The ‘sabzi’ debacle, Keith Lee reviewing a jacket potato, Eating with Tod’s Festive Feast, Bengal Village’s Mr. Raj, the long-awaited David Ellis heel turn, the Best Broasted Ed Sheeran lookalike, Crystal Cafe Homerton, ‘Paul Hollywood has “martyred Hezbollah fighter” physiognomy’, Thomas Straker holding Boris Johnson’s child, the Hugh Corcoran remontada, lurking on r/LondonFood. 2025 has been the most terminally online year in London food media history.

Traditional food media is in decline. In last year’s report, I wrote that there was uncertainty over three of the most influential roles in the industry: the editorship of OFM, the Evening Standard restaurant critic and the Observer restaurant critic. A year later, OFM has announced it will no longer be publishing in print, the once-daily Evening Standard has rebranded to the weekly The Standard, and there is still no permanent Observer restaurant critic. A recent article by Simon Parkin in the Observer titled ‘How we lost our taste for the vicious restaurant review’ gives a good outline of the state of play, although I think it misses something fundamental: it’s not that people have lost their taste for bad reviews, it’s that most journalists can literally no longer afford to be critical. As long as there are few publications willing to pay people well and cover restaurant costs, as long as freelancers have to rely on taking free meals to make ends meet, then journalists will edge ever closer to becoming poorly-remunerated influencers.

Actual influencers, meanwhile, are not just part of the culture but now are the culture, moving from our phones into the real world like Sadako crawling out of the TV screen in The Ring. Just this year, Tod had Fume Festival, Bite Twice opened a pizza shop, and Big John did a show in Los Angeles and then got deported from Australia. I think these are canny moves from people who have received success quickly and know it can just as easily be taken away. In a revealing article for The i, Gizzi Erskine lamented the changes to Instagram that have left old-school influencers hearing ‘the sudden, sharp thud of watching our carefully built platforms collapse in reach, engagement, and therefore, earnings.’ It’s a reminder that real influence is in the hands of a very small number of powerful tech companies, and that tectonic media shifts are due to algorithmic tweaks designed to make these platforms money, not a response to anything people actually want. This is one of the main reasons why we decided to make print a major part of what we do this year (you can still buy Issue 2 here).

As for London restaurants, it’s been a difficult period as ever, with many sad closures: Lyle’s, FKABAM (for now), Hill and Szrok, Locanda Locatelli, Chick ‘N Sours, Thattukada, Kaieteur Kitchen, the Lido cafés and many more. But I would like to end on a positive note. One of the most welcome trends I’ve seen this year is owner-operated businesses moving from the home into the restaurant space, channeling all their care into a small and sustainable number of dishes, with few overheads. I’m thinking of Boutheina Ben Salem cooking Tunisian food at Oula, Spasia Dinkovski transforming Mystic Borek into Doma, and Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub opening Logma, which served me my last meal out this year. Even the bakery on Ballards Lane I spotted a few days ago serving Iranian soups out on the street is a promising harbinger. I hope to see more of this independent spirit in 2026 – if journalists and influencers can unite on one job, it’s to hunt out these places that are true to themselves and help them thrive.

Meals of the year, 10-6

10. My third meal at Dilpasand in Whitechapel that confirmed its place on the Vittles 99. A subsequent meal made a strong case for the brains masala being one of the best dishes on the menu.

9. A solo meal at Trattoria Masuelli San Marco in Milan, with a perfect order of fried brains, puntarelle, veal costoletta, and a small portion of saffron risotto.

8. A Vittles staff meal at Banquet just outside of Colchester which remains the best dim sum I’ve had all year.

7. A completely lucky find: Asia Restaurant Grandmother Food in Vienna, which serves outstanding homestyle Zhejiang, Sichuan and Hunanese dishes and is run by a Hakka chef from Calcutta. Came back again to double check it wasn’t a fluke: it wasn’t.

6. My favourite fine dining meal of the year was at Le Clarence in Paris, which was also a reminder of what I find lacking about London’s fine dining. Unfortunately chef Christophe Pelé left soon after, so I didn’t know it was a swansong.

Who wore it better?

‘Here is a room that considers Versailles a touch demure’ ~ David Ellis on Lilibet’s, 23rd October 2025

‘I nod politely, even though this place seems less elegant and more Versailles before the revolutionary horde storms the gates’ ~ Jay Rayner on Lilibet’s, 7th November 2025

‘Lilibet’s has about it the air of how the palace of Versailles would look if its designers had been allowed really to let their hair down’ ~ Grace Dent on Lilibet’s, 9th November 2025

The 99 By Numbers

Earlier this month we announced the Vittles 99, our list of the best places to eat in London. ICYM, here is a breakdown of the entire list in numbers.

25 - London boroughs represented (plus a borough not technically in London)
20 - Michelin stars in the list
40, 29, 17, 7, 5, 1 - Restaurants in Zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 respectively
20, 14, 10 - Restaurants located in Westminster, Hackney and Southwark (the most represented boroughs)
6 - Pakistani restaurants (the cuisine most represented on the list outside ‘British’)
5 - Turkish, French, Cantonese and Japanese restaurants (the next most represented cuisines)
4 - Turkish businesses who contacted me afterwards to ask if we could write about them too
6 - Restaurants with ‘café’ in the title
2 - Restaurants with ‘café’ in the title that are legitimately cafés
3 - Restaurants run by people who are my friends
2 - Restaurants run by people who I am in active beef with
2 - Times River Café was mentioned without actually being on the list
2 - Restaurants located in hotels (The Ritz and Saikei)
1 - Legendary chef mistakenly announced as dead due to a typo

Favourite articles of the year

• Eat, Pay, Love by Earnest Graham The Hunger

An exposé of the Chicago influencing scene that involved the author creating a fake restaurant called Sagi (Japanese for ‘fraud’) and then navigating the murky world of paid promotion. This article comes the closest so far to explaining the economics of influencing.

• Inside the World of ‘The Great British Bake Off’ by Ruby Tandoh The New Yorker

The article Ruby was born to write imo!

• Who is paying for fake five-star reviews of The Ritz? by Jim Waterson London Centric

Jim Waterson has shown that it’s possible to create a successful London publication by focusing on two things that unite all Londoners: infrastructure and low-level scams. This is one of the latter, involving a Google review scam that appears to be simple, but turns out to be something else entirely.

