Six of Nunn
Six restaurants to go to and one to avoid, by Jonathan Nunn
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Six of One is a column dedicated to London restaurant recommendations. In each issue, six writers will usually share a restaurant, bakery, cafe or takeaway spot that they believe deserves to be better known.
However, in today’s issue all the entries have been written by Jonathan Nunn who is back from a three month break. You can find the full Six of One back catalogue with over 250 entries here.
Six of Nunn
Six restaurants to go to and one to avoid, by Jonathan Nunn
One of the first things I learnt when I started writing about restaurants for this publication is that there is a difference between a restaurant you review and a restaurant you recommend. Restaurants worth reviewing are rare. A review has to have a story: something that gives it a resonance beyond the restaurant’s neighbourhood. A recommendation is something much simpler: it is just me saying, if you are in the area or if it’s convenient for you, then I would advise eating here. These are less rare, but also not as common as you might think.
Recently, I have been eating at restaurants I would be delighted to recommend but few I would review. So for this Six of One, I’ve personally compiled six recommendations for restaurants across London that I think you should go to. I have also included one additional restaurant I considered reviewing but decided not to, mainly because it has received far too many fawning reviews already. It is emphatically not a recommendation.
1. Blue Sheep
One of the more interesting recent London phenomena has been the appearance of Hong Kong restaurants that are of a completely different tenor to the ones that preceded them. They have mostly been opened by newly-arrived entrepreneurs on BNO passports who, for obvious reasons, want to distinguish themselves and their cooking from mainland China. This has meant leaning into the more esoteric aspects of Hongkongese culture: namely, the city’s relationship with European and British colonialism, and the influence it has had on cha chaan tengs. This is why, a 20-minute walk from Norbury and Streatham Common stations, you will find a small unit no larger than the average rental living room that’s filled with Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse books, several guides on How to be British (and, ominously, a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), a picture of the late Queen and a menu that spans Hong Kong borscht to fish fillets in cheese and cream sauce on rice.
I have been guilty of saying restaurants are like being in someone’s living room when they really aren’t. But in the case of Blue Sheep I cannot emphasise this enough: almost nothing has been done to it to make it restaurant-ready, including getting rid of the textured, shell-patterned Anaglypta wallpaper. The menu is almost entirely deep cuts: Hong Kong spaghetti, pork chops in sweet tomato sauce and cheese, French toast. The curry fish balls are excellent, with the sauce reduced down so much it takes on the sticky brown of rapidly burning caramel, giving them an unexpected intensity. Pork chops also come with Taiwanese-style mince on rice – a kind of mash-up between lu rou fan and spag bol – with a dusting of jolting Sichuan peppercorn. A curried beef flank with a splash of coconut milk is every bit as good as my favourite version at Cafe TPT in Chinatown. This is great food, and if it means eating it in a room that looks like your grandmother’s underneath a photo of Chris Patten then so be it.
293 Northborough Rd, SW16 4TR
2. That’s It Grill
I must have first visited this tiny Portuguese takeaway in Clapham North in 2020. At the time I was in the habit of organising food crawls and distinctly remember eating a portion of doubles from (what was then) Roti Joupa on the wall across from That’s It while waiting for some piri piri chicken. Almost seven years later, I no longer have the patience nor stomach for crawls, but I still get pangs of FOMO, so I’ve gotten into the practice of ordering simultaneously from two places that serve cuisines which might go together. This has meant coming to Clapham to specifically get veg roti from Tawa Roti and supplementing it with meat from That’s It. I cannot explain how transformative this has been to my quality of life.
That’s It, run by Jorge and Maria, is one of those rare places – like Lebanese Grill in Elephant and Castle, or Egi’s in New Cross – serving inexplicably good barbecue, not quite amazing enough to make a pilgrimage for, but the type that you would hope to have five minutes from your house. Although it has a new menu (things like duck rice, grilled quail and broken eggs) its speciality is piri piri, applied either to chicken or pork. Both are worth getting: the chicken specifically as wings, which are halved and blistered up on the grill, and the pork as flat slabs of ribs, fatty and charred till almost burnt, all with more marinade thrown into the foil bag. They will ask whether you want it with chips or rice, but I can tell you that it goes very well with buss-up shut.
28 Bedford Rd, SW4 7HJ
After the paywall — four more recommendations for London restaurants, plus our most disappointing restaurant of the year so far.