeled cars. Even in caffs it rarely comes as standard in a fry-up these days, though most proprietors will quite happily toss a slice into some hot oil for you if you ask.

E Pellicci in Bethnal Green is one such place. It has retained its historical atmosphere and convivial charm (despite becoming TikTok famous and having its own celebrity podcast.) The menu offers an optional fried slice with its flagship fry-ups, which I find heartening because it means loads of tourists end up eating fried bread each day. If you don’t assemble scaffolding for a living you probably don’t need the calories, but that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty about enjoying the glistening cuboid.

As London’s native fried slice tradition has receded slightly from view, one of its south Asian relatives has taken a deeper hold. This is the bread pakora, a vividly colourful example of which you can find at Gujarat Junction in Forest Gate.

Kaya Toast

Kaya toast contrasts with Western conventions of toast by spreading the jam first, presenting the butter as thick, cool slabs and layering it into a sandwich. The butter is a long way from melting when it arrives, which creates a pleasing mix of textures and temperatures.

With the temporary closure of Shoreditch’s Kopichadim, Mei Mei in Borough Market may currently be the only place to buy kaya toast in London. I’ve enjoyed it there, but it’s more economical to prepare at home, which I’ve done using a jar of pandan kaya I bought at Raya, a Southeast Asian grocery store on the nearby Stoney Street. This smooth, willow-green variant of the coconut spread is floral and earthy, tasting something between vanilla, Earl Grey and seaweed.

Prawn Toast

Thanks to some clever branding, most people don’t think about prawn toast as it really is: sesame-prawn fried bread. Or maybe they do, but get it anyway because it tastes so good. You could order this dish from almost any Chinese takeaway, and enjoy it on your sofa, but there’s something particularly fun about getting it to eat in.

Along with Uncle Wrinkle’s artful rendition of the dish – chunky and crispy, yet loaded with soft pink mush – the prawn toast at Wong Kei is equal parts juicy and brittle. These are both contorted, sesame-speckled things, more like quarter-circles than triangles. If you examine them closely, the bread doesn’t actually look as if it has been hand-filled with minced prawns. To me, it looks like it has been genetically reprogrammed to become something far better, as if it was never sliced white bread at all.

Welsh Rarebit

I like St. JOHN’s Welsh rarebit because it allows you to eat at a famous London restaurant for £10.50, so long as that’s all you get. As with the place’s historic Clerkenwell environs, this dish’s ​​lagomorphic-sounding name is mysteriously archaic. It isn’t Welsh, nor does it have anything to do with rabbits; in fact nobody alive knows how it got its name.

At St. JOHN, the cayenne, Guinness and cheddar sauce is thick, adhering to the bread like a spray-on dress. The serrated knife you’re given comes in handy, as does a bottle of red Coke, along with a sharp, watercress-heavy salad and liberal application of the also-provided Lea & Perrins. 

Francesinha

I first came across the word ‘francesinha’ when somebody mistook my picture of a large dish of lasagne for one. Googling it later, I was thrilled to discover that such an absurdly rich concoction could exist, where ham, steak, sausage and melted cheese are layered between slices of toast before being submerged in a piquant, gravy-like bath and finished with a fried egg.

As with several entries on this list, you could technically call a francesinha a sandwich, but like them it is also much more than that. This is mainly because it is so drowning in sauce that you have to eat it with a knife and fork. Somewhere along the road to becoming a sandwich it took a reckless left turn; it is closer in form, ambition and ludicrousness to a Tournedos Rossini.

London is blessed with plenty of Portuguese spots, but they don’t all serve francesinha – so you have to look harder to find the places that do. They do a good one at O Cantinho in Stockwell, which I enjoy because you can taste the booze in the sauce – recipes fortify it with beer and often port and whisky too – something that helps cut through all the cheesy, porky indulgence. I once worked through it slowly by myself, with the help of a beaker of hot sauce.

Bread and Butter Pudding

Stale bread becomes bread and butter pudding with the quiet enchantment of custard, sultanas and tender loving care. As a result, its nostalgic powers are unrivalled: if you ever had this dessert in a school canteen, your first spoonful is likely to take you back there immediately.

For a uniquely London experience, try the ones at Castle’s Pie & Mash in Camden and Regency Cafe in Pimlico – both old, cafeteria-like spaces. At the Regency, the dish repurposes the pre-buttered doorstep slices they stack up in plastic boxes and issue with each breakfast, which I think is a very clever way to avoid waste.

Hong Kong-style French toast

Hong Kong-style French toast is the world’s most indulgent white bread creation – even more so than francesinha. The sheer volume of peanut butter plays a part here, as does the fact it’s fried, but it’s the butter and syrup topping that really pushes the dish into wild excess. If you haven’t had one before, the best comparison I can think of is a double-decker battered-Mars-bar sundae.

The first time I tried Hong Kong-style French toast was at Wamimichi Noodle Bar in Hendon, one of a number of spots opened up by London’s new Hongkonger communities. The dish has a squidgy coat, not unlike its Western cousin eggy bread. But as with the best white-bread dishes, Hong Kong-style French toast’s mass-produced origins are barely perceptible. This is because human creativity and resourcefulness, as well as the small dose of insanity behind all great ideas, have transformed it into something totally new.

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Credits

Isaac Rangaswami is a writer based in London. He runs the Instagram account @caffs_not_cafes.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead.

This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.

In this second week of the project, you can look forward to pieces on the myriad purposes of sliced white bread, a potted sandwich timeline, the history of London’s Caribbean bakeries and, for subscribers only, the definitive London bakery guide on Friday!

Who Are We Serving Today?

The ever-changing role of a Jewish community’s bakery in London’s East End. Words by Adrienne Katz Kennedy. Photography by Michaël Protin.

Stories of the Rinkoff family are easily prised from the mouths of those members who are still living. An afternoon spent with Esther Rinkoff on one of the tours she leads around the East End will usually mean a look inside her plastic folder of laminated photographs: a physical catalogue of family memories. Each picture, fished out at a specific landmark and in a particular order, has a story to accompany it: the wedding photo of the original bakery’s owners Hyman and Fanny – the product of successful match-making (‘shidduch’ in Yiddish) – and old images of Petticoat Lane which prompt Esther to quote her ancestors who walked through Spitalfields market on Sundays in the early 1900s. She talks of her husband, Ray, who went to the market as a child in the 1950s with his parents Max (Hyman and Fanny’s youngest son) and Sylvie. You’ll find another album’s worth of those memories displayed across the walls of the Rinkoff sandwich shop on Vallance Road (previously an all-night bagel shop owned by another local family) and the flagship bakery in O’Leary Square – a century of care, craft and community distilled into newspaper clippings about bagels and challah. Although it has long since moved on from only serving Ashkenazi-rooted breads and is today better known for its ‘crodough’, cookies, Danish pastries, cheesecake and other culture-agnostic bakes, the past lives of Rinkoff Bakery are never far away.