• He’s one of London’s most famous chefs. So why do so many people say Victor Garvey owes them money? by Andrew Kersley The Londoner

The Londoner has been responsible for some excellent investigations this year, and none better than this one by Andrew Kersley (incidentally, the inventor of the Vittles Pub Guide). Incredibly, SOLA is still running.

• Mise en masse by Barclay Bram The Economist

The cruise ship piece, but make it about food. This very fun podcast essay is about the logistics of feeding a cruise ship, which involves a staggering amount of spreadsheet work (and no small amount of exploitation). I want a whole podcast with Chef Gary.

• How restaurant hype happens: a tale told through booking data by Clara Murray Financial Times

The FT has had an excellent year, showing what a food section can do with curiosity and ambition (plus a dedication to print). This fascinating piece uses booking data to quantify influence, whether it’s from Topjaw or Michelin.

• Whining and Dining by Ian Trueger The Fence

A print-only long read on the influence of private equity on the city’s dining scene, containing the first insinuation I’ve seen published that a certain beloved restaurant group is being ‘fattened for acquisition’.

Incidentally, The Fence are running a fundraiser right now which involve many restaurant related prizes: you can support them here.

Further sections in this newsletter

Meals of the year, 10-6
Who wore it better?
The 99 By Numbers
Favourite articles of the year
Instagram reel of the year
Publication of the year
Typo of the year
YouTube video of the year
Influencer of the year
The annual Jonathan Nunn award for services to posting
The annual Thomas Straker award for getting away with it
Standby of the year
Headline of the year
Influencer beef of the year
The most succinct and accurate explanation of the difference between Big John and Thomas Skinner, by Amelia Horgan
Offer I couldn’t refuse of the year
Meals of the year, 5-1
Predictions for 2026

Read more

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! This week, we received the first copies of Issue 2 of our magazine! As of this Monday, we will move from pre-ordering to just regular ordering, so if you wish to get the magazine at its discounted pre-order price of £18, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details), then this is the last weekend to order.

Pre-order Issue 2

In 2018, I saw two visions of the future. Down one path, there was Ohh Cha, the Japanese matcha pop-up that took place inside Muji Tottenham Court Road over the course of two weeks, serving koicha as thick as molten chocolate and usucha of various provenances – the type of matcha that compelled Japan to create kaiseki dining, tea ceremonies and the architecture of the tea house just to put a bowl of it in its right place. Down the other path, was the tin of chilli kale matcha I spotted on a supermarket shelf that promised to ‘destroy hangovers’. Of course, London chose the second path.

Over the last few years, matcha has taken over London, just as it’s taken over everywhere else in the world. As someone who used to work in the tea industry, and spent the best part of a decade trying to get people to drink good matcha, this has been a strange experience. Matcha is everywhere and people – particularly young people – love it, even if it’s low-grade matcha (and, increasingly, not from Japan, but from China). Meanwhile, the scarcity of matcha has pushed the prices for premium matcha up; from what I’ve heard, in the last year the wholesale cost has almost tripled. Whatever the grade, London has an insatiable need for matcha (note: all of these are real!): Biscoff matcha, Terry’s Chocolate Orange matcha, toffee nut Cream matcha, matcha tiramisu, matcha ramen, matcha hummus, matcha biriyani, matcha milk pedicures and, most ominously, daytime matcha raves.

So, in today’s acid reflux, I’m handing over the column to Niloufar Haidari to explain this pivotal moment in matcha culture on a global scale, and why it just might mean the death of civilisation as we know it. Jonathan Nunn

It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai, by Niloufar Haidari

It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai. The afro-house is bumping, ladies are swaying around like Sims, taxes are being evaded. There is much pain in the world, but not on this rooftop. Here there are digital nomads, myopic influencers selling dreams, and Europeans who moved to the UAE to escape the creeping tide of Islam in the West. There are also, for some reason, iced matcha lattes. Two Asians, seemingly the only non-white people in attendance, hand-whisk the green powder and serve it up to the partygoers with pink foam. A posh-looking man in a blue shirt and cream trousers offers a matcha ice cream cone to the camera with a smile and the Dubai skyline behind him. There is a complete dearth of swag, personality and vibe.

Drinking matcha is obviously not a new practice. Its history in Japan goes back nearly a thousand years, while whisked tea dates back even further in China. Starbucks has been selling (bad) matcha as ‘green tea lattes’ since 2006, the earthy, bitter taste of cheap matcha masked by everything from vanilla syrups to blueberry purées and sweetened coconut milk. But matcha has recently become a status symbol for wealth signalling and wellness culture, propelled in part by ‘aesthetic’ lifestyle TikToks, in which influencers in blush-coloured athleisure pose with matching strawberry matchas at ‘morning wellness raves’.

However, such events are not confined to the cursed dropshipper-populated corners of Bali and Dubai. This summer there were matcha raves in Vienna, Madrid, Frankfurt, Perth, Tijuana and Cork. Louis Bekk, a French DJ who seems to have made a career out of playing bad house remixes at pop-up brand activations, allegedly ‘turned the matcha scene on its head’ when he hosted an alcohol-free day-time rave at Marylebone’s How Matcha.

Of course, the reason I know so much about Gen Z green drink culture is not because I think it is a frivolous industry emblematic of impending societal collapse (although it is) but because I myself love this shit. When a matcha spot opened in Brent Cross’s new food court, I was ready to fall to my knees with gratitude at the prospect of finally being able to access a delicious silly little drink anywhere near my home in Neasden – the last place in zone 3 where you still can’t get a half-decent flat white. Its best-selling drink is the peach collagen yuzu; I personally alternate between the vanilla and brown sugar oat milk options, sometimes adding a shot of ashwagandha or bee pollen if I really feel like recreating my experience of the time I lived in LA. I will happily travel anywhere that gives me the option of topping my drink with sweetened cream cold foam, and have on more than one occasion found myself the oldest person in the queue at Jenki, waiting 20 minutes to spend £6.50 on a rose collagen matcha latte just to Feel Something – or maybe to avoid feeling anything at all.

But something about matcha, the aesthetic around it, and these ‘raves’ has left a bad, non-ceremonial-grade taste in my mouth. While coffee became associated with late nights, cigarettes, anxiety, deadlines and millennials (ew), matcha’s connotations are ‘quiet luxury’, youth, pilates, remote working in Bali, slow mornings and stay-at-home-girlfriend culture. Venture-capital-project-turned-Gen-Z-favourite Blank Street no longer even bothers to visually advertise its coffee-based drinks behind the counter, as the matcha latte is now the default beverage of anyone between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Because of this, matcha lattes – and memes about them – have become a micro-economy, the beverage of choice for both aesthetic girlies and performative males, two categories of people that mostly only exist online to generate content.

