Vittles Reviews: A Restaurant in Diaspora
Little Nyonya, laksa, and the new Hongkonger communities of Sutton. Words by Jonathan Nunn. Photos by Jimi Chiu.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants!
Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
Today’s review is a follow up to the first essay in London Feeds Itself, The Port, which looks at the links between London, Hong Kong and mainland China and asks where the Chinatowns of the future will be. The second edition of the book, co-published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is now available to order from Open City.
A Restaurant in Diaspora
Little Nyonya, laksa, and the new Hongkonger communities of suburban southwest London, by Jonathan Nunn.
If you grew up in outer London you may be familiar with the acute sense of dislocation that often comes with suburban eating: a Cypriot taverna covered in bougainvillaea on the banks of the New River; a mini-mall containing Bollywood movies to rent and a hundred types of dosa opposite an Irish pub; a cavernous Romanian banqueting hall with fantastic vistas of Crossness Pumping Station. Even among these urban glitches, Little Nyonya, a compact 14-seater restaurant in a semi-detached house in Sutton, still provokes a double take. The awards from the Cantonese press that dot the walls; the two young boys confidently sharing three bowls of laksa as if they’re grand old men; the baked pork chop rice that arrives with a mantle of melted cheese, paired with a salted lemon Sprite or a cold red bean frappe; the soundtrack of bossa nova versions of Abba songs – all of these things would be enough to convince you that you were in Hong Kong if it wasn’t for the sight of the 154 bus to West Croydon driving past. Often, in the suburbs, the purpose of a restaurant is to transport you to another place, but the painting on the wall depicting the original Little Nyonya, the version that existed in Quarry Bay 6,000 miles away in another lifetime, reveals what Little Nyonya actually is: a restaurant that has been dismantled and painstakingly reassembled somewhere else; not just a diaspora restaurant, but a restaurant in diaspora.
How does a restaurant like Little Nyonya end up here, in the hinterland where London becomes Surrey? In some ways, this is the obvious place for it to be. In January 2021, the British government offered a special visa to anyone from Hong Kong who holds a British National (Overseas) passport in response to Beijing’s new national security law. It was the biggest planned migration to the UK since Windrush, with 300,000 people estimated to arrive in the UK over five years (more than half that number already have). The government set up welcome hubs across the UK to diffuse the effects of the influx, but you cannot account for the vagaries of migration, where a few individuals act as a seed crystal. A burgeoning community settled in the boroughs of Sutton and Kingston – neighbourhoods destined to always be called ‘leafy, south London suburbs’. On average, this is a more affluent wave of migration than London has seen before; rather than looking for cheap, unwanted space, people began to talk about the churches, housing and schools, while YouTube influencers made vlogs on the abundant green space and low crime rate. Then more arrived, all looking for the dream of stable suburban living that it normally takes immigrant families a generation to achieve.
Like many others, Little Nyonya’s owners, June Fan and her partner Kelvin Chan, left Hong Kong in late 2021 and came to Sutton. During the first couple of years, Kelvin worked in a factory and then at another restaurant, but neither job felt right. June and Kelvin’s friends, who had eaten at their restaurant back in Quarry Bay and also moved to Sutton, asked them if they would consider reopening it here. It turned out they would, so they started looking for a site that resembled the first Little Nyonya, finding one at 82a Westmead Road, a minor, mostly residential street that winds from Carshalton to Sutton. A brand new restaurant didn’t immediately cause any excitement among locals. In fact, 82a is what restaurateurs would refer to as a “cursed site”: a location where food businesses go to die. In the last few years, it has been a café selling paninis and Jamaican patties, a coffee shop offering English and Romanian cakes and, most recently, a burger joint. It was only when Little Nyonya opened in November last year and people started coming – first in trickles, then in droves, turning up in hatchbacks, queuing down the street – that locals realised something was up. All of a sudden, the immovable object that is Sutton met the unstoppable force of Hong Kong dining culture.