‘My grandfather’s brother, Abraham, who was also a baker, had seven children,’ says Esther’s husband, Ray. ‘And everyone had the same [names] – Max, Barney, Sid... People would say, “I knew your grandfather’s son, Max. He was the one who played piano.” And I would say, “My father never played piano in his life. You mean Max from Thrawl Street.”’ Ray will tell you of all the Rinkoff cousins and uncles who ran their own bakeries or businesses and changed their names – Rinkcroft, Richardson, Rankin – each contributing whatever they could towards keeping Rinkoff’s afloat. If you add the overlapping families and businesses, which include the owners of other East End institutions like the bakery Kossoffs, Katz’s string and paper bag shop and S. Cole poultry butchers, then trying to isolate the story of the Rinkoff family is like attempting to detangle a single thread from the intricately woven tapestry of the history of the Jewish East End. 

What we do know without doubt is that the story of Rinkoff’s bakery begins in 1911 on Old Montague Street in Stepney. Hyman Rinkoff, a Ukrainian refugee, and his wife Fanny (née Faiga), purchased the shop’s first location for £20, with a portion of the funds borrowed from a charity, the Jewish Board of Guardians. At the time, Old Montague Street had almost 100 per cent Jewish occupancy, a fact that would be used to fuel the Aliens Act 1905, which restricted immigration, but which also contributed to the demand for a bakery. While never officially kosher, Rinkoff’s became a gathering place and retailer of the familiar breads of Eastern Europe. The street, as described on researcher Rachel Lichenstein’s interactive Memory Map of the Jewish East End*, was at one stage lined with barrels of pickled herring, with people selling products from the windows of their flats and houses, and was also home to a well-known spot in the alley just behind the original Bloom’s, a legendary Jewish deli and restaurant where Communist Party meetings and politica public discussions were usually held. Ray remembers visiting Bloom’s, which was kosher, for salt beef and chips as a treat with his parents after preparing the bakery for the annual post-Passover rush; it was known for its unique system where, instead of customers simply paying for their meals at the till, the servers would first have to buy the food from the kitchen, then be reimbursed for the cost by customers. Like many relics of Jewish East London, that method didn’t survive.  

Amid this, the original Rinkoff was a sanctuary that provided the Jews of the East End with a space to congregate, network and feel known. Through its daily bakes, including coarse black bread, rye, challah on Fridays and thick baked cheesecake with and without sultanas on Sundays, and through the loaning of its ovens in preparation for shabbat, it served the Jewish community dependably. When the bakery closed for shabbos early on Friday afternoons, the owners would keep the ovens running so people who wanted to make traditional overnight-cooked dishes like cholent, but didn’t have the means at home, could do so at Rinkoff’s. On Friday evenings its ovens were filled with these foods and the next day boys (under the age of 13, who were free from the obligations of the sabbath) would be sent to lug the heavy stews back home for shabbos lunch. The bakery would reopen for business on Sunday morning and in the evening Hyman would give out the day’s leftover bread and pastries to anyone who needed it. Today, even when the shop is closed, you feel reassured by the familiar yeasty scent of challah emanating from behind the metal shutters. 

In 1957, following the two World Wars and the passing of both Hyman and Fanny, the bakery was passed on to the couple’s seven children. Soon, Max (Ray’s father) and Jack (Ray’s uncle) were at the helm. Despite the exodus to north London (which had reduced the number of East End Jews from around 100,000 at the turn of the century to 25,000 by 1951), the family purchased a second location on Jubilee Street, to be run by Jack and his wife Dora, with the original location operated by Max and his wife Sylvie. The new bakery came in handy in 1971, when the original was forced to close due to a compulsory purchase order from the council. Just five years later the Jubilee Street bakery befell the same fate, all part of a long-term project to help restore areas in London affected by bombing during WWII. The Rinkoffs moved the bakery into a unit on a short parade of shops erected in O’Leary Square, where it remains today. Ray watched from the shop one hot summer as flats were built around the square. ‘I don’t think we had five or six customers from the whole set of new flats in those days because of all the English bakers and supermarket competition.’ Like in times past, it would again be ‘word of mouth [that] built the business up’. 

Today the repertoire of Rinkoff’s extends far past the ryes and challahs, though you’ll still find loaves on the shelves. Giant chocolate chip cookies, babka, vanilla-glazed danish and freshly fried doughnuts generously filled with custard, raspberry jam and chocolate line the bakery’s pastry cases on any given day. To the right is a separate vegan selection of baked goods that stretches down the window ledge. There are breads and bagels to have sliced for take-home, or built into sandwiches on site. Over in the cooler, sitting among sandwich fillings, is the bakery’s hefty cheesecake – sold by weight, its recipe is Hyman’s living legacy. Many customers, however, know the bakery for its signature crodough: a laminated and deep-fried pastry similar to the cronut, with a wide range of toppings and fillings. In 2013, the bakery received significant press when the crodough made its way into the pastry cases, though Ray was never as enthusiastic as his trend-savvy daughter Jen, who has worked at Rinkoff’s since 2007. Like any good child, she waited until her dad was on holiday before pushing past his reluctance to pick up and ride the wave of a New York trend. She and longtime baker Djamal Dallalou worked on the recipe together, launching a product that served to firmly put the family bakery on the viral map. And like a good dad and a good business owner, Ray made way for his daughter’s idea to take off.

Despite its history, the Rinkoffs don’t pass their baking skills down in a lineal fashion. Neither Ray nor Jen learned the baking ropes from their fathers. Instead, it was the kitchen staff who trained them, which started with cleaning roles before they worked their way up. And though each Rinkoff generation has been the primary baker – first Hyman then Max, then Ray and now Jen – today, the majority of the employees are Muslim. Some are even from the same family. This means that the bakery’s success story is not just reserved for one family name. Like the Rinkoffs themselves, many of the business’ bakers, packers and back-of-house employees have been there for dozens of years in total, including Omar Kaid, who has been at Rinkoff for 14 years and works alongside his brother and his brother’s father-in-law. ‘I fell in love with baking and then the family keeps me here. We learn a lot and try to give what we can. When you work for family people it’s different. There’s something about it that keeps you here,’ he says.

Another employee is Djamal Dallalou, who has been with the bakery for 12 years, working with Jen to help create the famous ‘crodough. He’d had previous training as a pastry chef before being hired by Kaid. Dallalou reflects on his time spent in the kitchen. ‘When I look at it, it’s just yesterday. Maybe it’s because I’m ageing. There’s no boss here. We’re treated as one family, working. No matter where you come from, or what religion you are,’ he says. 