The idea of combining this with raves is a new development, but not a surprise. As nightlife venues and spaces for genuine hedonism continue to close, we are being pushed to embrace the psyop of ‘soft clubbing’ – the idea being that even while partying we should be practising mindfulness and praying at the altar of wellness. As delicious as silly little drinks may be, there is no comparison between dancing all night on drugs in a dark, sweaty basement and attending a coffee shop rave at 9am. Despite marketing that makes heavy use of words such as ‘community’, ‘culture’ and ‘connection’, these gatherings all have the sad, desperate air of a networking event. They are opportunities for content creation, ‘parties’ for people who can’t afford to be hungover the next day because it would impact their productivity levels and biohacking goals.

If the ‘matcha girl aesthetic’ is one of myopic self-betterment and the type of ‘self-care’ that instructs acolytes to tune out anything that doesn’t ‘serve them’, then it is particularly fitting for a society that has been numbed into the mindless consumption of in-group signifiers (and memes about mindless consumption of the in-group signifiers) as a distraction from the discomfort and rage we should all be feeling. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that the world as we once knew it is crumbling around us. The idea of a liberal international order, if we ever believed in it, is dead. We have spent two years watching a genocide unfold on our phones while doomscrolling through a never-ending stream of brain rot interspersed with photos of our friends on holiday. While millennials worry about renting forever, almost a third of Gen Z is thought to still be living with their parents. We are accelerating climate change and destroying the fabric of society itself so that the richest people in the world don’t lose their investments in a sycophantic AI technology that so far seems to be making everyone who uses it more stupid, self-obsessed or insane.

It makes complete sense that the matcha rave and its associated little-treat-as-distraction-from-the-horrors economy is centred in Dubai, a fake country built on modern-day slavery and a commitment to delusion, where you can avoid your sense of civic duty to others and reality itself by spending your life being shuttled around in a glorified air-conditioned 544km² shopping mall. When the matcha rave video went viral on Twitter earlier this year, one user called it ‘spiritually Israeli’, a phrase that has become shorthand for a tacky consumerism that relies on willfully ignoring the suffering of others. Another user commented: ‘worst nightmare scenario is that in the future there will be new dubais throughout the world and the global poor are converted into slaves to enable the lifestyle of people going to matcha raves on a Saturday.’

Obviously, we are to some extent already living in this future. There are people who believe that underpaid gig workers bringing them their breakfast in the pissing rain is an inalienable human right. Recently, I stood in the queue for a matcha latte behind a woman with a Pomeranian that wouldn’t stop barking as she told the stressed-out minimum-wage worker behind the counter that they should add calorie information to the menu. But it is naive to think that we have reached the zenith of this cursed new world. As wealth inequality grows and our futures grow ever more uncertain and dystopian, it’s not particularly hard to imagine a society in which wealthy elites escape to authoritarian police-state tax havens while the rest of us fight robots for the right to serve them Dubai chocolate donuts and hand-whisk their iced matcha lattes or die. The uncertainty is how much more treat-based self-distraction we have left before getting there.

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Credits

Niloufar Haidari is a small girl from Neasden with the soul of an itinerant drifter and the eating habits of a racoon.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Last week, we announced Issue 2 of our magazine – titled ‘Bad Food’ – which goes to print this week. We’re selling through the issue quickly, so if you wish to guarantee a copy, pre-order the magazine now. If you order before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details).

Pre-order Issue 2

Since time immemorial, or at least during the past 30 years, restaurants and customers have existed in a delicate balance – a mutually dependent relationship in which each party believes the power lies with the other – and have only survived through a delicate system of checks and balances that we call ‘hospitality’.

Recently, this ecosystem has been entirely disrupted. On the one hand, you have the rise of third-party apps like delivery or reservation platforms, which have, in a very short time, inserted themselves between the restaurant and the customer. Where you might once have had to ring up Harvey’s and negotiate personally with Marco Pierre White for a table, now you can book and un-book at the click of a button, which is convenient for everyone involved, but has inadvertently created a whole new set of grievances.

At the same time, the rise of influencers and Google Reviews means that everyone can now be a critic, even though there is no real code of behaviour that explains how to navigate this new world. In a recent post on his blog that starts ‘When did an unbearable percentage of the general dining public become such insufferable, entitled, unforgiving pricks?’, Mangal II owner Ferhat Dirik writes that customers turn to review platforms on a hair-trigger, that the ‘smallest imperfection immediately is met with a 1*’. There is no accepted way of dealing with this: some complain publicly, others seethe and try to get them taken down, others – as I have written about — decide to turn the tables and give as good as they get.

I do not think it’s a coincidence that the biggest viral restaurant story of this year (Don Ciccio closing in Highgate and choosing to go out in a fireball of anti-customer invective) and the biggest viral restaurant story of last year (The Yellow Bittern) are both, at their hearts, about wounded restaurateurs trying to navigate this new world. I have been to many restaurants that give you a QR code to their Google page at the end of a meal, sometimes asking you to do it there and then (one 4.9* rated restaurant, in Alum Rock, Birmingham, has been accused in its own review section of using customers’ phones to write the reviews for them).

Others, however, take to Vittles. So in this week’s acid reflux, I’m handing the reins over to chef Thom Eagle of Bottega Caruso in Margate to explain why customers have become so unbearable.

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The Customer Is Not Always Right, by Thom Eagle

Restaurants and bars have always been spaces where certain sectors of society can behave like toddlers. The infamous Bullingdon dining club at Oxford University, nurturer of future government leaders and the guardians of our economy, is notorious for giving its members the chance to live out every toddler’s dream, i.e. acting out a tantrum without fear of consequences, destroying toys and playpens in the process; the application of large amounts of money ensures that everything will be fine again in the morning. Most people would agree that smashing up a restaurant and then waving enough money at the owner for the problem to go away is abhorrent behaviour, but in a way it is just an extreme perversion of the dictum that the customer is always right, the final logic of the assumption that if you are being served and paying money for the privilege then you can do whatever you want. It is the logic of the toddler, who can’t control their emotional responses, and the logic of the bad customer, who can.

