Six of One – A London Caribbean Special
Restaurant recommendations from Denai Moore, Marie Mitchell, Andrew Corbin, Ivan K-T, and Gavin Cleaver.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s Six of One by Denai Moore, Marie Mitchell, Andrew Corbin, Ivan K-T, and Gavin Cleaver, is all about London’s Caribbean specialists.
The ‘Caribbean food shop’ has long been a fixture of eating in London. It started in the 1950s and 1960s with the casual ‘cook shop’, run out of people’s houses (a tradition that continues at places like Maureen’s in Brixton), which soon morphed into Jamaican takeaways as we now know them, with menus that any Londoner should be able to recite like the shipping forecast: fried chicken, brown stew chicken, oxtail, curry goat, ackee and saltfish.
Today’s newsletter is about these takeaways, although not exclusively. Within London’s Jamaican scene itself there is huge diversity — from bakeries and fine dining, to barbecue and Ital specialists — while the city is also blessed with a large number of Trini and Guyanese roti shops, along with takeaways like Cool’s Kitchen in West Norwood where St. Lucian dishes are hidden on the menu. This Six of One happens to be Jamaica-heavy, but we would love to feature more writing on London’s wealth of Caribbean specialists this year: if you know these cuisines intimately and would like to contribute to Vittles then please email us at vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com. No prior writing experience is necessary.
If you’re new to Six of One then you can look through the archives, and find a map with more than 400 restaurants featured here. Finally, a reminder that you can still buy Issue 2 of our print magazine here:
1. All Nations Vegan House
As a part-time city girl, All Nations Vegan House isn’t quite a quick stop on the bus for me, but whenever I happen to be in Stoke Newington, it’s the first place I go. While the vegan food scene from a Western lens has been whitewashed and repackaged as a new phenomenon, when I think of vegan food, I immediately think of Ital. The word derives from the English word ‘vital’ and was rooted in Rastafari culture long before the word ‘vegan’ was coined by The Vegan Society.
At All Nations, you are met with warm hospitality. It’s like coming home for dinner with the smell of hearty thyme-heavy stews drifting through the air. As I walked eagerly towards the restaurant, partly to rush through the rain but mostly with the hope that ackee would be on the menu in any form, I felt a rush of joy seeing it paired with butterbeans on the specials board.
All Nations has a rotating menu of its own classic dishes that change throughout the week. If you’re like me and are always craving pumpkin soup (the route to my heart) with lots of spinners (dumplings), be sure to come on a Saturday for the full menu. The best way to order is to get a mix of dishes of the day. On this occasion, I opted for a smoky lentil stew, pumpkin curry, ackee and butter beans with coconut red rice, which I ate at the pace of someone who didn’t want the meal to end.
As a chef, I’m often itching to eat something new, something that will surprise me. However, it’s the familiarity of both the food and the surroundings that makes All Nations Vegan House so special. There seems to be a great deal of pressure on restaurants right now to create algorithm-friendly hypebeast food that is far away from its traditional origins, but All Nations remains authentic to what Ital food should be. Denai Moore
41 Stoke Newington High St, N16 8DR
Behind the paywall: five more recommendations for some of the best Caribbean food in London.
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