Vittles Reviews: I'm Seeing Doubles
Tawa Roti, Roti Joupa and the homecoming of the roti kings. Words by Jonathan Nunn. Photos by Michaël Protin.
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 long version of a new entry in London Feeds Itself, which contains recommendations for over 125 restaurants. The second edition of the book, co-published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is now available to order from Open City.
I’m Seeing Doubles
Tawa Roti, Roti Joupa and the homecoming of the roti kings, by Jonathan Nunn.
If you ask Vash Mathura about how he started the important Trinidadian restaurant in London, he will tell you about disappointing roti. When Mathura first arrived from Trinidad in 1987, his brother-in-law Sarran Mahabir took him out to his nearest roti shop. As they pulled up in a car, Mathura was incredulous. “No way can good roti come from a place like this,” he said. Inside, a curtain partitioned the customers from the kitchen – a sure sign, he thought, that the roti and curries were not being made on site. He could do better himself. Mahabir jokingly challenged a bullish Mathura to open his own roti shop and the idle thought of what that might look like never left him. His shop would be something like the one that his grandparents had back in Trinidad’s capital Port of Spain pre-independence, with an open kitchen so customers could see the cook making the curries from scratch and the hands that stretched the rotis. Recipes come from tradition, Mathura believes, but it is the hands that change them. For 15 years, Mathura worked in construction but never forgot his idea. So when Mahabir told him his barber shop in Clapham North was coming to the end of its lease, he took it on without hesitating – he had his kitchen, he had his hands, all he needed was a name. On July 31st 2002, Mathura opened Roti Joupa and a London legend was born.
Over the next decade, Roti Joupa became something more than the entry point for many Londoners’ experiences of Trini food – it was an education. It wasn’t just the first place I ate doubles, one of the world’s perfect snack forms, it was also where I realised Caribbean food could be made by people who looked a lot like my family. It was from Roti Joupa that I learnt a lesson they didn’t teach us in school but which is told in the documentary Dal Puri Diaspora: about the migration of Indian workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to Trinidad, and the system of indentured labour that the British Empire created to facilitate it after the abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade. This is why Mathura is particularly proud that after the Trinidadians had found Roti Joupa (followed by the British, Americans and even Clapham’s Australians on their way to Infernos), Indian customers started coming too, then learned how roti became dal puri and how puri became fried bara. By 2007, according to Mathura, “the whole world was eating here” – in an Avengers Assemble moment, even the baker Dan Lepard turned up to learn how to make roti.
But five years later, Mathura was gone. Thinking of his children’s future and his ailing parents, he returned to Trinidad. He’d seen too many family members talk about going back and either end up dying in London or returning to the island too late. He wanted to enjoy the dream that the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon writes about in The Lonely Londoners – of having an old house, some cattle and lying down in the sun before his teeth fell out. He sold the shop to a new family, the Pareys, and for many people the Pareys are Roti Joupa. It is their doubles that have fed a generation of south Londoners, and then north and west as Roti Joupa expanded to Finsbury Park and Shepherd’s Bush. Last year, the graffiti writer 10 Foot cited Roti Joupa as one of the hidden gems he doesn’t want foodies to discover, but he was far too late – in 2016, Roti Joupa made it on to the first-ever London edition of the Eater 38. When the original shop shut down in Clapham North in 2022, people mourned the loss beyond the food. It was about the decreasing viability of a popular business in a changing city, something that seemed particularly cruel when a shinier, savvier roti shop called Tawa Roti took its place last spring. But Tawa Roti wasn’t what it seemed. Far from a new shop, it was the latest chapter in a story that has been simmering on slow heat for more than 35 years. He was older and had less hair but it was unmistakably him: Mathura had returned, and with him were his lieutenant Sham Ramcharan, one of Roti Joupa’s first employees, and, completing the circle, Sean Mahabir, Sarran’s son. The boys were back in town.