Six of One: Zone 1 Special
Beating the allegations of Zone 4 bias with six central London recommendations.
Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. In July, we featured the Kensington Road Cabman’s Shelter in an edition of Six of One. The writers, Monica Jae Yeon Moon and Eleanor Swire, have now completed the film they were making on London’s cabman’s shelters and the food you can find in them; it’s a great watch and you can view it 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 recommendations are from Jonathan Nunn, Siqi Chong, Yanyu Sun, Gavin Cleaver, Montague Ashley Craig and Dan Biddulph. To read all the recommendations, as well as the back catalogue, please subscribe below.
1. Sagamiya
It’s a source of unending amusement to me that County Hall, the former home of the GLC, where some of the most progressive municipal policies of late 20th century Britain were conceived, is now Shrek’s Adventure. Some might be tempted to make a point about the rampant commercialisation of London’s heritage spaces, but I’d like to tell you that it’s worth checking out the back of the building. Despite there being space for the world’s largest Benihana, instead there are four idiosyncratic Japanese restaurants: the kaiseki specialist Hannah; two Osakan okonomiyaki vendors, Jeux Jeux and Okan; and Sagamiya, a sushi restaurant owned by a husband-and-wife team from Kanigawa. The whole development has the feel of the down-at-heel Parisian ramen shops you find within spitting distance of the Louvre. It is utterly bizarre, and somewhat refreshing, to encounter something so lovably janky so close to London’s tourist centre.
The clientele at Sagamiya mostly consists of Westminster wonks, local doctors and nurses, and Americans livid after their rotation on the London Eye and in need of restoration. It makes sense – Sagamiya is my idealised lunch break restaurant, one that does hot bento boxes and good mid-range sushi and where you can be in and out in 45 minutes. The chirashi bowl is carved in front of you and comes with akami, chutoro, salmon, yellowtail, a fat, cooked prawn, scallop, hot eel, salmon roe and some nicely layered tamago. It hits everything you want from a lunchtime chirashi. A bento of rice, miso soup and salmon belly teriyaki, torched until the skin is crispy, was plush and decadent. I really want to come back for dinner, when they sometimes do oden and cabbage rolls; I’ve booked myself in at Shrek’s Adventure to kill two birds with one stone. Jonathan Nunn
County Hall, Belvedere Road, London SE1 7GP
Behind the paywall: Today is a Zone 1 special, so we have six recommendations for restaurants in tourist/workplace areas. There’s a new Teochew restaurant specialising in braised meats on Brick Lane, an under-praised Vietnamese stalwart in Soho, an actually good City sandwich shop close to Sandwich Sandwich, a Zhejiang restaurant in the new Elephant and Castle development, and a great Korean homestyle cooking specialist in one of the last undeveloped areas of the West End.