The bakery still serves as a community hub, even if the makeup of the surrounding area has changed. It’s minutes from the East London Mosque, one of the largest in Western Europe, which serves a sizable local population. Equally, Whitechapel’s markets, tastes and cuisines reflect the influence of the Bangladeshi communities who have settled in the area since the mid-1960s. Debs, Ray and Esther’s other daughter, who leads the business’ sales, tells me that around 80 per cent of Rinkoff’s customers are Muslim, so it’s important that as many bakes as possible are halal. There are also older Jewish customers, for whom they retain the traditional recipe, and more modern Jewish customers in their late twenties or thirties, looking for nostalgic and also more modern bakes. ‘We’ve got such a wide and varied customer base because of where we are,’ she says. ‘So we have to straddle that line.’ A typical weekday morning sees a steady stream of customers, from construction workers on their break and mothers with babies strapped to their chests, to locals and older customers who have clearly made an intentional journey for their weekly provisions and for a chat with Ray and other familiar faces behind the counter. Now that some of the bakery’s older patrons can no longer manage the journey, Ray is known to deliver rye bread and cheesecake to care homes on occasion – a gesture of generosity towards long-standing customers that also serves an inability to keep still, according to his daughters. At the bakery, regular customers get personalised greetings by Ray, with their repeat order presented to them as a question upon arrival as he flits between tables to chat.

Esther Rinkoff’s tour serves as a way of remembering some of the now-fading layers that have helped to build London’s East End. It is fitting that the tour ends at the Rinkoff bakery – a space that manages to straddle its past and present, preserving memories of its own place in the city’s Jewish East End history, while equally embracing the present and possibility of the future. Esther has the remarkable ability to look at the area’s buildings and streets and see both what is there now and what was there once. She shares stories like others talk about old friends – what sorts of mischief they used to get up to or adventures they had, and how to trace those glimmers even with age and time. Her stories help others look for signs that might otherwise go unnoticed: the faded logo of Percy Dalton’s peanut roasters painted at the top of a brick building on Crispin Street; or the shop front sign of David Kira, the area’s first banana merchant. But just to be sure, she says, ‘Write your story down: once you’re not here, it’s lost.’

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Credits

Adrienne Katz Kennedy is a food and culture writer living in London. You can find her on Instagram @akatzkennedy and @youcantbeatababka. 

Michael Protin is a Belgian-born food and reportage photographer living in London.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Liz Tray. 

*The memory map of Jewish London was compiled by artist/writer/researcher Rachel Lichenstein and colleagues Dr Duncan Hay, Professor Laura Vaughan, and Peter Guillery.

This guide is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and features in this project, please click here.

Look out for pieces on a 113-year-old East End institution, the myriad purposes of sliced white bread, a potted sandwich timeline, the history of London’s Caribbean bakeries and the definitive London bakery guide next week!

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The 50 Best Sandwiches in London

50 sandwiches you will like, in six categories. By Ed Fenwick, Jonathan Nunn, Kelly Pochyba, Isaac Rangaswami, and Adam Coghlan. Illustration Alex Brenchley. Photography by Michaël Protin.

Eating sandwiches in London, by Ed Fenwick

Getting a sandwich is the quickest way to experience London without ceremony. When you go to a restaurant you eat with others who’ve made a similar decision, but when you eat a sandwich in a park or on a wall, London happens around you while you eat. You so often experience a sandwich in a designated window of time and London gives you places to enjoy them – a cemetery or a park to sit in, a pub to have a pint in, or a walk you can take it on. Anyone who goes to the same place for work every day has their lunch spot; go to any London park or bench and you can see how most of the capital eats its lunch.

The sandwiches in this guide are, therefore, as much a map of places where you can watch London happen as they are an historic geography of the city’s immigration patterns and what its residents want to eat. We’ve tried to reflect at least some of the huge variety of what London offers inside two pieces of bread: North African, Turkish or Caribbean sandwiches in north and east, Portuguese in south west, Brazilian or Indian in north west, Italian everywhere, or the old East End diaspora in Essex edgelands. There truly aren’t many international sandwiches you can’t find within the M25 (although if anyone knows where to get a Tunisian fricassee please lmk, I just can’t find one). I’d like to preface these selections with the thought that sandwiches aren’t meant to be life-changing meals; they’re meant to accompany life once a day. You could call them everyday sandwiches.

Sandwich morphologies

Long – baguettes, bánhs, somun ekmek, challah rolls and subs
Round – rolls, baps challah and coco 
Soft – focaccia, ciabatta and other good things that happen to be Italian 
Flat - pita, flatbread and khobz
Sliced – triangles, rectangles and other shapes of most-often-white slices 
Toasted – toasties, paninis and grills

All entries by Ed Fenwick unless states otherwise.

To find a map of all 50 sandwiches (and more) mentioned in this guide, please scroll to the end of the article.

Long – baguettes, bánhs, somun ekmek and subs

North African baguettes on Blackstock Road

This is kind of a small category in itself as I don’t know which one of Cafe Salaam or Mediterranean is my favourite. Certain sandwiches are better at each.

Café Salaam and Mediterranean Café both offer four sandwiches. Merguez, meatball, chicken or liver baguette. My favourite at Salaam is the smashed-up meatball. The chef chops the meat while it’s on the grill, mixing it like a New York chopped cheese, cracking an egg through it and adding chips, parsley and salt at the end. Harissa and mayonnaise are spread inside each side of the toasted baguette before the meat, chip and egg mix is placed inside. I think this is pretty close to a perfect sandwich.

I like the liver sandwich best at Mediterranean (though I also recommend the merguez baguette here made using the sausages from the deli Al Baraka just opposite, with aniseed sprinkled over the sausages as they fry.) There’s no egg fried through it but the owner Lour (who used to run Salaam) has his own trick: he scoops out the inside bread from the baguette to make space for more filling, leaving the crust to act as a case. You get a very healthy portion of liver on top of the chips, which are squished into the bottom on top of the usual mayonnaise and harissa mix. I think the chips here might be the best prepared of the two. The last time I was in, I asked for my sandwich to be chopped in half. Then the chef asked me to hold one end to steady it for cutting, which made me unreasonably happy. 

26 Rock St, N4 2DW
49 Blackstock Rd, N4 2JF

Kokorec at Fındık İbo’nun Yeri

I was recently speaking to the manager of The Midyeci in Dalston about kokorec and how it was very hard to find in London, due to regulations relating to cleaning the lamb’s stomach and intestine lining that it’s wrapped in. He then recommended this place up by the M25 in Enfield as his favourite sandwich in the city. Kokorec is offal – sweetbreads, hearts, lung – wrapped in lamb intestines and then slow roasted on a rotisserie. It comes off looking not dissimilar to porchetta or a cigar unravelling its tobacco leaves. It’s then cut off, put on the grill and chopped up with tomato, green and red peppers, oregano, chilli and cumin. It’s fatty, rich, herby and not as offal-ly in flavour as you might expect due to the seasoning (though the texture is very much that of offal, pleasingly.) The correct bread to use for kokorec is somun ekmek, which here is made by a baker friend especially for them. Bouncy and crusty, it’s perfect for what goes between. I was incredibly happy when, sitting on a tiny chair underneath an umbrella right next to the food trailer, I opened a metal dish in the centre of the low table to reveal pickled peppers in their brine. As much as it’s a fantastic sandwich it’s also just a lovely place to sit, where eating a sandwich is only half the joy.

820 Hertford Rd, Enfield EN3 6UE

Fish kokorich at The Midyeci

This is The Midyeci’s own creation apparently – not a stomach lining and intestine kokorec sandwich of the type you would get in Istanbul, but a ‘fish kokorich, made entirely from scratch on the grill in front of you. A fillet of mackerel is put on the grill skin side down along with a mini somun ekmek, a sub-like roll that local Dalston legends (and friends of The Midyeci) Akdeniz Bakery make especially for them (a commissioned bread roll is a very good sign that the details are being thought about.) The chef then adds fresh tomatoes and peppers to the grill and fries everything until brown, adding spices before chopping up the mackerel and mixing everything until it turns into a rich, dark sea of browns, reds and greens. The top of the roll is then dipped in oregano which makes the first bite the best. Squeeze lemon on each bite and add those evil little chilli peppers as you want. You can make it a meal deal with ten stuffed mussels and a Sarikiz.

505 Kingsland Rd, E8 4AU

Bánh mì phố cổ at Lò Bánh Mì

The Old Quarter banh mi at Lo’s in Borough – an offshoot of the Vietnamese restaurant Rao Deli next door – is a paragon of sandwich construction, one that should be printed in textbooks for every young sandwich maker to learn from and follow. The individually-sized baguette, about the length and shape of a cacao pod, is toasted gently so it’s not too crusty but warms the garlicky liver pâté to melting point. The ham and char siu provide two separate textures, the mayo and char siu sauce some lubrication and sweetness, with jolts of pickle and chilli heat to balance it out. The sandwich is small but generously filled, built in striated layers, with the baguette holding everything firmly in place. I ate this at the start of what was supposed to be a sandwich crawl and broke my own rule one by finishing it all and going home – I couldn’t bear to waste a single mouthful. It is the last sandwich I ate for this guide, and my only regret is that I haven’t spent more time with it. JN

Note: you can get a vegan version of this sandwich with tofu curry.

Unit 1, 304 Borough High St, SE1 1JJ

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This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here. Look out for the Vittles London sandwich guide which comes out this Friday.

Pandan, Ube, and the Visual Consumption of Asian Baked Goods in the Viral Age

The sweet and colourful curse of Instagram and TikTok in London’s Chinatowns, by Angela Hui. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

Pandan’s verdant green hue has had me and countless other East and Southeast Asian kids in a chokehold for decades. When I was little, the sight of a soft, fluffy chiffon-style pandan Swiss roll from the Asian supermarket would set my heart racing. I dived into them like a greedy little vulture; cakes with smooth golden-brown skin and contrasting pastel flubber-green sponge, complete with mesmerising swirly cream filling. Many people my age – the pandan generation, if you will – have a sentimental connection to the plant. Whether it’s the pandan-flavoured baked offerings from Chinatown supermarkets and bakeries; the subtle, nutty, and herbal aroma of pandan rice in Malaysia’s national dish, nasi lemak; or the colourful treats (like kaya jam or kuih) that are found all over Singapore, pandan’s shocking shade of green only add to its charm.

Recently, however, pandan has broken out even further; not for its taste – which is often compared to coconut, vanilla, or popcorn – but for how it has become a huge deal online. Over the years, there’s been a gradual pandanisation of social media and of London, painting the town – and our feeds – green. In Singapore, McDonald’s ice creams have been stained green with pandan, and last year IKEA Hong Kong released a limited-edition pandan Thai milk tea sundae. On Instagram, bakers have been experimenting with pandan leaves, creating pandan burnt basque cheesecakes, pandan bolu kojo bundt cakes, pandan crack pies, and pandan sandos studded with cream and raspberries. Meanwhile, on TikTok, viral derpy frog pandan milk breads, ridiculously cute dessert panda pandan noodles, and Toy Story alien pandan bao dominate feeds. Très Shrek. 

London’s breakout pandan moment happened in 2010 (the year Instagram was founded), when bartender Nico de Soto brought pandan leaves back from his travels in Indonesia and used them in drinks for an Experimental Cocktail Club event in London. Since then, pandan has proliferated throughout the city, emerging in exciting new iterations in kitchens and bakeries. Malaysian restaurant Mambow uses pandan leaves throughout their menu for infusing flavour in the coconut rice, cendol (pandan jelly worms), and dadar gulung (pandan crepes), while Burmese restaurant Lahpet turns pandan leaves into a syrup for their Daiwei Tai cocktail. During a talk at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2017, Nigella Lawson dubbed pandan ‘the new matcha’, noting a rise of chefs in the US using the plant as a sweetening and flavouring alternative to vanilla, which subsequently pushed it into the mainstream. Sales, of course, skyrocketed. 

Until the mid-2010s, the most feted bakeries in Western cities usually had very beige offerings and stuck closely to traditional flavours: plain croissants and viennoiserie, chocolate-chip cookies, sugary doughnuts. The slightly unnatural greenness of pandan is perfectly attuned to a baking culture that has become progressively more absurd and colourful due to social media. In 2008, former Momofuku-pastry-chef-turned-dessert-empire-creator Christina Tosi opened Milk Bar in New York. She revolutionised baking in the US with childlike confetti birthday cakes and pretzel-potato-chip compost cookies, sparking a trend for more vibrant and unashamedly nostalgic desserts. Soon, everyone was jumping on the bold and colourful bandwagon. Dominique Ansel’s monster croissant-doughnut hybrid caused Cronut mania in 2013; his frequently sold out within hours, with Instagram helping them break the internet harder than Kim Kardashian’s oily butt. And who can forget the great rainbow bagel domination in 2015? Originating at the Bagel Store in New York, the frenzy grew so intense that copycats spawned all over the world, and made their way to Beigel Shop on Brick Lane in 2016. 

