Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. If you missed yesterday’s podcast with Joké Bakare, you can catch up with it (and all previous episodes) here.
A quick reminder that Faye Gomes at Kaieteur Kitchen is cooking at Walworth Living Room from 5-9pm tonight, after being evicted from Elephant and Castle last year. If you’ve enjoyed her food, please go and support her - you can find the menu below.
Today’s review by Dina Begum is about Bangla City, a Boxpark-like structure of 30 units in Upton Park which has become one of the most significant Bangladeshi food hubs in London. To read it in full, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including all our restaurant coverage.
The entrance to Bangla City. Photo by Dina Begum
It was as if Bangla City appeared overnight. For years, I’d passed what used to look like a junkyard just off Plashet Grove in Upton Park, nestled between Chaiiwala and Naan Staap. Sometimes I would spot rolls of old carpets, broken furniture and offcuts, not really paying attention to the narrow passageway or the sizable space it led onto. And then one day, sometime in the summer of 2025, the greige turned into Technicolour. Suddenly, it was Dhaka: a bustling food street of shipping containers, alive with the scents of Bangladeshi home cooking: biryani laced with kewra water, pandan leaf extract mingling with aromatic chinigura rice. People gathered in groups everywhere, the staccato rhythm of Bengali conversations punctuating the steady stream of popular Bangla songs. It was almost as if we were all thinking the same thing: ‘Who knew a place like this existed in London?’
Bangla City Food Court, as it is unofficially known by locals and vendors, has since become one of the most significant hubs for Bangladeshi food in London. Around 30 units are currently open, with more than 20 coming over the next few months. These businesses comprise everything from colourfully decorated food carts selling popular Bangladeshi street foods to single-unit containers and fully fledged restaurants with a focus on the cuisine of Dhaka, the capital. Upon entering the development, you can’t help but be swept along – particularly after 5pm, when crowds form in every direction and deftly move through the space, picking up a snack here and there: chotpoti, spicy fruit chatnis, salads, fried snacks or sweet treats like bhapa pitha, a steamed coconut and molasses rice cake.
Even though Bangla City appeared suddenly, the conditions that led to its arrival have been in the works for years. Over the last decade or so, the Bangladeshi foothold in Upton Park has grown deeper, with Indian and Pakistani businesses swapping hands with Bangladeshis. Every other shop, from clothes stores to fried chicken shops, now displays Bengali names and sells types of frozen freshwater fish, amaranth greens and soft drink brands I only ever used to see at select stores in Whitechapel or Brick Lane. The new hub of Upton Park makes an interesting contrast to the historical Banglatown in London’s East End, which has been home to Sylheti immigrants since the 1970s, following the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. My discontent with Banglatown has always stemmed from the dissonance between Bangladeshi home cooking and the curry house fare you’ll find there: a hybrid cuisine created for the British palate. Yet Upton Park – particularly the food court – offers a fresh social space for Bangladeshis and non-Bangladeshis alike to experience traditional food and the late night cha and adda (tea and conversation) culture of Bangladesh.
Behind the paywall: Recommendations for some of the best food businesses in Bangla City, from biryani to grills, from puchkas to duck bhuna and more. To read it in full, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of our restaurant coverage.
