Beyond the Hype at London’s Newest Viral Sandwich Spot
A review of Logma. Words by Hester van Hensbergen. Photographs by Cole Wilson.
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Today’s review of a new Iranian-Iraqi café bistro in London Fields is by Hester van Hensbergen. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.
The first time I encountered the chef Ziad Halub, he was apologising. It was the end of a hectic lunch shift at the newly opened Logma in London Fields this January and the sandwiches – gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine – had all sold out. A couple of the last orders had lost their customers and now some stragglers had muscled their way forward, hoping to get lucky in the confusion. Beneath the lacy, latex curtain of the kitchen, Halub’s partner Farsin Rabiee was quietly drizzling kashk, a musty fermented yoghurt, across the verdant bowl of ash-e-reshteh I’d ordered. It wasn’t yet 2pm, but they both seemed exhausted.
Logma’s ‘soft opening’ in late 2025 never really happened. Instead, owing to a gift for storytelling and appealing to the fashion and art worlds as well as to the online food community’s love of landscape-scale things between bread, the Iranian-Iraqi kitchen was catapulted into the ranks of some of London’s most ludicrously popular sandwich shops before it even had furniture. These are the kinds of places that are united by their sandwiches of boisterous size, their rainbow cross-sections and their signature breads: wood-fired, submarines, doorstop sandwich loaves, focaccia. They are the spots that get anointed by Eating with Tod, become known for their 30-40 minute lunchtime waits and soon outgrow their original sites to expand across the city. It’s a London sport. By joining the likes of nearby Dom’s Subs, which serves its footlongs out of Rasputin’s, a dive bar on Mare Street, and wood-fired sandwich shop Rogues in Bethnal Green, neither more than 15 minutes’ walk away, the arrival of Logma has cemented Hackney’s place on the leaderboard of sandwich neighbourhoods.
This all seems far from what Logma was supposed to be. After a year of supper clubs, Halub and Rabiee took on a lease on the shop in this quiet patch of Goldsmith Row, just north of Hackney City Farm and a few doors down from the Palestinian falafel bar, Zeytoona. Rabiee, who is Iranian-American and Swedish, and Halub, who is British-Iraqi, aren’t professionally trained chefs, so instead of a restaurant they’d envisaged a café-bistro inspired by the 20th-century café culture of cities like Baghdad and Tehran: spaces not just for drinking but for dissent, and for the playing out of the cultural and political life of the city. The gap between the mid-century coffeehouse public sphere and mid-2020s TikTok-endorsed sandwich virality – mass mobilisation absent of social or political bonds – is, to say the least, sizable. But it’s also a classic problem, especially for first-time proprietors: the mismatch between a fantasy and the emergent chaos of its reality. Whether or not they could have predicted the effect of their pitas on a city filled with a small army of sandwich influencers, Logma clearly had potential. As I sat down in the park and took off my winter gloves for my first spoon of curative soup, I wanted to know what they would do with it.