The Asian bakery sector in London has similarly grown as a powerful social currency, with colour and the visual appeal of its baked goods central to that growth. In May, Lil’ Wong Bakes (also known as Sam Wong, a Chinese baker who has become popular for her pandan sandos) hosted a pandan kiosk pop-up, selling all things pandan. Also in May, Community organiser Celestial Peach and ice cream phenomenon Happy Endings put their heads together to create a weekend of wild ice cream flavours, including a roasted rice, pandan, and tres leches ice cream topped with sambal tumis, anchovies, and peanuts. Filipino ice cream makers Araw took over a site in Spitalfields market last year, offering unique flavours and dessert combinations like calamansi gochujang sorbet and ube cookie with pandan onde-onde (glutinous rice balls filled with palm sugar and coated in shredded coconut) ice cream. The short time-frame, exclusivity and novelty of these pop-ups only adds to the phenomenon, when many of our food favourites collaborate to reach a wider audience and create more hype – AKA two queens coming together to maximise their joint slay.

In the last decade, Western consumers have also slowly become accustomed to the type of bakes that pandan tends to flavour (and which they were once suspicious of). While Chinese food found success in takeaways, baked goods often didn’t cross over, with Asian cakes’ subtle sweetness and featherlight texture (compared to their stodgier, richer Western counterparts) meaning they were often lost in translation. Instead of traditional buttercream frosting, Asian cakes often lean towards fresh fruit, mousses and jellies, with flavourings that impart bold, block colours: black sesame, red bean, matcha, durian and, of course, pandan. 

Among these, there’s another flavour that’s taken London by storm. Enter: ube. Over the last decade, ube has become a staple flavour in the city’s desserts thanks to its unbelievably fake-looking pinkish-purple colour, which has created a whole market of people sharing pictures and videos of ube-flavoured food online. The Filipino purple yam has a mildly woody sweet potato flavour, but its colour is more striking than its taste. Ube has long existed in Filipino culinary circles via ube halaya (purple yam jam), which can be used for various traditional desserts such as halo-halo (layered shaved ice with ube ice cream), taisan cakes, and crinkle cookies, but its popularity in the UK has soared to unprecedented levels thanks to the TikTokification of Chinatown. Almost every viral ‘Must-Try Desserts in London’ video now features the ube bilog, a pandesal milk bun filled with purple yam ice cream from Mamasons Dirty Ice Cream. The cult favourite Filipino bakery and dessert parlour first opened its doors in Chinatown in 2018 and has been instrumental in introducing ube to a wider audience ever since. ‘Last summer, we sold five tonnes of ube ice cream,’ says Florence Mae Maglanoc, co-founder of Maginhawa Restaurant Group (which includes, among many others, Mamasons and the Filipino bakery Panadera). ‘It’s crazy and wild to see the staying power that ube has.’ 

Mamason’s popularity on social media has led to an explosion of other bakeries, ice cream shops, bubble tea parlours, and brunch spots rushing to jump on the trend, embrace everything purple, and push ube in all different directions. 

‘I think we were blessed to be in the in-between soft spot of Instagram-famous and TikTok viral. A lot of businesses are not in charge of how viral they go, and if they’re in it just to blow up then it’s a very high commitment to keep up with that level of demand,’ Mae Maglanoc adds. ‘In my opinion, it's an unsustainable business model with very high highs and incredibly low lows. You need to be churning out new dishes, new specials and get[ting] people to come in constantly to take this content for you. For us, it’s so important to be consistent and not get sucked into trends.’

Despite their success on social media, pandan and ube still have some way to go before blanket acceptance. They’re Asian ingredients that can be viewed harshly online because those unfamiliar with them tend to have an unconscious bias and ingrained prejudice. This bias causes people to reject them without actually trying the ingredients themselves. 

‘It’s a tough sell. Some people love them and some people hate them.’ Aaron Mo, founder of Stratford and Bermondsey’s Ong Ong Bakery, tells me. ‘Ube is hard to work with because it’s expensive and doesn’t keep well. We’re losing a lot of money trying to sell ube products wholesale since the demand isn’t there yet. It’s not as popular or widely accepted as pandan or black sesame, but if more people start using it, it’ll become more accessible.’

Since 2020, Ong Ong focused on producing inventive baked goods that aren’t tied to any one tradition: bo lo bao (pineapple buns), vegan kimchi buns, pandan and mung bean bullar, cha siu bao shaped like cat paws, and their newest creation, Korean garlic bread, which combines sweet cream cheese and garlic butter. ‘It’s interesting to see what [is] a hit and what’s not. Why do some flavours we don’t spend as much time on go down a storm? [While] others we spend years carefully sourcing the right ingredients and developing the recipe [for] are left on the shelf?’ Mo queries. 

This begs the question: why are some Asian ingredients non-threatening and more widely accepted than others? Why are pistachios, almonds and pecans, for example, more favourable than black sesame? Why hasn’t red bean enjoyed the same ubiquity as chocolate? And why are chestnuts not more readily available in Asian bakeries in the UK? What’s deemed popular is down to local tastes, trends, and, increasingly, social media. It’s largely driven by young people with more disposable income influencing others; the desire to try different flavours; and jumping on new trends. ‘Back when we first started, our goal was to make ube as synonymous as matcha because we wanted to demystify it, make “exotic” ingredients less scary, and I never thought in a million years that it would happen so quickly,’ says Mae. ‘We’ve come to see Filipino food as these ube desserts that are perfect for social media. I’m very proud to see the way the ingredient is used in Asian bakeries, or people making a beeline to try the next ube product. It makes me so happy – and genuinely a bit starstruck – to see customers want to try something new and actively support independent Asian businesses like us.’ 

Ube and pandan have also been two key building blocks for family-run Filipino bakery Kapihan, founded by brothers David and Nigel Motley, their sister Rosemary, and David’s wife Plams. From their bakery in Battersea Park, they sell ube bibingka (baked rice cake), ube buko pies, and pandan brioche pan de sal with sticky macapuno (young coconut) sweet cream filling. The family’s success means they now have a second location two minutes down the road from their first. Rather than being a carbon copy of the traditional Asian bakeries and supermarkets that they grew up eating, the Motley family are paying homage to those that came before them and applying European techniques to Asian classics. 

‘A lot of our recipes are developed from family recipes, which were a bit plain and basic,’ David says. ‘We wanted to elevate them further and create something bigger and more luxurious.’

