Back to the Future: A Trip to Wing Yip
Eating in London's newest neighbourhood. A review by Jonathan Nunn. Photographed by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
Back to the Future: A Trip to Wing Yip
Eating in London’s newest neighbourhood, by Jonathan Nunn
Lately, as a small treat to myself, I’ve been taking the Thameslink – the London Shinkansen – from south London up to Brent Cross West so I can eat at Reindeer Café, one of my favourite Cantonese restaurants in the city. Reindeer Café is what restaurant writers euphemistically call an ‘institution’ – like Rules or a pie and mash shop – which usually means that they love it but haven’t been in ages. It is a place simultaneously left alone by time and well-used by the people who go there regularly, a dai pai dong-style café tucked away in the recesses of the Cricklewood branch of Wing Yip, an East Asian supermarket complex whose towering green bamboo pagodas and swooping quadratic function curves are instantly recognisable to anyone who grew up in that arc of north London criss-crossed by the North Circular. Most of those people will have fond stories about Reindeer Café; probably involving being driven there past a blur of warehouses, Ikeas and Holiday Inns, following their mother’s trolley around the aisles of Wing Yip and then getting an assortment of roast meats on rice, or a huge nest of seafood crispy noodles, Reindeer’s own version of a sizzler plate, to share as a treat. It’s one of those restaurants I unreservedly adore and almost never visit, mainly because it’s such a pain to get to. Like everything in the area, Reindeer Café has only ever been accessible by car – sure, you could get the train to Cricklewood and walk up the A5, or get off at Hendon and hike down, navigate a crossing of Staples Corner, sail around the Cape, squeeze through a car dealership and somehow end up in the Wing Yip car park, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.
In the last year, all that has changed. In December 2023, Brent Cross West became the newest mainline station to open in London, the first that the capital has had in about a decade. It’s an impressive piece of work: a huge black cube designed by Studio Egret West that vaults across four sets of railway tracks; a cross between London Bridge station and the Kaaba. It has already had a seismic effect on the area. First of all, it finally allows pedestrians to cross the tracks without having to deal with the North Circular, meaning that it connects two areas of land, a few minutes apart, which have previously had nothing to do with each other. Secondly, its presence justifies the masterplan of Brent Cross Town, a new park town of almost 7,000 new homes, offices, restaurants, cafés and playing fields that is being built in collaboration with Related Argent, the developer behind King’s Cross and New York’s landmark £20 billion Hudson’s Yards project. You may not have visited yet, you may not even have heard of it, but Brent Cross Town is one of the single biggest developments happening in London right now: £8 billion’s worth of real estate abutting the most desolate roadscape in London, built on land that was, until very recently, barren industrial estate. You should visit.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it shaves about 15 minutes off my journey to Reindeer Café.
On recent visits to Wing Yip, I’ve found the supermarket itself to be as busy as ever, with a healthy staff-to-visitor ratio reminiscent of 1990s-era Safeways before automation came in, or those grand Chinese supermarkets with fish tanks and crabs trying to escape that you find in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley.