Six of One: Ceviche, Nihari, Brik, Burgers, Guilin rice noodles, Tagine and Chips
Six outstanding and unsuspecting places to eat in London this weekend.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
Before we start, we are excited to announce our contribution to this year’s British Library Food Season: a panel dedicated to the question ‘What is the point of a cookbook?’. If you enjoyed our recent supplement on cookbooks, then this will expand on many of the themes raised about the role of cookbooks in an increasingly online recipe space. To discuss this, we have a blockbuster panel: Ozoz Sokoh, author of the newly-published landmark cookbook Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria; the mastermind behind the bestselling The Roasting Tin series, Rukmini Iyer; and recipe maven Sophie Wyburd, whose cookbook Tucking In straddles the digital and paper worlds. They will be in conversation with food writer Ruby Tandoh.
The event will take place at the British Library on April 28th at 7pm. Tickets are £10 and you can buy them here.
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 Six of One has contributions from Guy Dimond, Taran Khan, Yohann Koshy, Anto Wu, Hoagy Pollen, and Hester van Hensbergen.
1. Guilin Ramen House
I first came across Guilin Ramen House (桂小卤) last April when the owner Jimmy took over the space on Grafton Way in Fitzrovia. I had anticipated its opening from the day they began renovations for one reason: the Guilin-style rice noodles for which the restaurant was named. To be clear, its speciality is not ramen, but rather a specific, rarely found regional rice noodle dish from the Guangxi province of China – from where my own family hails.
Listed first on a sparse menu of seven noodle dishes, the thin, rounded noodles arrive laden with toppings: crispy pork belly, braised beef, char siu, pickled bamboo shoots, pickled green beans, roasted peanuts and roasted soybeans. Tossed in a ‘master braise stock’, or lǔ zhī, the flavour of the rice noodles is rich with savoury depth, cut through by the acidity of the pickled vegetables and the nuttiness of the soybeans and peanuts. Texture, a dimension that is just as valued as flavour in Chinese cuisine, also takes centre stage: from crisp and crunch to firm and bouncy. It’s delightfully easy to wolf down. Don’t miss the freshly made Liuzhou snail noodles, which these days are most commonly found in instant noodle form in a TianTian aisle.
As a young child in China, I had eaten these rice noodle dishes in dime-a-dozen noodle shops, only to realise the difficulty of finding them abroad after moving, even in Chinese-American enclaves in California. Yet Guilin Ramen House demonstrates an almost reverent adherence to the regional speciality, down to every roasted soybean. And while I was excited to eat the noodles, it was more so the idea of sharing them with my mother, who had planned a trip to London conveniently just in time for its opening. What better way to make her feel comfortable on her first trip to the capital? Turns out that Jimmy had set out with similar intentions: he wanted to make the dish for his wife, who is from Guilin.
Guilin Ramen House, in both name and substance, is as much about coaxing those new to Guangxi cuisine out of their comfort zone (the ‘new menu’ advertised at lunchtime consists of familiar Cantonese rice plates) as it is about welcoming the Chinese diaspora back into the tastes of nostalgia. Anto Wu
64 Grafton Way, W1T 5DP
Behind the paywall: Nihari and the art of ordering well in a Pakistani restaurant; burgers, estates and Henry Moore sculptures; a new venture in south London from the former Pueblito Paisa Café owners; a French-Algerian cafe in a lido that refuses to acknowledge culinary boundaries; and a night out featuring brik a l’oeuf and a boat called Aïoli.