Allan’s Bakery & Cafe in Shepherd’s Bush stands out in a sea of TikTok viral sensations. Unlike others who use pandan and ube as visual selling points or marketing gimmicks, they have been a humble grocery store since 2017. Inside, there’s a bakery counter offering ube swiss rolls, halo-halo, kakanin (sticky rice cakes) and pandesal milk breads, primarily serving the West London Filipino community without much social media fanfare. According to owner and baker, Cecilia Villanueva, despite being open seven days a week, business can be up and down, but generally, they’re doing well. But in a world where being photogenic and standing out on feeds is crucial, will these places have to sell themselves visually in the same way as their modern successors in order to survive? Regardless, Allan’s focus on traditional Filipino flavours and community connection is what sets it apart in an era dominated by social media hype. Perhaps their dedication to quality, tradition and heritage will prove to be their strongest selling point in the long run. 

As a pandan purist, I'll always have a soft spot for the impossibly light and luminously bright emerald-green pandan chiffon cake and Swiss rolls from the Asian supermarket. Although they’re laden with flavourings, preservatives, and unpronounceable ingredients, my affection for them is rooted in nostalgia. That’s not to say I don’t respect the new wave of  independent Asian bakeries, which prioritise using natural ingredients that taste good to push boundaries with visually pleasing creations and innovative flavour pairings. But I also worry about where this is all heading, as bakers and bakeries try to outdo one another in the capricious arena of social media, hoping that a flash of green or purple will win our affection, break the saturated algorithm and help power the relentless treadmill of the attention economy. Because really, the concern is less for the quality of what bakeries are baking and more about how this virtual world serves its audience: the aesthetic-driven nature of social media can flatten people’s understanding of different food cultures, heritage, and history by stripping away context. The rich colours of pandan and ube are at once natural, integral to their cultures, and vivid warning symbols of online popularity’s ultimately transient significance. 

For Mae, social media is good for business but the end goal is to not lose sight of their core values nor consistency. ‘Seeing someone eat an ube bilog over a chocolate brownie gives me the biggest butterflies,’ she says. ‘I think we’re only at the start of this journey.’

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Credits

Angela Hui is an award-winning writer and editor. She was the former food and drink editor at Time Out and lifestyle reporter at HuffPost. Her work has been widely published in the BBC, gal-dem, the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, National Geographic Traveller, Refinery29, Vice, and Eater. Her first non-fiction book TAKEAWAY: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter was published in 2023.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead. 

Good afternoon and welcome back to Vittles.

This week and next we’ll be taking a pause from the normal publishing schedule and instead rolling out the Vittles London Bakery Project. Below you’ll find an introduction to the project, which today is published alongside Branca Lessa de Sà’s essay on London’s Brazilian home bakers saving expats from homesickness.

Give Us This Day

A Vittles London Bakery Project, by Adam Coghlan

It was when I was cycling home one evening about five years ago that the idea of covering the plurality of London’s bakeries and baking traditions first came to me. I was at the junction of Lea Bridge Road and Orient Way, which, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, is the best place to catch the billowing bready scent emanating from the smelled-but-never-seen Kingsmill factory further down Argall Avenue. It’s the same smell that the owner of the village shop where I worked my first job would pump out with frozen rolls and assorted pastries to draw in customers as a ‘loss leader’; the one that supermarkets use to lure people in to buy everything but the bread that inevitably tastes much worse than it had promised on the forecourt. 

This is the thing – the smell of baking stops us in our tracks, makes us think stuff, do things, eat, and move. It was at this point on my bike at a red light that my my mind danced – through thoughts of Kingsmill adverts, Warburtons crisp sandwiches, and all the different types of bakeries in London, the ones that I knew and loved, and the many others that I didn’t, all of which were nothing like the industrial ‘bakery’ that I was smelling at this moment. Implausibly, it conjured the heritage rolls and ciabatta from E5 in the mid-2010s, kouign-amanns, doubles from Roti Joupa, pide at Mangal 2, doughnuts from Raabs, Pret bakewells, and a kind of borrowed nostalgia and stolen grief for Percy Ingle’s closure (also less so its racist past). Almost instantly, the idea for ‘Give Us This Day’ was born: a collection of essays, histories and guides that would cover the city’s many baking traditions in all their diversity. 

Bread is not elemental, but made by combining water, fire, and crop, it is perhaps the closest thing humans have to an elemental food. Therefore, it is uniquely positioned to tell the story of London’s various communities. Many of the first diaspora food businesses in London were bakeries – you do not need to import any special ingredients to make bread – and it was the bakery that often became the centre of a neighbourhood, as Adrienne Katz Kennedy writes in her profile of Rinkoff Bakery, one of the last surviving Jewish food businesses in the East End. Bread straddles the public and the private, inside and outside: many of London’s bakeries were started in the home before they opened their doors to everyone, which is the case for the lauded bakeries in Riaz Phillips’s history of London’s Caribbean bread, patties and roti; and in today’s essay from Branca Lessa de Sá’, which pays tribute to the role of Brazilian home bakers in London, and their efforts to kill longing and homesickness through their cakes. 

In the last decade particularly, bakeries and certain types of baked goods have become more pronounced cultural signifiers of taste and class. In her potted timeline, Hester van Hensbergen looks at the cultural history of sandwiches in London, from 18th century private members clubs to the 2010s sourdough boom, while Isaac Rangaswami examines the many uses of sourdough’s polar opposite, shite white bread (first perfected on the fringes of the Metropolitan Line in Chorleywood). Social media has helped shift and accelerate these signifiers, and, in recent years, London has seen the emergence of a certain style of bakery informed by the dominant aesthetics of Instagram and TikTok, which Angela Hui looks at in her essay on the colourful pandan and ube boom among London’s new wave of east Asian bakeries. 

The name of this project refers to how ubiquitous and ordinary baked products are in the lives of Londoners, and the guides we have compiled reflect the way we all eat: a bakery guide, obviously, which maps London in fifty distinct bakes, from Tottenham cake to agege bread, but also a comprehensive everyday sandwich guide, compiled by sandwich maven Ed Fenwick. These will be released over the next two Fridays and will be paywalled for subscribers only – so do sign up if you would like to read them. 

‘Give Us This Day’ has been a long time coming – years in the making – and would not have been possible without the immense contributions and formidable eating abilities of all those listed below. This day is now yours and we hope you enjoy reading the stories and using the guides over the course of the next fortnight and beyond! And be nice when you tell us which of your daily breads we’ve missed. 

