Vittles Reviews: Return to the Silk Road
Vittles Reviews: Return to the Silk Road
Three versions of the once most-hyped restaurant in London: the new, the Italian and the vegan. 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.
Return to the Silk Road
The new Silk Road, the Italian Silk Road and the vegan Silk Road, by Jonathan Nunn.
When Silk Road first opened at the tail end of 2008, no one could have predicted that this small restaurant on Camberwell Church Street, with communal benches and a short menu of dishes from Xinjiang, would one day become the byword for a whole new genre of person. Over the next few years, Silk Road became a second home for an archetype of a young, culturally restless Londoner who was not just really into restaurants but would also often say that they were “really into restaurants”. The richest text of this era is the 2015 Jackson Boxer episode of Munchies’ Chef’s Night Out (featuring a young Amol Rajan!), in which the chef takes his brother, Frank, and their friend Jeremie Cometto-Lingenheim (soon-to-be Mr. Jolene) to Silk Road, commandeers the ordering and claims a “spiritual affinity” with the food as the amused manager Tim Pan looks on. I recognise the unvarnished sincerity of this scene. Back then, Silk Road felt like a benign cult – on any given evening you would find Chinese diners excited to finally discover the food of Xinjiang in London, a dozen impeccably turned out Goldsmiths’ fashion students and half of Left Twitter. As someone who was then becoming the kind of annoying person who has a ‘favourite cabbage in London’, I would have told you (without you asking) that Silk Road was my favourite restaurant. Wave after wave of food bloggers held group dinners there, some discovering that Sichuan and Xinjiang were different places, others learning about the existence of a place called Camberwell. People suddenly started to have sophisticated opinions on China that they had never before held. One food critic at a national newspaper wrote the immortal words: “I know little of Xinjiang and its ethnic strife. But I do know I liked the version of its food served to me at Silk Road.”
Many things have changed since that golden age. Tim Pan left and started Lao Dao (think Silk Road but with natural wine) in Kennedy’s sausage shop on Walworth Road, where his kitchen produces exceptional lamb skewers with blistered amber fat from a Xinjiang tandoor. Silk Road, meanwhile, suddenly closed in the summer of 2023, creating a huge wave of anxiety among leftist men in my DMs, but reopened in February this year. Silk Road 2.0 is a slightly different restaurant to the first one, but we’ll get to that later. The bigger change is that it has reemerged in a different city to the one it first arrived in 15 years ago. Today, there are plenty of restaurants in London that look like Silk Road and Londoners are more familiar with the differences between them. Some are Han Chinese, but many more are run by Uyghurs, a pattern that started with Etles in Walthamstow and Dilara in Finsbury Park, and has continued with new central London restaurants like Turpan and Tarim. These restaurants feature anonymously in the background of an excellent article by John Phipps in 1843 magazine, which examines how exiled Uyghurs – a repressed and forcibly detained minority in China – navigate cities like London where they are ostensibly free but fearful of surveillance. The influx of Uyghurs into Western cities like New York and London in recent years has increased the number of these restaurants significantly. In the face of cultural erasure at home, they are some of the few places in the city that are explicit about Uyghur culture as a thing that exists; by serving food, they help keep that culture alive.
No restaurant has done more to promote this culture in the UK than the Leicester-based Karamay, which opened its second London branch late last year just north of Oxford Circus. In an act of what I can only call historical inter-nation trolling, it renamed all its dishes with Italian terms to remind people where pasta really came from: big plate chicken became ‘Original Linguine’, polo turned into ‘Original Risotto; (I can only presume a visit from the carabinieri is why the owners have since gotten rid of the ‘original’ tag). I may never get over my disappointment that ‘Beef Tenderloin Spaghetti’ is not, in fact, the Uyghur/Italian mash-up I was craving, but I do recognise that we’re spoilt to have an excellent traditional Uyghur restaurant so close to John Lewis. The mini version of the big plate chicken – thick belt noodles with bone-on chicken and dark, toffee-coloured potatoes that have soaked up all the chilli broth – is as good a solo lunch as you could hope to have in Fitzrovia.
