The Vittles EU8 Restaurant Guide
The best Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Slovakian, Estonian and Slovenian restaurants in London.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. This is the second in a two-part series on how the accession of the EU8 countries to the European Union twenty years ago changed British food culture. On Monday we published a cultural history of the polski sklep, which you can read here.
Today’s guide is written by Kasia Tomasiewicz (KT), Marta Zboralska (MZ) Stephen Buranyi (SB), Barclay Bram (BB), Pawel Glodowski (PG), Jonathan Nunn (JN), Gavin Cleaver (GC), Jelena Sofronijevic (JS), Marianna Janowicz (MJ), Mehlaqa Khan (MK), Isaac Rangaswami (IR), Harry Lambous (HL), Sean Wyer (SW), and Sam Wilson (SaW)
Also a reminder that our selection of six art prints made in collaboration with illustrator Sing Yun Lee and photographer Michaël Protin are available to buy via our website. Today is the last day you’ll be able to order them with the possibility of Christmas delivery.
A Vittles EU8 Restaurant Guide
Where to find the best food from the EU8 countries in London restaurants
In 2004, the European Union expanded to include eight new countries – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia – opening up a whole swathe of Eastern Europe to the West, and vice-versa. In the 20 years since, the UK has left Europe but the EU8 have left an indelible mark on Britain, including, to various degrees, its food culture. This influence is diffuse, complex and often hidden – the most obvious legacy has been its effect on the British hospitality and agricultural labour markets, but also the resurgence of the polski sklep, now a mainstay of the British high street, and whose cross-culture appeal has turned it into, in the words of Kasia Tomasiewicz and Marta Zboralska, ‘a Polish hub, a British corner shop and a pan-East European space’.
In London, the influence extends further, particularly into community-oriented restaurants in heavily Polish and Lithuanian neighbourhoods such as Streatham, Ealing, Acton, Beckton and Leytonstone. Across the city there are Polish bakeries, Lithuanian pubs, Czechoslovak beer halls, Hungarian grocers, Latvian bars (well, one), British-Polish milk bars, Balkan shops selling Slovenian produce, innumerable social clubs and, still, remarkably, almost no Estonian food. This 20+ restaurant guide, compiled and written by Vittles contributors, intends to be a rough guide to all of them, albeit with a couple of exceptions. Barclay Bram’s vegan Polish pop-up Bracia (which he co-runs with Karol Adamiak) and Pawel Glodowski’s Polska Kitchen are both ineligible, due to being contributors, but are each pushing their cuisines in new directions and show, in their own ways, a future for the food of the EU8. After two decades of growth and a population that has exhausted its capacity to be surprised by spice, it feels like we’re at the start of a city-wide culture shift that moves this food from the permanently untrendy to sought-after. The long arc of history does, after all, bend towards dill. JN
Czech and Slovakian
Bohemia House
Like the bridge club a few doors down, Bohemia House in West Hampstead occupies a building with three floors and a lot of history. Since 1946 this grand detached house has been a meeting place for Czech and Slovak people, including the soldiers and airmen who fought with the British against the Nazis in the Second World War. As you come through the front door, you pass a brownish-red plaque commemorating them. In the main dining room, another metal plate says čest jejich památce!, or “We honour their memory!”
Two years ago I tried my first řízek, goulash and knedlíky here. But I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t drunk any lager at Bohemia House until last month. When I went back, its calm, function-room-like energy was just how I remembered it, aside from the addition of a tinsel-draped Christmas tree. As Mariah Carey played, I learned that Budvar Dark tastes like Coke and that a glass mug of Radegast should be poured with at least 30 per cent foam. I also ate my first Slovakian halušky, a deeply satisfying potato dumpling dish enriched by sheep’s cheese, crispy onions and generous lumps of bacon. IR
74 West End Lane, NW6 2LX
Lithuanian
Berneliu Uzeiga
Beckton was once a mythical realm for me, a place where my dad told me everything I flushed down the toilet would end up. Since then, I’ve learnt Beckton is real and has rebranded as an East London destination for dry slope skiers and retail park shoppers. Today, the most interesting thing about Beckton is that it is the centre of Lithuanian London, which is why the chain pub Berneliu Uzeiga chose to open here (with a second branch in Leytonstone). Berneliu Uzeiga markets itself as a pub with decor somewhere between a castle and a school holiday chalet: lurid pink-orange walls, plush benches, melancholy Lithuanian electro-trash, and Guy Fieri on the TV. It’s a riot. The meny is an exercise in how many combinations of pork, potato and dairy it’s possible to eat before exhaustion sets in (with enough sauerkraut and beetroot horseradish, you can get through all of them). The best and most evil of all options can be found in the snacks: soldiers of brown toast rubbed with raw garlic and covered in grated cheese. This is cuffing-season food. JN
16 Mary Rose Mall, E6 5LX
Lt Kebabai Kimo Street Food
If you get off at Dagenham Dock rail station and walk down the inhospitable A13 into central London, you will pass warehouses, builders’ merchants and London’s second-largest go-karting track. You will walk until you find a small cabin located in a car park with an unusually large stream of people waiting outside – mostly people in cars, or builders working nearby. They have come for Lithuanian doner kebabs: thinly shaved pork and beef, all served in lavash or on a plate with chips and pickles, smothered in garlic and chilli sauces – it’s similar to what you get in a Turkish kebab shop, except with 1,200 percent more dill and the addition of fried dumplings. It would be supreme late-night-drinking food if it wasn’t for the fact you’re most likely going to eat it stone-cold sober in the afternoon. JN
Barking, IG11 0SN
Triple One
The Pakistani part of Triple One, a dual Lithuanian and Pakistani café in Lewisham co-owned and run by Rasa and Kasha, is a display cabinet packed with Tupperware of chicken biryani, carrot halwa, keema, haleem, nihari and mutton samosas, all cooked from scratch by Kasha’s mum in the back. The Lithuanian part is best represented by šaltibarščiai, the dayglo-pink, kefir-based, chilled beetroot soup, teeming with dill and cucumber, a chopped boiled egg lurking beneath. The piquancy of the kefir is augmented with sour cream and sweetened with earthy beetroot; the addition of milk balances it and creates a satisfying viscosity and throat-coating chill similar to a Yop.
There’s also dessert. ‘People make a special journey back for it,’ Rasa says, beaming over a fat wedge of medutis, a Lithuanian honey cake of gently spiced sponge layers with intervals of sour cream frosting. Rasa is tentative but passionately optimistic about bringing Lithuanian food to an area otherwise totally bereft of it and plans to expand her own offerings considerably. But she needs to be sure there’s adequate (and deserved) clamour for it first. SaW
111 Loampit Vale, SE13 7TG
Niam Niam
A well-made cepelinas – a kind of Hindenburg-shaped potato dumpling – should have the heft of a comical weapon, like a water balloon filled with sour cream. The ones at Niam Niam, a new Lithuanian restaurant in Seven Kings, are textbook examples, although, if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t see how even two people could get through a whole portion here given the amount of cheese, cream, bacon and meat loaded into the potato dough. Solo diners should probably go for the pork kotletai – meatballs pitched somewhere between Ikea-sized and a burger – that come covered in cheese sauce on dill mash, or go for the schnitzels which arrive with a girdle of melted cheese and mushrooms, and Thousand Island dressing. They also have the benefit of coming with a lesser seen item on Lithuanian menus: vegetables.
It’s still early days for Niam Niam, so some items on the menu are out, but I would love to come back specifically for the kugelis, a potato and bacon cake – a highly un-kosher version of its etymological sister dish. JN
731 High Rd, IG3 8RL
Krantas
You would be forgiven for walking straight past Krantas, a cosy, unassuming restaurant situated among the hustle and bustle of Europe’s longest outdoor street market down Walthamstow High Street. Yet, for the last 16 years, this family-run restaurant has been a pillar of the sizable local Lithuanian community.
The fried rye bread and cheese is everything you could hope for in a starter: crispy, crunchy, chewy, garlicky and salty. I then got a little carried away when I ordered the two most filling items on the menu, pre main course. The waitress kindly smiled at me, knowing full well what was in store. The cepelinai and the house special, kranto dumplings, were both topped with ladles of garlic sour cream, bacon and spring onion. The wonderfully satisfying chew of potato dough and accompaniments brought to mind two simple adjectives: hearty and delicious.
I wish I could have stayed for the live music but instead I sat back vibing to Island in the Sun by Weezer from out of the tinsel-adorned speakers within what felt like an LED-lit winter cabin dream before making my exit. Believe me when I say that this was the first time in more than 20 years that I’ve not finished my dinner and left with a white carrier bag of defeat. HL
28 High St, E17 7LD