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Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project

1. Matar a saudade by Branca Lessa de Sá
In London, the Brazilian home bakers satisfying our longing

2. Pandan, Ube, and the Visual Consumption of Asian Baked Goods in the Viral Age, by Angela Hui
The sweet and colourful curse of Instagram and TikTok in London’s Chinatowns

3. The Vittles Sandwich Guide, by Ed Fenwick (with Jonathan Nunn, Kelly Pochyba, and Isaac Rangaswami)
Fifty sandwiches you will like

4. Who Are We Serving Today?, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy
The ever-changing role of a Jewish community’s bakery in London’s East End

5. London Sandwiches: 1762-2024, by Hester van Hensbergen
A cultural history of London’s iconic sandwich moments

6. Far Beyond These Things, by Isaac Rangaswami
The many shades of shite white bread

7. By Them, For Them, by Riaz Phillips
The vital history of and uncertain future of three generational Caribbean bakeries 

8. The Vittles London Bakery Guide, by Jessica Wang, James Hansen and others
Around the city in fifty bakes

9. The Ten Best Bakeries in London

Credits

Give Us This Day is written by Branca Lessa de Sá, Angela Hui, Ed Fenwick, Adrienne Katz-Kennedy, Hester van Hensbergen, Isaac Rangsaswami, Riaz Phillips, Jessica Wang, James Hansen, Jonathan Nunn, Adam Coghlan, Kelly Pochyba, Harry Lambous, Zayneb Al Asaadi, Isobel Lewis, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Zahra Al Asaadi, Mark Corbyn, Melek Erdal, Marie Mitchell, Christian Theodorou and Ruby Tandoh.

Many thanks to Alex Brenchley, Isadora Machado, and Sinjin Li for the illustrations and to Michaël Protin, Riaz Phillips, and Isaac Rangaswami for the photographs. 

This project was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray. All Give Us This Day illustrations in this post are by Alex Brenchley.

This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.

Matar a saudade 

In London, the Brazilian home bakers satisfying our longing. Words by Branca Lessa de Sá. Illustration by Isadora Machado. 

People often try to pin down the elusive meaning of saudade, a kind of longing or homesickness associated with Lusophone cultures. For me, it has always been simple. Saudade is a sort of hunger, a very specific craving for a taste that cannot be found anywhere but at home. During my first few years in London, after leaving Brazil as a child, I’d often fantasise about the milky sweetness of doce de leite; the earthy crunch of farofa; the sharp tang of queijo coalho. Every time we travelled back to Rio to visit family, my brother and I would play a game on the plane. We’d conjure up a list of the things we most wanted to eat – an inventory of our saudade. We’d organise them in order of priority, as if writing a to-do list: the bisnaguinhas my grandad would pan-fry with butter when we arrived, the bolo de rolo with layers and layers of sticky red jam, the folhados that left crumbs all over our clothes. Weeks later, on the way back, we’d assess our progress. It wasn’t a successful visit if we hadn’t managed to tick them all off. 

My strongest saudade was for the unofficial food, the ‘treats’ squeezed in between proper meals. Food you can eat with your hands, that has too much sugar, too much butter, not enough nutrients. Food that you find at birthday parties and at your local bakery. Part of the reason I craved this stuff so much was because it seemed near-impossible to find in London. You can buy seasoned black beans in Tesco, go to Kilburn for feijoada. There are plenty of churrascarias around. But baked goods? Cakes and pastries? Confectionery? You can make these things at home, of course, but the ingredients are often hard to find. Plus, few of us are endowed with the attention to detail required for excellent baking. 

It took many years – and a job in which I was surrounded by other Brazilians – for me to unearth the extensive network of Brazilian home bakers in London. They’re hard to find, largely because they are small businesses that function almost entirely by word-of-mouth. Most of them aren’t on Google; they don’t have websites or physical shops. To know them, you need an in: a Brazilian friend, or co-worker, or – as is the case for many – a fellow member of one of London’s Brazilian churches. 

Geni Cordeiro is one such home baker. She is known for her cakes, docinhos (fudge-like treats made with sweetened condensed milk) and pães de mel (bite-sized, honey-flavoured cakes). I first ordered from her during the pandemic, for my mum’s birthday. It was that bleak period when birthday celebrations consisted of Zoom calls and badly edited video montages; gestures that, in all their noble effort to forge connection, mostly served as reminders of what was no longer possible. I wanted something different, something that could capture the essence of a proper celebration. I reached out to a Brazilian colleague, having seen her post pictures of a party she’d thrown for her son, table laden with perfect-looking docinhos. She responded with a long list of names and numbers. Among them was Geni – who, my colleague said, made some of the best cakes and pães de mel around. 

Ordering from Geni felt like sending a wish list to Santa Claus. She asked me what I wanted: how big, what type of dough, what kind of filling. My request was indulgent – something with both brigadeiro and doce de leite – but Geni agreed to turn it into a reality. She advised me that simple white dough, as opposed to other flavoured varieties, would work best for the kind of fillings I wanted. The result was better than I could have imagined. Gooey doce de leite held together layers of dough so soft they came apart like candyfloss. In Portuguese, we speak of matar a saudade, or ‘to kill the homesickness’. These are the things we do to assuage that desperate longing, that restless yearning for a person or place. Homemade arroz and feijão, sessions spent listening to MPB, visits from friends and loved ones: all are reliable saudade-murderers among my family. That day, Geni’s cake became another one. 

Geni has been baking goods at home to sell for the last six years – almost as long as she’s been in London. Before moving here, she lived in Spain for twelve years, where she mainly worked in hotels. Back then, she didn’t have any ambition to be a confectioner, but friends were impressed with the cakes she baked for birthdays and special occasions (she often made things that were common in Brazil but couldn’t be found in Europe). Geni laughs at a brigadeiro cake she made for her son’s birthday, one of her earliest attempts at doing something ‘a bit more special’. She wanted to decorate it but knew nothing about how to do so, so she simply ‘smothered it in M&Ms’. Regardless, when she took a slice to the hotel for her co-workers, they loved it and asked for more. 

In 2016, Geni moved to the UK for her son’s studies. At first she worked as a cleaner, but soon enough she was making cakes to sell on the side. They were for friends initially – people she’d met at her church, the Capelania Brasileira in Willesden Green. But it wasn’t long before she began to get orders from others – people who had tasted her cakes at parties and asked for her number. 

Geni’s pães de mel, however, were where she found her real success. Somewhat resembling the Argentinian alfajor, pães de mel consist of two small slices of spiced honey cake which are glued together by a layer of doce de leite, and are harder to find here than better-known Brazilian treats like brigadeiro or pudim. Geni began making hers based on a recipe from a friend in Brazil, but tweaked it until arriving at what she proudly calls her recipe – one that is now beloved by many Brazilians in London. Lots wanted her variations on the traditional pão de mel: flavours like pistachio, nutella, lime, and passionfruit. While the vast majority of her clients were Brazilian, she started to get a few orders from people outside of the community. To suit a paladar gringo (‘foreign palate’) – one that often finds Brazilian sweets too rich – Geni sometimes uses peanut butter, jam, or other spread instead of the sweeter doce de leite. 

