Six of One: Eggs 25 Ways
Six of One: Eggs 25 Ways
The Egg & Veg Food Plaza Restaurant, plus five other recommendations in London this weekend
Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! A map with all 97 of the Six of One recommendations published in 2023 can be found, used, and enjoyed here.
If you have enjoyed Six of One, then London Feeds Itself, edited by Vittles founding editor Jonathan Nunn, is now available to order from Open City. It contains 26 essays and over 125 London restaurant recommendations, including one of today’s entries.
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 Oscar Rickett, Kasia Tomasiewicz, Nikkitha Bakshani, Shekha Vyas, Elaine Zhao, and Jonathan Nunn.
1. The Egg & Veg Food Plaza Restaurant
When the wind whips down the Romford Road, few places in the world feel as bleak. Cold and flat, the cars crawling through east London towards Essex, the sky an exhausting shade of white grey, it’s sometimes hard to imagine finding joy here. And yet, there are always respites. The Egg & Veg Food Plaza, a Gujarati-run vegetarian café serving a dizzying array of egg specialities alongside thalis, samosas and more, is one of these.
The setup is stripped back: four tables, each with four chairs, and a sink in the corner where customers can wash their hands. A glass counter houses puffs and samosas to take away and there’s a small shrine to Vishnu above the till. The first time I came here, with a sleeping baby, the cook’s six-year-old-son was at one of the tables watching Paw Patrol on a phone, rather than on the large flat-screen Panasonic TV mounted on the wall, which is used mainly for showing pictures of regular customers, the menu or egg-based artistic montages. It lends the place a nice family atmosphere. Members of the area’s substantial Gujarati community – as well as those from other South Asian backgrounds – come in at a regular pace for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The café is distinguished by its two-pronged approach to food: the eggs, and everything else. Cooked in 25 different ways – back home in Gujarat, street chefs claim to be able to manage 150 – you can have those eggs fried, boiled, in a grilled sandwich, in a tikka sauce or with rice. You can have egg bhurji. You can have them with Maggi noodles.
A staple of Gujarati street food, eggs have become controversial under the Indian Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. Considered by some to not be vegetarian – and therefore not part of a strict Hindu diet – there was uproar in Gujarat in 2021 when the sale of eggs in the street was banned in parts of the western Indian state. Asked about the status of this ban, a source in the Indian government told me: “Don’t know, man. The country’s gone mad.”
On Romford Road, you don’t need to worry about such things, and aside from the 25 varieties of egg you can enjoy a Gujarati thali, for under £6, and a Punjabi thali, for under £8, as well as familiar vegetarian Indian dishes like saag paneer and samosa chaat. “Frankies”, crisp wraps oozing in sauce and filled with anything you like, which were born on the streets of Mumbai and named after the West Indian cricketer Frank Worrell, are also well represented on the menu. When the wind is whistling outside, there’s nothing warmer. Oscar Rickett
398 Romford Rd, E7 8DF
2. Camden Bakery
