There's one week left to save one of London's best restaurants

The battle for Castle Square, and suspicious goings on in Southwark, by Jonathan Nunn and Gavin Cleaver

Oct 08, 2025

Good morning and welcome to acid reflux. Today’s column is primarily about the fight to save four restaurants in Elephant and Castle from eviction. We also have a short dispatch from Southwark by Gavin Cleaver, about a new, strange development in food and tech.

One Week to Save One of London’s Best Restaurants

Last Wednesday, I received a call from Faye Gomes, the owner of the exceptional Guyanese restaurant Kaieteur Kitchen and one of my favourite cooks in London. Almost in tears, she told me that she, along with three other food traders in the development – Daddy O’s Suya Spot, El Guambra and the Original Caribbean Spice – had been locked out of their premises at Castle Square in Elephant and Castle that morning. The notice stuck to her door listed an incorrect phone number for Savills, Castle Square’s managing agent, and informed her that she had two weeks to vacate the premises.

When I saw Faye later that day, she went into further detail about what had happened. In March 2024, she received a backdated electricity bill for £12,000 from Savills, which covered the four-year period since Faye had moved in. The other traders also received backdated electricity bills for £10,000–20,000, and told me that for years they had been requesting monthly electricity bills from Savills and their landlord, Get Living, without success. Faye stressed to me that she had never been behind on her rent, and so thought that a realistic repayment plan could be agreed on. However, a year later, she was hit with a further bill for £9,000, bringing the total electricity bill to £21,000.

When I asked Get Living for comment earlier this week, they did not dispute the timeline or the lateness of the bill, but instead responded with an official statement referring to ‘eighteen months of intensive engagement’ before the lock out, and claimed that ‘traders were informed about some metering issues and were regularly advised to set aside funds in preparation for electricity billing’. Savills did not respond to our request for comment.

It’s difficult to explain the significance of this story without looking back at the last decade of regeneration of Elephant and Castle and the creation of Castle Square (Cormac Kehoe at London Centric provides a very good overview here). In 2018, when I first started reporting on Elephant and Castle for Eater London, Kaieteur Kitchen was one of the many food stalls gathered in the moat of the old shopping centre. I would eat in the moat most days, everything from the gizzard suya at Daddy O’s to the hornados at El Guambra, but I would often gravitate towards Kaieteur Kitchen after a long day of interviewing to have Faye’s spinach rice with curried pumpkin, or her pepperpot. The food was very much an extension of Faye’s presence, and it was not rare to find people at the stall just to talk, or to simply feel better. I came to understand Kaieteur Kitchen, along with many other businesses inside the shopping centre, as places that made the act of living in an often-anonymous city like London feel more human.

When the shopping centre was closed in 2020 (and subsequently demolished), Kaieteur Kitchen, Daddy O’s, El Guambra and the Original Caribbean Spice, were moved into Castle Square, a temporary, Boxpark-like structure opposite the train station. They were joined by Diana Sach at Coma y Beba, who used to own La Bodeguita, one of the major Colombian businesses in the old shopping centre, which had not been relocated. Castle Square was, like many things about Elephant’s regeneration, a compromise. Southwark Council required that certain businesses in or around the shopping centre should continue to operate. With the support of the charity Latin Elephant, which has long represented the interests of traders in Elephant and Castle and fought hard for small gains, Castle Square was secured for the five food traders and several retail businesses, while others were given a berth at Elephant Arcade, close to the roundabout. Despite the low footfall, Kaieteur Kitchen thrived and scaled into a sit-down restaurant (I interviewed Faye about it at the time here).

Five years later, virtually none of these businesses remain open. Traders at Elephant Arcade were told to leave their premises at the end of August 2025. Last month, Coma y Beba left Castle Square due to similar electricity bill issues. With the new shopping centre due to open in 2026, and with chains and slicker restaurants with financial backing competing for limited space, it’s unclear if Kaieteur Kitchen or any of the old Elephant food businesses will be allowed to stay in the area – or if they ever really had a fighting chance.

The line up at Castle Square. Every single food business has now been evicted.

Each restaurant under threat is its own world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Kaieteur Kitchen is one of the best restaurants in London, or that Faye’s fans included not only London’s Guyanese community, but also dignitaries from the Commonwealth Secretariat, the legendary chef and author Rosamund Grant and the graffiti artist 10 FOOT. Or that, since I first profiled her at Eater London in 2019, her restaurant has featured in Lunch with the FT and on websites like The Infatuation (where Kaieteur Kitchen is currently ranked as the sixth-best restaurant in London).

However, I think it speaks to the precariousness of the London restaurant industry, and how much power landlords have, that a restaurant with the reputation of Kaieteur Kitchen could conceivably vanish within a fortnight. Latin Elephant is currently leading a campaign to save all four businesses, and many questions, some of which I have put to the landlords and Southwark Council, have yet to be answered. Why were the bills so late? Was Get Living ever planning to include these businesses in the new Elephant and Castle complex? And, above all, if all four food businesses have been put into a situation where they are unable to pay basic utilities, have Get Living and Savills upheld their responsibilities and agreement with Southwark Council to provide a space in which these businesses can survive?