I could make a list of the behaviours that have in my experience made for bad customers, and while it would certainly start with things like setting fire to the curtains, shitting on the toilet floor and being remarkably racist, the meat of the list would be more like:

ordering off-menu and being arsey about it

arriving very early or very late and being arsey about it

sleazing on the waitress and then being arsey when called out on it

talking to the waitress like they’re an idiot

talking to me like I’m an idiot

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This edition of acid reflux was supposed to be a New York special, but I can’t overlook gifts when they drop into my lap.

Lately in the London restaurant world, there’s been a lot of chat about Carbone, the New-York-restaurant-turned-luxury-dining-chain, whose recently opened London branch currently has a score of 2.8 on Google due to a spate of near-identical 1-star reviews. Two restaurant critics even rushed out opening-night reviews to get the scoop that Carbone is, in fact, not very good – something I could have told you for free.

At the same time, a hot take about Carbone has been solidifying into something approaching received knowledge: ‘We don’t need Carbone because we already have something better’ – namely The Dover, a homegrown steak, burger and pasta restaurant on Dover Street that is essentially Carbone crossed with the understatement of a Mayfair club.

I decided to eat at The Dover last week, not for this newsletter but because my long-suffering girlfriend is tired of date nights when either 1) the food is terrible or 2) the restaurant is in Enfield. So, I booked in for what I hoped would be an uneventful evening of good-enough, non-boundary-pushing food. The first signs were auspicious: the restaurant is designed like an intricate wooden jewellery box, with hidden compartments and alcoves, and a curtain that ensures no sunlight will ever penetrate the room. The starters section is essentially a footnote of things that go well with martinis, of which there are nine, and the three we ordered were all superb. The burger tastes almost exactly like a Whopper (complimentary).

As it was Mayfair, we expected to see some characters, and tried to play a game of working out which table in there had the most evil energy, before concluding that it was probably us. That is, until the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak, was seated next to me and completely killed my vibe.

Since the dissolution of his ministry, Sunak has been busy working at Goldman Sachs, consulting and, evidently, doing more eating out to help out. I was less struck by his dry chat (AI, ChatGPT, problems at Microsoft) or the revelation of whom he fancies (Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman) than by his ordering.

I think you can tell a lot about a person not from what they order but from how they order it. I respect people who know what they want and just order it, without compromising. Sunak’s technique was to ask every single person at the table what they were ordering, ask the waiter for his thoughts, spend the next ten minutes fussing about whether the Dover sole was too big, asking the waiter if he thought the Dover sole was too big (answer: no), trying to negotiate sharing it with someone else at the table and failing, before capitulating and ordering penne arrabbiata.

After witnessing this dithering over a piece of flatfish, I left The Dover with a better understanding of our ruling class. How can you possibly hope to lead the country if you cannot even lead your own stomach?

An interesting parlour game for nerds: which PMs would have just ordered the sole?

IMO Wilson would have got the sole. Blair would have got the sole. Even Callaghan would have got the sole. Now we are doomed to be ruled by people who want sole but order the penne.

Update on Castle Square

It’s been a busy fortnight in the fight to save five restaurants from their unfair eviction from Castle Square, as covered in the last acid reflux. Since then, Latin Elephant have secured a temporary reprieve of sorts, with the council leaning on Castle Square’s developer Get Living to agree on a deal for repayment. However, there is still much work to do. The traders have only been offered ‘tenancies at will’, which mean they can be legally evicted at short notice, and they have not been offered any space in the new development despite earlier promises that they would.

You can keep up with the developments on Latin Elephant’s Instagram and find an updated template to email your local councillors here.

Recommended reading

• ‘Is new Dublin restaurant Entrecôte connected to the French originals?’: A masterclass of reporting, in which All the Food, a Dublin-based blog, investigates the newly opened Entrecôte Dublin, proving in the process that it cannot possibly be related to any existing Entrecôte franchise, despite insinuations that it was in marketing materials. Soon after, the owner of the Dublin Entrecôte, Paul McGlade, put out a backtracking statement, confirming that his restaurant wasn’t associated with ‘similar L’Entrecôte / Entrecôte restaurants around the world’ after all, but rather was a homage. Entrecôte Dublin has already closed.

• ‘How James Hoffmann became king of the coffee nerds’: It seems improbable that no one has profiled coffee supremo James Hoffmann before now, but this article in the FT is really about what happens when you get so deep into the thing you love, and your taste becomes so rarefied, that everything becomes disappointing. I will admit that I felt pangs of recognition on reading it.

• ‘How high-end restaurants went global’: A well-researched piece by Jay Rayner, again in the FT, on the global chain-ification of luxury restaurants, and particularly the move to the UAE and Saudi Arabia – a topic I am fascinated by. In the most recent episode of our podcast, I talked a bit about the London fine dining restaurant Row on 5, its sister branch in Dubai (Row on 45), and my ambivalence over whether this was really luxury. After reading this piece, I am more certain that it is not.

• ‘A polite argument with J. Nunn’: A genial riposte to me on the above by Marshall Manson, who is a Row on 5 fan. All I will say is: if you don’t like my criticisms, I have others!

I hope to write a bit more about my problems with fine dining in this city over the next few months, but I would like to start on a positive note by shouting out Wilsons in Bristol and Upstairs at Landrace in Bath (both of which I mentioned in the podcast), as well as Dongnae. All are in contention for my meal of the year, and all feel rooted in place in a way that I sometimes struggle with when it comes to London restaurants. Dongnae is the second Bristol-based restaurant from chef-couple Kyu Jeon and Duncan Robertson, a more sedate sister to Bokman, which I once said was my favourite restaurant in the UK. What I love about their cooking at both places is how they combine a forensic, almost-obsessive attention to detail with a keen sense of fun. London has recently been blessed with many Korean restaurants of varying sensibilities, from Calong to Sollip to Miga, but there is something very special about Bokman and Dongnae. I’d like to hope London could incubate more restaurants like them.

The rehearsal

Last month, Guardian critic Grace Dent published a very strange review of Brasserie Constance, which was less about the food and more about the (alleged) behaviour of the staff. Dent arrived at Adam Byatt’s new Fulham restaurant to an empty dining room, seemingly provoking a crisis among the managers who didn’t want the critic to think that the restaurant was vibeless. According to Dent:

‘The table next to us filled up with a group of twentysomethings and, soon after, another table did likewise, then another, until there were five jam-packed tables around us, all merrily going through the motions of having lunch, although, curiously, none of them seemed to have been offered menus or had orders taken. In fact, on closer inspection, not much food was on those tables, either. It was almost as if they were miming having a meal.’

