Six of One: ¿Los mejores tacos de Londres?
London's best taco (possibly), plus five more great restaurants to try across London this weekend.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.
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.
You may have seen last month that we announced the new Vittles Restaurants mentorship. It is open to all first-time or early career restaurant writers from global majority and/or working-class backgrounds based in London. Find out more about the scheme, including details on how to apply, here. Please note: The deadline for applications is next Friday, 19 July.
Today’s Six of One recommendations are from Taran Khan, Jonathan Nunn, Monica Jae Yeon Moon, Eleanor Swire, Zayneb Al Asaadi, Shekha Vyas, and Tom Mouritz.
To read all the recommendations, as well as the back catalogue, please subscribe below.
1. Dias Goan Restaurant
It must have been some premonition of the ambience to come that prompted me to leave for Dias Goan Restaurant wearing my breeziest cotton kurta, as though I was going to lunch at an idyllic coastal hamlet, instead of Southall on a rainy Saturday. That weekend afternoon the place hummed with customers lingering over expansive lunches. By the entrance of the restaurant, a takeaway counter dispensed snacks like beef cutlets, samosas and chicken lollipops, while sketches of idyllic country scenes decorated the walls, next to prints of artist Mario Miranda’s illustrations and a large screen TV showing the cricket. It was a tiny slice of susegad, the Goan good life, on the shores of the Elizabeth Line.
Dias Goan opened its doors in July 2023 and has already expanded its premises, catering to a mostly Goan clientele. It starts serving breakfast from 7.30am and closes at 7.30pm, seven days a week, between which it serves everything from fried Goan snacks to chilli fries. However, I was there for the fish thali, which arrived with a golden centrepiece of rava-coated fried kingfish (you can also get it with prawns, crab or different kinds of fish). The secret of a good thali lies in its range and balance of flavours. The mix on my plate included the tang of kokum, tendli (ivy gourd) with coconut and an electric-tasting homemade lime pickle. Sweet, sour, spicy, arranged in a deceptively decorous circle. There was a larger bowl of golden hued curry, with slit green chillies submerged in its currents, and a papadom to crush over the rice. Expect some variation in this line-up, as the proprietor Remedio Dias says he likes to change things around.
My thali cost £10 and came with a dessert of kheer, with cashew nuts and vermicelli. It left me full enough to succumb to a sublime siesta on my return. Taran Khan
96 The Green, Southall UB24BG
2. ¿Los mejores tacos de Londres?
Londoners are generally a level-headed bunch, but we have started to collectively lose our minds when it comes to the subject of tacos. It’s not that we don’t have great versions – Sonora and La Chingada will easily scratch the itch if you want one – but that the hype surrounding new taco spots often has no relationship with the final product. It's gotten bad enough that a place like CDMX Tacos in Soho – a place in which not one single person has had a good taco despite influencers being paid to say otherwise – now has 90-minute long waits, which is approximately 90 times as long as it takes for its tortillas to fall apart. So when it comes to the subject of tacos i) made by a Mexican ii) in a mini market iii) with hand-pressed tortillas and iv) no PR or fanfare, it would normally be wise to curb your enthusiasm.
However…