Six of One - Supermarket Sweep
The snacks of Vietnamese supermarkets, plus three restaurant recommendations in London this weekend.
Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! 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, which currently has a 10% discount on everything in its shop. It contains 26 essays and over 125 London restaurant recommendations.
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 Ananya Kumar-Banerjee, Isobel Lewis, Christian Theodorou and Frank L’Opez
1, 2 & 3 – The Vietnamese Markets of Mare Street by Ananya Kumar-Banerjee
During the pandemic, I lived in a New England town with a large Chinese grocery store. It was often a highlight to walk the 20 minutes there and peruse the aisles of dried mushrooms, lao gan ma and hot peppers, imagining with my cook’s fantasy eye what I might make for dinner. I was lucky to live with someone who had the instinct for it; my flatmate Melinda introduced me to a series of broadly East Asian mainstays (spam fried rice, kimchi jjigae, oyster sauce spinach, sweet and sour pork ribs), which became comfort foods for me in the years that followed.
After moving to the UK in September 2021, I struggled to find grocery stores as well-stocked at comparable prices until I moved to London Fields, where I lucked upon the Vietnamese markets. These shops aren’t new to the area: according to the Hackney Museum, the first Vietnamese grocery store in east London opened in 1986 on Upper Clapton Road, precipitating Kingsland Road’s Pho Mile and the newer community on Mare Street. Grocery stores with Vietnamese specialties, from Elephant and Castle’s excellent Kiki & Miumiu to Peckham’s Kim Lien, often sell savoury and sweet snacks which are made in house, and Mare Street is home to three which serve their own cooked and prepared food to take away. Consider the following entries a market map for a week’s purchases: I’ll point out things worth buying, but what’s most important are the takeaway bits that sit by the checkout counter, often wrapped in a banana leaf or lodged in the back of a big fridge.
London Starnight
This is a maximalist Asian supermarket in the broadest sense. Yes, it has some Vietnamese classics, but there is a separate aisle for frozen dumplings (one fridge for gyoza, one for mandoo, one for imported Chinese jiao zi), along with an array of other takeaway products such as fermented black rice. London Starnight is also a place with a daunting display of lao gan ma and regional alternatives with everything from Lunar New Year decorations and colanders to different kinds of dumpling spoons.
Here my order is tau hu nuoc duong (sweet silken tofu with ginger syrup), which is usually a speciality I associate with Hong Kong and dim sum parlours. I think Starnight’s sữa chua nếp cẩm (Vietnamese pandan yoghurt with black sticky rice) is superior to the alternatives. I recommend having one with a cup of black coffee in the morning, but you might also be tempted to try one of the other sweets they have in the fridge, like dừa non lá nếp (young coconut flesh, jackfruit and pandan agar cubes in coconut milk), which is a close second for me, followed by the more summery che buoi.
199 Mare St, E8 3QE
Vietnam Supermarket