This episode has reminded me of a story of another critic who visited a restaurant in Manchester last year. The critic had asked to be booked in the restaurant under their own name (an increasingly dire trend) on a certain date. The only problem was that the restaurant was supposed to be shut that day. Not wanting to turn down the boost that comes with a national critic review, the restaurant decided to open specifically for the critic, and filled the room to the rafters with table after table of friends and family, all pretending to be paying diners, Nathan Fielder-style. In a rave review, the critic praised the restaurant, with a particular note on how full the restaurant was and how happy the staff seemed to be to greet them. To this day, I am not sure if they know what really happened.

The moral of the story is: don’t be bait!

Shot and chaser of the month

New York, New York: part 2

New York’s food scene has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. If some of the city’s culinary institutions once felt like either stuffy throwbacks or slightly forlorn cafes, now movements prioritising careful ingredient sourcing and imaginative takes on regional cooking, as well as more professional service, have transformed the city into a place where visitors can plan their days around their meals as they might in, say, London, Paris, Tokyo or Mexico City, and be continually surprised by the diversity and quality of their options.

I was in New York last month and had a surprisingly great time. Last time I went, I found the city oppressive, that New Yorkers have made a personality trait of having bad infrastructure, and that the dining scene was uncanny, serving similar things to London except with sticker-shock pricing. This time, everything was delightful, and I now realise that the difference between the two trips was down to the weather being good.

Here are 20 observations on the city and recommendations for dining in New York that I hope will be useful to anyone visiting (and maybe even to anyone who lives there):

• New Yorkers disagree on many things, but there are, to my knowledge, four places about which every New Yorker will say, ‘Oh yeah, I love that place’ – as if you’ve just reminded them of a friend they rarely see. Those places are The Long Island Bar, Maxi’s Noodle, S&P Lunch and whatever their favourite rice roll place is.

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Good morning and welcome to acid reflux. Today’s column is primarily about the fight to save four restaurants in Elephant and Castle from eviction. We also have a short dispatch from Southwark by Gavin Cleaver, about a new, strange development in food and tech.

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One Week to Save One of London’s Best Restaurants

Last Wednesday, I received a call from Faye Gomes, the owner of the exceptional Guyanese restaurant Kaieteur Kitchen and one of my favourite cooks in London. Almost in tears, she told me that she, along with three other food traders in the development – Daddy O’s Suya Spot, El Guambra and the Original Caribbean Spice – had been locked out of their premises at Castle Square in Elephant and Castle that morning. The notice stuck to her door listed an incorrect phone number for Savills, Castle Square’s managing agent, and informed her that she had two weeks to vacate the premises.

When I saw Faye later that day, she went into further detail about what had happened. In March 2024, she received a backdated electricity bill for £12,000 from Savills, which covered the four-year period since Faye had moved in. The other traders also received backdated electricity bills for £10,000–20,000, and told me that for years they had been requesting monthly electricity bills from Savills and their landlord, Get Living, without success. Faye stressed to me that she had never been behind on her rent, and so thought that a realistic repayment plan could be agreed on. However, a year later, she was hit with a further bill for £9,000, bringing the total electricity bill to £21,000.

When I asked Get Living for comment earlier this week, they did not dispute the timeline or the lateness of the bill, but instead responded with an official statement referring to ‘eighteen months of intensive engagement’ before the lock out, and claimed that ‘traders were informed about some metering issues and were regularly advised to set aside funds in preparation for electricity billing’. Savills did not respond to our request for comment.

It’s difficult to explain the significance of this story without looking back at the last decade of regeneration of Elephant and Castle and the creation of Castle Square (Cormac Kehoe at London Centric provides a very good overview here). In 2018, when I first started reporting on Elephant and Castle for Eater London, Kaieteur Kitchen was one of the many food stalls gathered in the moat of the old shopping centre. I would eat in the moat most days, everything from the gizzard suya at Daddy O’s to the hornados at El Guambra, but I would often gravitate towards Kaieteur Kitchen after a long day of interviewing to have Faye’s spinach rice with curried pumpkin, or her pepperpot. The food was very much an extension of Faye’s presence, and it was not rare to find people at the stall just to talk, or to simply feel better. I came to understand Kaieteur Kitchen, along with many other businesses inside the shopping centre, as places that made the act of living in an often-anonymous city like London feel more human.

When the shopping centre was closed in 2020 (and subsequently demolished), Kaieteur Kitchen, Daddy O’s, El Guambra and the Original Caribbean Spice, were moved into Castle Square, a temporary, Boxpark-like structure opposite the train station. They were joined by Diana Sach at Coma y Beba, who used to own La Bodeguita, one of the major Colombian businesses in the old shopping centre, which had not been relocated. Castle Square was, like many things about Elephant’s regeneration, a compromise. Southwark Council required that certain businesses in or around the shopping centre should continue to operate. With the support of the charity Latin Elephant, which has long represented the interests of traders in Elephant and Castle and fought hard for small gains, Castle Square was secured for the five food traders and several retail businesses, while others were given a berth at Elephant Arcade, close to the roundabout. Despite the low footfall, Kaieteur Kitchen thrived and scaled into a sit-down restaurant (I interviewed Faye about it at the time here).

Five years later, virtually none of these businesses remain open. Traders at Elephant Arcade were told to leave their premises at the end of August 2025. Last month, Coma y Beba left Castle Square due to similar electricity bill issues. With the new shopping centre due to open in 2026, and with chains and slicker restaurants with financial backing competing for limited space, it’s unclear if Kaieteur Kitchen or any of the old Elephant food businesses will be allowed to stay in the area – or if they ever really had a fighting chance.

Each restaurant under threat is its own world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Kaieteur Kitchen is one of the best restaurants in London, or that Faye’s fans included not only London’s Guyanese community, but also dignitaries from the Commonwealth Secretariat, the legendary chef and author Rosamund Grant and the graffiti artist 10 FOOT. Or that, since I first profiled her at Eater London in 2019, her restaurant has featured in Lunch with the FT and on websites like The Infatuation (where Kaieteur Kitchen is currently ranked as the sixth-best restaurant in London).

However, I think it speaks to the precariousness of the London restaurant industry, and how much power landlords have, that a restaurant with the reputation of Kaieteur Kitchen could conceivably vanish within a fortnight. Latin Elephant is currently leading a campaign to save all four businesses, and many questions, some of which I have put to the landlords and Southwark Council, have yet to be answered. Why were the bills so late? Was Get Living ever planning to include these businesses in the new Elephant and Castle complex? And, above all, if all four food businesses have been put into a situation where they are unable to pay basic utilities, have Get Living and Savills upheld their responsibilities and agreement with Southwark Council to provide a space in which these businesses can survive?

For now, Faye and the other traders are looking for kitchen space to fulfil their catering commitments and to keep staff paid and in work. Latin Elephant is organising a public protest against the decision, and is creating a template for Southwark residents to email their MPs and the Council to urge scrutiny of what’s happening at Castle Square (please keep an eye on their Linktree today for details). And while the traders have a solicitor, anyone who can help with legal advice is always welcome. But there is not much time: traders have just a week to fight the decision before the premises need to be located. Bitter experience shows that, in Elephant, once a place is gone, it’s gone forever.

You can contact Miatta Fahnbulleh who is the MP for Peckham here, and Neil Coyle who is the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, here.

You can follow Latin Elephant here.

My Hiro

The fate of the Elephant and Castle traders mirrors what happened to Michael Clinkett at Plush in Surrey Quays last year, when bailiffs and dogs were called to the restaurant where he previously had made some of the best jerk chicken in the borough. Then, as seemingly now, Southwark Council was unable to help. Last month, the site was finally demolished.

Gavin Cleaver covered the Plush eviction for us at the time as a local resident, and since then he has been reporting on other food goings-on in Bermondsey. As something different for acid reflux, here is a short dispatch from Gavin on a new worrying development in the area at the intersection of restaurants and technology.

A restaurant called My Hiro recently opened on Southwark Park Road in Bermondsey. For a while, it had no sign and only one thing on the menu: a katsu curry at a bargain £5.99. Since then, they’ve put up a sign, and have expanded their menu to offer a curious assortment of easily prepared dishes: a teriyaki chicken, a beef madras, bao, and pesto tagliatelli. They also sell cookie dough to take home and 1.2kg containers of hot honey, with the claim that theirs is ‘the only hot honey made with simply chillies and honey’ (even though the very same sentence mentions that it also includes olive oil).

Intrigued by the seemingly random menu and low prices, I did a little digging and discovered that My Hiro is a brand from a software group called Bountiful, and that several others exist. There’s one at Charing Cross that serves sushi rolls (most of which contain no fish), and there are also two currently closed locations, one in Elephant and Castle (which bills itself, in its Google Maps listing, as ‘home of the Mango Masala’) and another in Clapham (also closed, currently a dark kitchen, operated by the same group and calling itself Indian Shack). Bountiful sells itself with the tagline: ‘The only real alternative to home cooking. Do you really want to cook tonight?’

Most recently, Stuart McCamley, the founder of Bountiful, seems to have been working with a company called Good Robin, which persuaded people to invest in Lifetime ISAs using crypto currency, a venture which has now been scrubbed from the internet beyond a few stray LinkedIn posts and some bad TrustPilot reviews. The investor presentation for My Hiro says Stuart is ‘living in the dark kitchen until we’re profitable’. The company’s Chief Growth Officer, Raj Sathi, describes My Hiro as ‘the McDonald’s of healthy everyday favourites, tech-enabled and automated’. The investor pitch deck outlines a plan to expand to 1000 UK restaurants, sell their technology to other restaurants and claims that ‘a real alternative to daily cooking could see the £1.27T restaurant market grow by 5–10x’.

Having read enough, I decided to actually eat at the new My Hiro. As you’d imagine for £5.99, the food is extremely basic, but no worse in that sense than the Morley’s a few doors down. The katsu is three fried chicken patties of the sort you might get in a large freezer bag from Iceland, on top of an under-spiced and lumpy katsu. There are also ‘bao sliders’, which are much worse – a diminutive splodge of sauce on one edge of an identical fried chicken patty, in between two reheated bao.

My Hiro’s stated goal is to sell ‘food people love, made perfectly every time with robotics’. Currently there are two people running the Bermondsey location; there’s no evidence yet of robotic innovation, but there are a lot of rice cookers. It’s intriguing to consider the end-to-end restaurant mechanics of making a profit on a good katsu for £5.99 in the current food-service environment. One thing’s for sure though: when prices are kept artificially low and processes are streamlined in the name of cost savings and efficiency, usually the savings come from the workers. Let’s hope My Hiro can buck the ‘disruptor’ cornerstone of leaning on labour.

An evening of Ursula Le Guin

We’re big fans of Ursula Le Guin at Vittles. Back in 2021, Eli Lee wrote for us about the fascinating use of food in her novels, particularly Always Coming Home. For what would have been her 96th birthday party, Sarah Shin and So Mayer of Silver Press have collaborated with artist Rain Wu to come up with an edible landscape, made in response to Le Guin’s maps (which Silver Press have created a book and exhibition of, in collaboration with the Architectural Association). The party is on October 21st at the AA Lecture Hall, and you can buy tickets here.

New York, New York

Finally, I was in New York recently to celebrate the American publication of Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming. I will write more about the New York food scene in the next acid reflux, but while I was there I was on Taste Podcast with Cake Zine’s Aliza Abarbanel talking about Vittles and food media at large. You can listen to it here.

That’s all for now. If you have any news, gossip or tips, please email them to vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com or DM me at @jonathandnunn.

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Good morning and welcome to acid reflux, a column that’s already getting me into trouble.

Free Palestine

It’s been heartening to see London hospitality come out so strong in support of Palestine, with many cooking fundraisers directly raising money for food and aid agencies attempting to operate in Palestine under an Israeli blockade and genocide. There are two smaller events that I would love to promote. The first is a walk/workshop tomorrow (Saturday) on herbalism by Amanny Ahmad, who has been one of the most lucid voices on Palestine and food over the past decade (read her essay on bread, wheat and Palestine on MOLD here). Tickets are £25 – to secure one, message Amanny on Instagram (@lalph_rauren).

Second, a group of publishers and activist organisations, including the brilliant Skin Deep magazine and Haymarket Books, are holding a fundraiser and solidarity event for Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the British–Egyptian writer and activist who remains behind bars in Egypt. Alaa, who has long been a powerful voice on Palestine, has previously participated in hunger strikes directly inspired by those of Palestinian prisoners, and since the beginning of the month he is on hunger strike again. Alaa’s mother, Laila Soueif, was hospitalised in the UK earlier this year after a hunger strike in support of her son. The event will take place at Pelican House on 25 September (tickets available here), and will include readings from Amrit Wilson, Harsha Walia, Omar Robert Hamilton, Hazem Jamjoum, Nihal El Aasar, Sara Salem and Amelia Horgan. Hunger is a food-writing issue.