2020 was Geni’s busiest period; it was at this point that she realised she had to take her business more seriously. She got a business licence, made a separate Instagram account, repriced her goods. She even considered devoting herself entirely to confectionery, but decided against this due to the stability offered by her contracted nannying job. Geni still does everything herself, from taking orders to making, decorating, and delivering her cakes (although João, her son sometimes helps with delivery). Quantities vary widely, but she tells me she makes an average of four or five large cakes a week, on top of batches of docinhos and pães de mel. As her weekdays are taken up with nannying, baking is squeezed into evenings and weekends. Often, she’ll go deep into the night making her cakes. 

João tells me his mother is a perfectionist, stopping and starting all over again if she makes a mistake. ‘Yeah, I’m no fun to be around when I’m baking,’ she laughs. ‘I can get obsessive, but it’s because I know how good the best version of a cake can be.’ It’s an effort that pays off: Geni’s cakes feel at once professional and homemade, products of a labour of love undertaken with laser-like ‘obsessive’ precision. They were an instant hit with my family. Since my mother’s birthday in the pandemic, all others have been met with one request and one request only: a cake by Geni.     

There’s a peculiarly Brazilian trait among London’s amateur bakers: the urge to reinvent old recipes. Unlike Italians, who are famous for their veneration of tradition (mythical as it may be), Brazilians have a penchant for customising, mixing, and bastardising in the kitchen: cream cheese in sushi, goiabada on pizza, pães de queijo filled with runny requeijão. In the cake and pastry industry, it is these variations – these unique combinations of flavours – that can make a business stand out. In London, there’s a lady who makes pães de queijo filled with sausage and black olive, one who sells churros-flavoured brigadeiros, another who makes passionfruit cocadas: the more creative, the better. 

There’s something of the ‘new world’ in this impulse to change and modernise – what writer Alex Hochuli has described as a Brazilian ‘disregard’ for the past, a myopic focus on the present. And there’s something of the immigrant experience in it, too: the inventions, reinventions and adaptations in order to survive. 

It’s not a surprise that many of these businesses thrived during the Covid pandemic. The humble size of our aptly nicknamed docinhos and salgadinhos (little sweet and little savoury treats, respectively) made it possible to send them in the post. And the fact that these businesses were being run from home, by one person alone, made them more resilient to the disruptions of pandemic restrictions. 

Ask around, however, and people will mention another factor impacting the popularity of Brazilian home bakers in London: Naira. Naira is Geni’s mentor, but she is also an inspiration for Brazilian confectioners trying to start a business abroad, a home-baking success story. Naira moved to London almost twenty years ago and, like Geni, first worked as a cleaner before getting into confectionery. Although she had no experience in professional baking, Naira loved making cakes and had grown up doing so for her four younger siblings. When she took some of her homemade creations to events at church, they were an instant hit. Soon enough, she was baking full-time. Her interest was increasingly in highly stylised, meticulously decorated cakes, the kind served at weddings and other special occasions. It’s a difficult art to master, but Naira devoted herself entirely. She spent hours watching YouTube videos and did courses to hone her skills. The effort paid off, and her creations became so popular that they went on to be sold in Harrods and featured in well-known confectionery magazines. She even participated in a series of Bake Off: The Professionals. 

As her success grew, Naira began to get messages from those who wished to pursue a similar path to hers, seeking guidance and advice. Eventually she decided to hire a studio, where she could run workshops for aspiring home bakers on a range of confectionery skills. The classes were booked up quickly, but Naira soon realised that they didn't offer what many people needed most: the skills and knowledge required to run a business. So, she set up a mentorship scheme. ‘With my mentees, I follow them every step of the way’, she tells me. ‘It’s something I wish I had when I started. Because when you do something like this, you’re often completely alone … and very lost.’

Indeed, the highly personal nature of semi-professional bakeries – as well as the fact they’re run primarily by women – can make them particularly subject to abuse. Geni tells me that while her customers are no longer just her acquaintances, they often treat her as such. People will demand she lower the prices, complain about paying for delivery. ‘Sometimes I have to travel up to an hour to take a cake somewhere, being careful to keep it intact,’ she says. ‘I can’t afford to not charge for that.’

The boundaries between formal and informal work are often quite blurred in Brazil, a country where class divisions are stark and rarely overcome. Women from poorer backgrounds frequently work as ‘maids’ in the homes of middle-class families, doing everything from the daily laundry to feeding the kids and taking them to school. They’ll be called ‘tia’ (auntie) by children who have grown up with their food (rather than their parents’), while being paid minimum wage for strenuous physical and emotional work, work that often keeps them away from their own families. 

These class divisions are often re-enacted by the Brazilian immigrant population in London. Often, working-class migrants will be paid smaller-than-average fees for cleaning and nannying jobs in the homes of wealthy families. If at-home confectionery businesses aren’t conducted with formality and rigour, they risk feeding into the same dynamic, with poorer immigrants baking to provide cheap food for the often-lavish events of a wealthier class. 

Naira’s main goal, then, is to guide her mentees to a more professional mode of working. One of the first things she teaches her students is how to adequately price their goods. ‘Almost always, they are charging too little for what they make,’ she tells me. Geni says that she was charging £2.50 for her large paes de mel when she first started. When Naira suggested that she more than double the price, she broke down. ‘I was so scared of asking people to pay more’, she says. Naira also advises her students on the steps needed to acquire a business licence, such as appropriate insurance, and ensuring they have separate stocks for their baking ingredients at home. 

I ask Naira why she believes so many immigrant women choose to pursue the path of baking. It is, she explains, a way for them to grow in a new country, despite the language and cultural barriers. You don’t need to do a job interview or a language test to start doing it. It’s also, she says, a ‘way to express that which is your culture, which is your country.’ 

It's this wish that seems to be behind the popularity of these businesses. Goods like Geni’s – which provide food for birthdays, Festas Juninas, Christmases, and baptisms – enable Brazilians in London to keep rituals from home alive here. More than anything, people come to these home bakers with a very specific wish: to kill the saudade. It’s a big ask, and one that can’t always be met. Geni tells me that customers will show her pictures of cakes made in Brazil and ask that she recreate them exactly; she explains that this isn’t always possible. But more often than not, she does manage to realise people’s fantasies and, at least momentarily, to fill in the ravenous contours of their longing. Until the next order, at least. 

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Credits

Branca Lessa de Sá is a writer and journalist working in London. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Find her on X @branca_lessa.

Isadora Machado is an artist currently working and living in Porto, Portugal. Having paved a path with wanderings and experiments, their work explores the mysteries around drawing and poetic processes. Find more of their work at isadoram.com.

This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead.