Good evening and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.
First of all, thank you to so much to everyone who read, agreed, disagreed and argued about the Vittles 99 last week. Our photographer Michaël Protin has been busy rushing around the entirety of London taking pictures of the restaurants featured on the 99 - we have released some as prints here, and will be releasing more over the next month.
We were also particularly happy to see one of the placements, Neco Tantuni at 4, made national and international news over the weekend and generally improved the standing of Vittles among Turkish London. Which very neatly leads us onto the subject of today’s podcast!
This month’s episode is an interview with someone you might already know — a restaurant owner who embodies many of the critical themes of the London restaurant industry, not just in 2025, but over the course of the last 20-plus years: community, trends, family, uncertainty, hype and more. Ferhat Dirik is the lifelong front-of-house, founder’s son, and now owner of Dalston’s Mangal 2, the family-run Turkish restaurant he’s been working in since he was 11 in the late 1990s.
Mangal 2 is one of the most well-known and cult-followed ocakbaşıs in north London. Opening in 1994, it was the follow-up restaurant to the U.K.’s first ocakbaşı (Mangal 1) which Ferhat’s father Ali Dirik opened 1991, and has been at the centre of that community ever since. Catering first to the Turkish community of Stoke Newington High street, then through the hipster era of Dalston in the 2010s, to serving Action Bronson, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and so many others over the course of the last half decade. But during the course of the last 15 years and increasingly under the stewardship of Ferhat, the restaurant has gone from the community fringes of neighbourhood restaurant territory and into the mainstream. A fully fledged member of the London restaurant industry.
“People back then had this perception of if you’re a Bengali restaurant, if you’re a Turkish restaurant, you should be grateful that I’ve come in and you should be plating up massive heaps of food for me. I want bang for my buck. And it’s like, ‘fuck you’. Turkish cuisine is so developed, so vast, so rich. We don’t owe you anything.”
So it felt like the right time, as the sun sets on another challenging year for London restaurants and in light of a series of illuminating blog posts authored by Ferhat in recent months, for Adam Coghlan to talk Ferhat about his journey, about the history of his family’s restaurant, what it means to serve people in London, about change, about speaking out, and about whether the end might well be nigh for one of the city’s most well-known and beloved places to eat.
We hope you enjoy it.
Like our previous three podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer, and to the whole team at Young Space, for hosting our recording sessions this year. We’ll be back in January to kick off a big 2026 for the Vittles podcast when Adam will be speaking with PR maven Gemma Bell.
From all of us at Vittles, thank you for reading, listening and supporting this year and we’ll see you again on the other side.
Credits
The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.
Ferhat Dirik is the owner of Mangal II in Dalston.
Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
