acid reflux
a new column by Jonathan Nunn featuring restaurant news, recommendations and gossip.
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.
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 …
Behind the paywall: Topjaw vs a London chef, an unexpected stag-do guest, the Jokerfication of David Ellis, the internal (and public) food writer battle at the Standard, and more recommendations