To the Victor, the Spoils

When we heard in July that Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand was closing after just five months of trading, we raised a collective eyebrow. The opulent dining room has been something of a problem spot. I had a great meal there under Patrick Powell, who only lasted two years, but five months is an extraordinarily short tenure for a chef who was clearly gunning for stars (Garvey’s other restaurant Sola, has one Michelin star). Our eyebrows were further raised by the announcement in August that Garvey was crowdfunding a new restaurant to the tune of £130,000.

Earlier this month, the Sunday Times reported that the company that owns Sola, MBS Rapidez Limited, went into liquidation in March 2023 with estimated debts of more than £1.2 million, including almost £80,000 owed to six wine suppliers and similar amounts to food suppliers (including £40,000 alone to the Notting Hill Fish Shop, owned by Chris D’Sylva of Dorian). The ownership of Sola was then transferred to Sola Fine Dining Limited, which collapsed in July last year with a deficit of £629,789. One wine supplier, Wanderlust Wine, claims it was owed £19,000 when MBS Rapidez went bust and that it was persuaded to continue supplying Sola until March last year, when Sola Fine Dining also collapsed, with over £26,000 of invoices left unpaid.

The baroque company structure surrounding Garvey’s restaurants, and the allegations of unpaid invoices, should be the biggest hospitality story in London right now, but so far no one has followed up on the Sunday Times story, and I have not heard it being discussed outside wine circles. Speaking to a wine insider recently, it seems that this story has been an open secret for a while and that those left out of pocket have had little recourse apart from trying to place the story in the papers. The Sunday Times article is paywalled, which may explain the lack of traction, but I hear more is in the works …

Dovids Deli

I don’t go to pop-ups and residencies often nowadays, but I am excited for Dovid Brown’s takeover of the wine bar Hector’s this Sunday 14 September (from 1pm until they run out). You can normally find Brown cooking at 40 Maltby Street, although his dream restaurant is actually a Jewish deli. ‘I’ve always found the lack of good Jewish restaurants and delis in London sad, and I can rarely find the patience to sit on the Northern Line to Edgware to visit my favourite salt beef bar, B&K,’ he tells us.

B&K can be difficult to get to if you’re not in North-West, so it’s a real public service to get this style of food at Hector’s. Expect salt beef with chrain and potatoes, chopped liver, and some nods to Brown’s Hungarian grandma. Whether this food can be small-plated remains to be seen.

Hanbaagaasuuteeki

In the last acid reflux, I mentioned the possibility of the Regency Cafe opening in Dubai but stopped just short of predicting that we’re about to enter a new chaotic era of Turkish restaurant ownership. Well, today, I am predicting that. Not too far from the Regency, you can find Hanbaagaasuuteeki, an Asian-inspired smash burger restaurant competing directly with the unmistakeable smell of Bleecker Burger’s extractor on the westbound Circle/District Line platform at Victoria. I came out of self-imposed retirement to review it for Emily Sundberg’s excellent newsletter Feed Me.

Feed Me

I found the only good brand on Substack.

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9 months ago · 66 likes · 30 comments · Emily Sundberg

Hanbaagaasuuteeki, an ‘Asian-inspired’ smash burger restaurant, whose name is clearly the result of there being no dissenting opinions at the ‘Foxy Mamma’ group that owns it, could not have opened in London at any other point in its history. It sits plumb at the intersection of two decade-long London trends: a slavish deference to the minutiae of American burger consumption patterns, and a new era of Turkish restaurant ownership, one that looks beyond the Ocakbaşı – the grillhouses which are the template for London Turkish dining – and out towards the rest of the world. At Hanbaagaasuuteeki you can order four burgers: a cheeseburger called ‘Not Another Double Cheeseburger’, a Thai-inspired ‘Isaan Burger’, a kimchi burger, and a ‘secret-menu’ Sichuan burger that they tell you is a secret at the counter. The walls are covered in a word soup reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace but with things like ‘gochujang’ and ‘katsuobushi’ printed in large red lettering.

Bake Off

It’s a truism that the smaller the industry, the more vicious the beef. And, judging by a recent tip off from Vittles contributor Thuli Weerasena, there is no beef like bakery beef – in this case a who-will-blink-first stand-off between Suba and Crumbs in Walthamstow. For those who don’t know, Suba was started in 2022 by baker Pa Modou and quickly established itself as one of London’s best bakeries, blending French techniques with African and Asian flavours (in these pages, Marie Mitchell cited the cashew cream croissant as one of her favourite bakes in the city).

In May, Suba’s old site at 368–370 Hoe Street rebranded as Crumbs. A quick browse on Companies House, plus comments in the Walthamstow subreddit, revealed that Modou had already left the business. However, if you hadn’t noticed the name change you might not have been able to tell anything was different: plenty of the old staff remained and the menu was nearly identical It was only the declining quality of the bakes that suggested it wasn’t business as usual.

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For the past few years, I have been shopping round the title ‘acid reflux’ to anyone who will listen to me. So far it has been rejected as the title of this publication, my own as-yet unwritten autobiography, my beautiful girlfriend’s book, a major London exhibition and a new restaurant (I cannot understand why).

So, I’m taking it back for myself. In this column, Vittles is returning to its roots as a first-person newsletter (as well as its origins in Eater London), as a place to regurgitate news and rumours in the London restaurant industry and beyond. In acid reflux, you can expect commentary on the month’s/fortnight’s/week’s events (depending on how often we do this), recommendations for restaurants, pop-ups, snacks and food items that I don’t have it in me to write a 1,500-word review about, and unverified but highly credible gossip that has been sent my way. Think about it as a compressed version of my end-of-year reports.

If you enjoy today’s newsletter and want more like this, then let us know, and we will try to publish it more often. To read it you can subscribe for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to the five year back catalogue of Vittles.

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News

Breaking America

The big news this month is the announcement that both Dishoom and JKS (Gymkhana, Ambassadors Clubhouse) are finally opening outposts in America. You can read more about the dizzying logistics and figures being thrown around here and here (we heard that the fit-out for Gymkhana Las Vegas is something in the ballpark of $10 million). I talked to Priya Krishna for the former article. Only my quote ‘the time is right’ made it into the piece, but my main thought is that in a world where the US (and particularly New York) is the culinary hegemon, this does seem like a rare and interesting case of London projecting soft cultural power across the ocean through its Indian restaurants.

