256 Restaurants You Might Like
A Six of One milestone with two of the best new pizzerias in London, long-awaited Cypriot home-cooking in Cockfosters, vibey 2010s Korean in Hackney, and more
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.
Today’s Six of One recommendations are from Mohammed Ali Salha, Christian Theodorou, Ria Parmar, Nick Bramham, Angela Hui, and Montague Ashley-Craig. We have also updated our Six of One map, which is now at 256 entries. To view it, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year.
1. Yiayia’s Cooking
For some reason, Cypriot restaurants focusing on seasonal home-style cooking have never really gained traction in the London Cypriot community, except maybe for Stelios’s at the Cypriot Community Centre. Instead, it seems nearly everyone and their uncle opens either a taverna or a kebab shop and inevitably reduces an entire cuisine to just dips, calamari and charcoal-grilled meats.
However, Yiayia’s Cooking opened its doors at the end of last year and serves the foods of mums and yiayias: koupepia (stuffed vine leaves), makaronia tou fournou stifado (long macaroni layered with pork mince and bechamel sauce), kolokasi (taro and pork stew), afelia and the wealth of beans and pulses known as ospria that we probably ought to be eating more of. It is also probably the most interesting thing to happen in Cockfosters for a long time.
I took my daughter to eat on Yiaya’s opening day, and we shared some koupepia and pourgouri (bulgur) while local legend and journalist Michael Yiakoumi of London Cypriot newspaper Parikiaki recorded his classic panning Instagram shots in the background around us. Later, we were joined by my sister and we shared an enormous slab of makaronia tou fournou large enough to comfortably feed two. The following day I noticed they had rabbit stifado and a dessert of semolina halva on the specials board – enough to motivate my mum to pop in, grabbing me a takeaway box on her way over.
Rabbit or hare stifado is a personal favourite and I believe superior to the beef versions you often find. Here the sweetness of the rabbit meat and onions balanced by the sharp tang of the vinegar brought back memories of a feast we enjoyed a few years back in the village, celebrating the orthodox holiday of the death and assumption of the Mother of God, or colloquially, dekapentavgoustos. Then, among tables and tables of food, was a large pot of stifado, made using wild rabbit freshly shot by a cousin, held up like a trophy for a photo and shared on Facebook for all to see. Christian Theodorou
7 Heddon Court Avenue, Cockfosters Rd, EN4 0DB
Behind the paywall: We ask, ‘What is a London pizzeria these days?’; a take on the pizza they call apizza; confronting the winter with eddoe curries and parotta in Turnpike Lane; a new Shoreditch noodle staple; and a DIY Korean restaurant that has us remembering Hackney in the 2010s.
PLUS: the Six of One map has been updated to include all 256 restaurants covered in the column to-date.