For now, Faye and the other traders are looking for kitchen space to fulfil their catering commitments and to keep staff paid and in work. Latin Elephant is organising a public protest against the decision, and is creating a template for Southwark residents to email their MPs and the Council to urge scrutiny of what’s happening at Castle Square (please keep an eye on their Linktree today for details). And while the traders have a solicitor, anyone who can help with legal advice is always welcome. But there is not much time: traders have just a week to fight the decision before the premises need to be located. Bitter experience shows that, in Elephant, once a place is gone, it’s gone forever.

You can contact Neil Coyle who is the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, here.
You can follow Latin Elephant here.

My Hiro

The fate of the Elephant and Castle traders mirrors what happened to Michael Clinkett at Plush in Surrey Quays last year, when bailiffs and dogs were called to the restaurant where he previously had made some of the best jerk chicken in the borough. Then, as seemingly now, Southwark Council was unable to help. Last month, the site was finally demolished.

Gavin Cleaver covered the Plush eviction for us at the time as a local resident, and since then he has been reporting on other food goings-on in Bermondsey. As something different for acid reflux, here is a short dispatch from Gavin on a new worrying development in the area at the intersection of restaurants and technology.

A restaurant called My Hiro recently opened on Southwark Park Road in Bermondsey. For a while, it had no sign and only one thing on the menu: a katsu curry at a bargain £5.99. Since then, they’ve put up a sign, and have expanded their menu to offer a curious assortment of easily prepared dishes: a teriyaki chicken, a beef madras, bao, and pesto tagliatelli. They also sell cookie dough to take home and 1.2kg containers of hot honey, with the claim that theirs is ‘the only hot honey made with simply chillies and honey’ (even though the very same sentence mentions that it also includes olive oil).

Intrigued by the seemingly random menu and low prices, I did a little digging and discovered that My Hiro is a brand from a software group called Bountiful, and that several others exist. There’s one at Charing Cross that serves sushi rolls (most of which contain no fish), and there are also two currently closed locations, one in Elephant and Castle (which bills itself, in its Google Maps listing, as ‘home of the Mango Masala’) and another in Clapham (also closed, currently a dark kitchen, operated by the same group and calling itself Indian Shack). Bountiful sells itself with the tagline: ‘The only real alternative to home cooking. Do you really want to cook tonight?’

Most recently, Stuart McCamley, the founder of Bountiful, seems to have been working with a company called Good Robin, which persuaded people to invest in Lifetime ISAs using crypto currency, a venture which has now been scrubbed from the internet beyond a few stray LinkedIn posts and some bad TrustPilot reviews. The investor presentation for My Hiro says Stuart is ‘living in the dark kitchen until we’re profitable’. The company’s Chief Growth Officer, Raj Sathi, describes My Hiro as ‘the McDonald’s of healthy everyday favourites, tech-enabled and automated’. The investor pitch deck outlines a plan to expand to 1000 UK restaurants, sell their technology to other restaurants and claims that ‘a real alternative to daily cooking could see the £1.27T restaurant market grow by 5–10x’.

Having read enough, I decided to actually eat at the new My Hiro. As you’d imagine for £5.99, the food is extremely basic, but no worse in that sense than the Morley’s a few doors down. The katsu is three fried chicken patties of the sort you might get in a large freezer bag from Iceland, on top of an under-spiced and lumpy katsu. There are also ‘bao sliders’, which are much worse – a diminutive splodge of sauce on one edge of an identical fried chicken patty, in between two reheated bao.

My Hiro’s stated goal is to sell ‘food people love, made perfectly every time with robotics’. Currently there are two people running the Bermondsey location; there’s no evidence yet of robotic innovation, but there are a lot of rice cookers. It’s intriguing to consider the end-to-end restaurant mechanics of making a profit on a good katsu for £5.99 in the current food-service environment. One thing’s for sure though: when prices are kept artificially low and processes are streamlined in the name of cost savings and efficiency, usually the savings come from the workers. Let’s hope My Hiro can buck the ‘disruptor’ cornerstone of leaning on labour.

An evening of Ursula Le Guin

We’re big fans of Ursula Le Guin at Vittles. Back in 2021, Eli Lee wrote for us about the fascinating use of food in her novels, particularly Always Coming Home. For what would have been her 96th birthday party, Sarah Shin and So Mayer of Silver Press have collaborated with artist Rain Wu to come up with an edible landscape, made in response to Le Guin’s maps (which Silver Press have created a book and exhibition of, in collaboration with the Architectural Association). The party is on October 21st at the AA Lecture Hall, and you can buy tickets here.

New York, New York

Finally, I was in New York recently to celebrate the American publication of Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming. I will write more about the New York food scene in the next acid reflux, but while I was there I was on Taste Podcast with Cake Zine’s Aliza Abarbanel talking about Vittles and food media at large. You can listen to it here.

That’s all for now. If you have any news, gossip or tips, please email them to vittlesrestaurants@gmail.com or DM me at @jonathandnunn.