Half a Dozen of the Other
A special day-trip edition of Six of One, featuring Sing Yun Lee, Ruby Tandoh, Ed Fenwick, Lucy Dearlove, Sejal Sukhadwala, and Cheryl Cheung
One rule that we have when we’re writing about restaurants at Vittles is ‘never assume where the reader lives’. What might be a mission for you may also be another reader’s home – this is just the way that London is. (We exclude Neco Tantuni from this rule, which is always 90 minutes away, including from other places in Enfield)
We’re going to slightly break that rule today. As a London publication, we do have a mostly London audience, and the following six restaurants have been chosen as potential places to visit while enjoying a day trip from the city. However, we hope that this guide remains useful to people who live nearby too. In our first Half a Dozen of the Other, Sing Yun Lee writes about one of the best dim sum parlours in the country, as easy to get to from London as it is from Essex; Ed Fenwick recommends what you should have for dinner if you make a lunch trip out east for oysters on Mersea Island; Lucy Dearlove argues that Hastings is not the culinary backwater that some restaurant critics would have you believe; Cheryl Cheung lauds the extraordinary-ordinariness of an Oxford Japanese restaurant; Sejal Sukhadwala praises homestyle East African-Gujarati cooking of the type that is dying out in London, but you can now find in Brighton; and Ruby Tandoh remembers the old ways, with scones and jam out in the country.
We hope you enjoy today’s edition, which wasn’t sponsored by Thameslink but probably should have been. JN
1. The Britannia & Gurkha Restaurant & Bar
If you’ve gone to lunch at The Company Shed on Mersea Island in Essex, then The Britannia should be the place you go for an early dinner. In short, The Britannia is a traditional family pub with the addition of a Nepalese restaurant run by a very proud ex-Gurkha, Captain Umesh Pun, and his family just a 15-minute drive away on the southern outskirts of Colchester.
My parents have been going here for years and are in love with it. The pub section has everything you’d want from a pub in that it has the feeling of a family’s front room; walls are covered in family military photos and Gurkha regalia, there are photos of Nepal and Essex, and, of course, the royal family. Pun opened the pub in 2013 after 31 years of service, wanting to change what he saw as a fairly ‘unwelcoming’ barracks pub into a pub for everyone, families with children and dogs; a British pub that tells the story of the Gurkhas. (Colchester is home to a large British Army garrison with a sizeable Gurkha community, who settled there after gaining the right to live in the UK in the early 2000s.)
The food is amazing. The restaurant only serves a Gurkha khana meal consisting of what Pun wants to make that day. It might be poppadums with turmeric sauce, then starters of samosas aloo dum, momo or pakora, then a chicken curry, a changing meat (goat, pork, lamb, venison) veg curry, a daal, a naan or paratha, plus a Nepalese dessert of rice pudding, kulfi or laddu.
It’s a beautiful pub and a beautiful restaurant, run with the attention to detail of an ex-soldier. Spend a day watching the football and drinking in the bar, then do dinner. Important note: you can ask for more of anything at no extra cost at any point in the meal before you go and sit at the bar under the Gurkha Kukri knife by a sign that reads ‘better to die than be a coward’. Ed Fenwick
42 Meyrick Crescent, Colchester CO2 7QY
Behind the paywall: one of the country’s best dim sum parlours, and many more recommendations. You can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to restaurant recommendations from the last five years, including the Six of One map.
