Six of One - A Counter to Kateh
Six of One - A Counter to Kateh
Molana in Ealing, two Ecuadorian restaurants, a trip to Twickenham, the last restaurant in Notting Hill, and Sichuan trotters in Vauxhall.
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 Niloufar Haidari, Ivan K. Taylor, Yanyu Sun, Thea Everett, Will Stewart, and, Saiba Haque.
To read all the recommendations, as well as the back catalogue, please subscribe below.
1. Molana
Iranian food has experienced something of an increase in popularity and intrigue in recent years, possibly spearheaded by the opening of places such as JKS Restaurants’s Berenjak, which sought to move away from the traditional, family-style kababi aesthetic and, in turn, cater towards a more high-end and/or, more often than not, white clientele. The ever-popular Kateh, near Paddington, meanwhile, may give you tahdig if you ask nicely, but it also has a portrait of an overthrown Iranian monarch on the wall, which may put a dampener on your appetite if you are of a certain political persuasion.
This brings me to Molana: a Persian restaurant decorated in the style of a kitsch Tehran café, located on a strip of road in Ealing that boasts no less than seven other similar establishments in a 200-metre straight line. Iranians are one of London’s smaller diasporic communities and, given the density of Persian restaurants on Uxbridge Road, you’d be forgiven for thinking they all settled here.
Persian cuisine broadly falls into two categories: grilled meats served with rice or aromatic, herby stews often studded with braised meat, also served with rice. Rice is a big deal in Iranian culture and Molana’s is perfect – fluffy, buttery, fragrant with saffron. (Pro tip: your waiter will bring you extra butter for your rice, use it!)
The koobideh – skewers of melt-in-the-mouth, fatty minced lamb seasoned only with onion, salt, pepper and a pinch of saffron – is a classic choice (and my personal favourite), although fancier cuts such as barg (thin, tender lamb fillet) are also available. The joojeh, a whole poussin that has been cut up and marinated in lemon juice, onions and saffron before being grilled over an open flame, is the closest I’ve got to the dish my aunt used to make for me during childhood trips to Iran in the summer.
No self-respecting Iranian restaurant is complete without a clay oven (tanoor) and the sangak naan that comes out of the one at Molana is always warm, soft and fresh, perfect for scooping up the creamy but sharp mast-e-moosir (yoghurt with garlic and shallots) and kashk-e-bademjan, a dip of smoked aubergine topped with crispy, fried mint and onions and drizzled with salty, tangy whey. I recommend going for a slow, late lunch and scheduling a nap afterwards. Niloufar Haidari
The Castelbar, 78 Uxbridge Rd, W13 8RA
2. Maramia Café
At the end of Golborne Road is a family-run Palestinian restaurant with a wooden door that takes both hands to push open. You’d be forgiven for missing Maramia Café. Perhaps you’ve been distracted by the music blasting out of Caia, the wine bar and open-fire restaurant next door that opened in 2022. Or perhaps you’ve been celeb-spotting at Straker’s, the infamous modern British restaurant, which opened about a hundred yards down the road in the same year. I say infamous because everyone I know who has been has emerged with horror stories, which would be risky to retell here. Infamous also because of the all-male, all-white chef line-up the restaurant posted, without irony, to its Instagram page in 2023.
Unfortunately, Notting Hill has become more and more populated with restaurants like Straker’s: expensive and increasingly impossible for ordinary people in the neighbourhood to access. When Dorian, a supposed “bistro for locals” opened on nearby Talbot Road in late 2022 it referred to itself as “anti-Notting Hill” in its press release. I assumed this meant that they were “not just another expensive new restaurant”. Last time I checked, the menu listed a ribeye steak for £130. Three minutes away on the same road is Twisaday House, a social housing block; in other words, Dorian is very much “anti-Notting Hill” insofar as it is inaccessible to so much of its local community.