New York is hardly a stranger to good Indian food. Floyd Cardoz opened Tabla in 1997, a restaurant which everyone who went there will tell you was well ahead of its time; more recently Dhamaka and Semma (which topped the New York Times’ 2025 list of the city’s best restaurants) have banished any feelings of inadequacy New York might have had about its South Asian food compared with London’s. But Dishoom and JKS are phenomenons. Both, in their own way, have utterly changed the way we consume Indian food in this country. Dishoom in particular has been a case study in how to make Indian food, for want of a better word, cool: wresting mid-market Indian dining away from white tablecloths, adding a sense of whimsy and narrative through minutely-designed dining rooms and menus, and (perhaps most importantly) serving fantastic drinks. And both restaurant groups are already successful with Americans: when the team from Eater US came to London seven years ago, it wasn’t St. JOHN but Dishoom at the top of their restaurant list, and recently, we heard that Kendrick Lamar was at Gymkhana (and that, incredibly, it was apparently his first ever Indian meal).

The London-Indian restaurant may be our biggest culinary export since nose-to-tail. Leaving aside who it benefits to have a Gymkhana in Las Vegas, or the wisdom of giving a stake of Dishoom to a private-equity group, it does feel like ‘the time is right’. I look forward to hearing how they travel.

Closer to Home

On the subject of Indian restaurants, two of London’s best Keralite restaurants in East Ham are currently embroiled in some trouble. Udaya, once a stalwart of the Eater London Best-Value restaurant guides, has received a £180,000 fine for employing four people without the right to work in the UK. If this sounds steep, it’s because the Tories increased the fine per employee from £15,000 to £45,000 in 2023 (while conveniently exempting the delivery apps, which technically don’t employ their workers). A fine of this magnitude already makes survival challenging, but on Monday Newham Council (under instruction from the Home Office) revoked the restaurant’s licence to serve alcohol (not even the intervention of Sir Stephen Timms, an East Ham MP and minister in the DWP whose silver wedding anniversary was catered by Udaya, was able to stop it.) For a restaurant like Udaya, which serves toddy shop food meant to go with alcohol, this additional punishment might be existential. I visited over the weekend, and found the restaurant full and the food as good as ever, although in the absence of beer, the restaurant has gone in hard on promoting its new range of goli sodas as an alternative — every single diner was drinking one.

Meanwhile, Thattukada’s days seem to be numbered. For the past month, the celebrated restaurant has been closed and its Instagram account has been pumping out AI slop about online jobs rather than pictures of its excellent netholi fry. That is, until 7 August, when Thattukada’s owner Biju posted a front-facing camera video alleging fraud, and that a partner (or someone claiming to be a partner) has been accessing funds and sending them overseas.

If anyone speaks fluent Malayalam and can translate further, then please let us know – Thattukada is one of the great London restaurants and it would be a sad end to a brilliant story.

Secret Menu

Since the news broke this month, there have been increasingly sensational reports in the right-wing press about Pho Na, a Vietnamese restaurant on Old Kent Road that was found to have dog meat in its freezer (labelled as goat meat). When I first heard the report, I couldn’t help but smile: if you’d told me that dog meat had been discovered in a restaurant anywhere in London, I would have put money on it being on Old Kent Road, which is the city’s culinary Wild West. (Pho Na, by the way, used to be Pho Thúy Tây Café, which served me some of the best Vietnamese meals I’ve had in London, from stuffed intestines to raw blood pudding.)

I’m fascinated by food subterfuge, which is nothing new, especially in a city like London. I used to eat at a Cypriot restaurant in North London that I know had ambelopoulia on its menu, a (highly illegal) dish of songbirds similar to ortolan. But most of all, it reminds me of Jack O’Shea, who got chucked out of Selfridges for selling foie gras under the counter as ‘French fillet’. Pho Na is now closed, but I’m excited to visit the restaurant that has already taken its place.

Random gourmands being stopped on Old Kent Road

The New Regency Era

Last month, I went to the Regency – one of London’s classic caffs – for a work meeting and unexpectedly found myself in the queue for the very first day of trading under new management. If you’re not up to speed yet, Claudia Perotti and Marco Schiavetta, who had ran the Regency since 1986, announced that they would be selling the leasehold at the end of last year. Since then, it’s been bought by new Turkish owners, Fevzi and Zafer Gungor, which is very much in line with the changing demographics of caff ownership in London (Fevzi Gungor has also previously owned and opened fast food and takeaway restaurants across Croydon and South West London).

The first signs were inauspicious: it was midday and the Regency still hadn’t opened yet. Once it did, there was no booming voice of the Oracle (which had become synonymous with the cafe) and my order was misheard, then corrected, then got wrong again. That feeling of being in a well-oiled machine was missing, but thankfully the food was exactly the same as always: excellent.

The Gungors have since come under fire for their desire, according to the Standard, to explore ‘possible expansion possibilities, including co-branded sauces and expansion overseas, including Dubai’. In many ways, this is not surprising: Simran Hans has written in these pages of Bar Italia teaming up with Outernet in a £1 billion entertainment district; Lina Stores has expanded across the UK; E Pellicci has moved into merch, selling everything from key rings to branded teabags, and has become so hyped that it’s unusable as an actual place to eat. Still, a Regency in Dubai feels like an inevitable red line in the continuing commodification of London’s old caffs.

New Openings

In our latest Six of One, we shouted out Little Tunis, one of the very few Tunisian cafes in the city. However, it will soon be joined by Oula, a Tunisian coffee house run by Boutheina Ben Salem, which opens in Fitzrovia in October. I’ve been lucky enough to have had Boutheina’s food, which is notable not just for the skilfulness of her cooking, but for the quality of Tunisian produce that she sources. Oula will be a special place, and it is currently looking for a sous chef and a barista (with experience), as well as a back-of-house (no experience required!). You can contact them through Instagram here.

Dish of the Month

Gossip

Flap-jawing

Topjaw have been receiving a lot of mainstream press lately, including this piece in the Times in which it’s revealed that Jesse Burgess was in a band with Sadie Frost and Garry Kemp’s son Finlay, and got his big break via Jamie Laing of Made in Chelsea. This coverage is rooted in a truth that has become more and more apparent over the last year: Topjaw are one of the main drivers of London restaurant bookings, placing them somewhere between Fay Maschler in her pomp and a powerful PR. A positive reel by the duo can allegedly increase bookings by 800 people, which is a boon for the industry.

It’s less known, however, what a negative review does. Strangely, Burgess – despite the Instagram success – seems to have designs on being a real critic, and only has one target …

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