A Food Crawl in London's Most Overlooked Restaurant Destination
Mohammed Ali Salha returns to Kingsbury to review four restaurants and take the temperature of an area in transition. Photography by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Mohammed Ali Salha.
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A Love Letter to Kingsbury
Mohammed Ali Salha reviews four restaurants that suggest Kingsbury is now one of the city’s most overlooked food destinations.
It’s hard to really articulate my feelings about Kingsbury. I hate it, I love it, I don’t really want to write about it. But it’s one of the few places in the world that feels remotely like home. When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to leave the banality of life in NW9. My family had moved to London in the bitter winter of 1990 from a Lebanon just moving towards peace, darting around the city in temporary housing before finding a feeling of stability on Laburnum Grove. The neverending summer of ’96 was our first in Kingsbury and I was still tethered to the area until I left Kingsbury High School’s sixth form in 2005. Throughout that time, the area was dominated by the hallmarks of a working-class London enclave: parents popping in and out of cash and carries at a canter; lame, unloved franchises of once-popular restaurants; and fried chicken shops filled with kids in jack-ups and short ties.
But something has changed. There’s a new momentum transforming Kingsbury from a seemingly faceless hub to a place that reflects the decades-long history of an area that has provided solace for solitudinarians and sanctuary for the stateless. In the 1950s, it was a base for London’s Irish community before the Gujarati contingent – the majority of whom were expelled from Uganda – put their own stamp on the area from the 1970s onwards. More recently, Kingsbury has become home to sizable communities from Iraq, Poland and Romania. It is all of those communities which have brought so much to the current landscape – street snacks and sweets; labyrinthine fruit and veg shops with seasonal prizes; food emporiums with epic selections of pickles and pulses; widespread habibification. Ambitious entrepreneurs have begun to reshape the look and feel of the area by thinking bigger with bold concepts and even bolder decors.
Kingsbury, more than ever, looks like a culinary map of its many lives. And recently, there have been three genuinely different, excellent restaurants and food businesses, which render the area more than just a site of historical interest. There are colourful, comforting chaats, kebabs kissed by open flames and desserts piled as high as ambition; with each one shaping Kingsbury in its own way.
Behind the paywall: Iraqi grilled meats and freshly baked khubz; amba-infused pickles; the origin story of Dubai chocolate, a breakfast of halwa, chana masala and fried puri; pav bhaji and vada pav; and pani puris for days.