One Year of Six of One
One Year of Six of One
A fully updated map with every entry since we started Six of One, plus six more exceptional places to try in London this weekend.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue here.
Today’s recommendations are from Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Atkin, Tom Mouritz, Harry Lambous, Kelly Pochyba, and Ruta Bakshi.
To read all the recommendations, as well as the back catalogue, please subscribe below.
1. Koobideh
Something’s going on in Finchley right now. Last week I wrote about stews, but this is really a sideshow to the amount of meat being grilled on a road you could easily jog down in twenty seconds. On Ballards Lane, just past a Turkish restaurant called Turkish Gobble (tagline: ‘Just Gobble It Down’) you’ll find Goda, a whole-animal rotisserie specialist that the big-plate-of-meat savant and part-time war criminal Eating With Tod called ‘London’s craziest Turkish restaurant’. There, rotating carcasses in various states of overdoneness fill the window, although I choose to believe it’s London’s craziest Turkish restaurant not because of its meat, but because its Instagram feed is made up of AI-generated images of Turkish fathers presenting their children with roast chickens. Further on down, you’ll find Nawroz Lounge, which fills made-to-order taftoon with lamb shawarma, and the new Shah Abbas Burgers, whose speciality is not burgers but long skewers of offal: liver, heart, liver wrapped in caul fat, tripe, spleen and crispy intestine (‘khosh gosht’ in Farsi, which translates as ‘good meat’). But best of all is the recently opened Koobideh, the one-man, zero-seater koobideh specialist, which is doing for kebabs what Saffron Kitchen opposite is doing for stews.
There is no secret to Koobideh’s koobideh, the minced Iranian kebab that the menu’s brilliant copywriting accurately describes as ‘habit forming’. Koobideh’s owner Barum says all he does is try to do right by himself and right by his community, which means executing one or two things to their absolute best level. The koobideh itself has not been overworked, oversalted, nor over-spiced – instead it’s cooked until just-done, before being hit with a blowtorch which gives it its uneven char while retaining the juiciness of the kebab. I’ve sent pictures of it taken on a bad phone to Iranian friends who have immediately demanded to know where its from, pointing out its resemblance to the best Tehrani versions. Yet, I actually think the best thing on the menu is the chicken – the joojeh kebab marinated in saffron, its sweetness infusing all of the meat (which is, again, cooked not one second more than it needs to be). There are a couple of dips, some raw onion and herbs, and that’s it, not even a place to sit. Instead, I have enjoyed it twice on the benches in the nearby Victoria Park, content with London’s least crazy Iranian restaurant. Jonathan Nunn
4 Long Lane, N3 2PT
Below the paywall: A one-man 33-year-old French restaurant in the front room of north London terraced house; saltfish dumplings that stand the test of time in Upton Park; Venezuelan specialities hiding in a Green Lanes caff, and our full map of every Six of One entry since we started a year ago.