Vittles

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is an interview with Sonora owners Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier, who this week closed their Stoke Newington taqueria, following its most successful year.

On Monday morning, a little under a month since announcing that Sonora taqueria in Stoke Newington would close at the end of October, its owners Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier wrote on Instagram, “Thats’ it.” Last month, they noted the toll it has taken on each of them – and how running one of London’s most hyped food businesses for the better part of the last decade has stressed them out, animated them and ultimately become their lives. The irony of closing just as the business has begun to thrive in a moment when many others are struggling, is not lost on either of them. But they’ve always done things their way.

“We are exhausted!” they wrote on Monday. “We could have never imagined that what originally was a tiny project for a visa sponsorship would eventually become our entire lives, give us a purpose and immense satisfaction.”

I first met Michelle and Sam at Pollo Feliz, the stall which came before Sonora in east London’s Netil Market in early 2020. I got to know them better during the Covid-19 lockdown when calling on them weekly for Michelle’s peerless flour tortillas, initially their USP, which Sam would deliver on his bike. In the two years or so following, since I worked in an office building nearby, I witnessed first-hand the queues at the market in the post-Covid era. I always enjoyed the tacos, the Friday burrito specials, the moments of innovation. Even before they moved to their first bricks-and-mortar site in Stoke Newington in 2023, it was Michelle’s quiet fastidiousness and Sam’s candour that set them apart and kept me and so many others engaged.

Both Michelle and Sam have always been publicly honest about how hard they’ve found doing a thing they never meant to do, while at the same time reluctantly acknowledging that they’ve advanced Mexican cuisine in London maybe more than anyone else in the modern era. Though there’s no sense of what, if anything, might come next, it felt like a good time to talk to them about the last few years and the last few weeks. I wanted to really understand what’s it’s been like behind those grills, what happened with Mexa at Arcade, the cease and desist from Taqueria in Notting Hill and the Sonora superfan lawyer who got them off on a technicality.

We hope you enjoy the episode. Let us know what you think in the comments! Adam Coghlan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is an interview with baker and pastry chef Anna Higham, the owner of the lauded Quince Bakery and Clementine, a café opening soon in Islington.

Higham’s story is as rich and varied as her bakes. Her career spans some of the world’s most famous kitchens, beginning with the Gordon Ramsay Group in London. After moving to New York, she spent time at the legendary Gramercy Tavern. While in the city, the mentorship of Claudia Fleming would prove formative for Higham, and when she returned to London in the late 2010s she brought with her a focus on provenance and seasonality.

Higham’s name quickly became known to pastry aficionados in the capital via her work at the landmark new-wave Modern British restaurant Lyle’s. While the pastry section broadly subscribed to the sometimes sparse aesthetic and precision preferred by Lyle’s head chef James Lowe – she shared his obsession with hyper-seasonality, British fruit and heritage grains – her desserts were subtly different. Higham would ensure her creations were generous and delicious, with less voguish fixation on oats, fruit and yoghurt than her colleagues had, whose desserts could sometimes pass for breakfast bowls. Instead, there were cakes, cream, meringues, caramels – as well as an abundance of berries.

During our conversation, Higham discusses what drove that approach, who shaped it, and how she gained the confidence to finally go it alone. Following the immense success of Quince and ahead of the opening of Clementine next month, she also shares her view on the ‘hype’ bakery scene in London – and her venue’s own place within it.

We hope you enjoy the episode. Let us know what you think in the comments!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s very special episode of the Vittles podcast is with journalist and editor Stephen Buranyi, who spent six months reporting and investigating the world of restaurant influencers for our Issue 3 cover story, titled ‘Who’s Paying for All of This?

When he set out reporting at the beginning of this year, Stephen, an experienced reporter, soon realised the London restaurant influencer industry was much more tight-lipped than he’d anticipated, more discreet ‘than the civil service’. ‘I found in general here people did not wanna talk,’ he tells us in today’s conversation. ‘I think there’s a sense that they don’t want anyone to know how this whole thing actually works.’

Eventually, he found people who would talk. In this podcast, we learn more about how those conversations came about, why ‘a lot of restaurateurs and PRs find influencers a little bit distasteful and a bit vulgar,’ but also why they rely on them nonetheless, even when they claim they don’t. He gets into the humans behind the characters that pop up in our feeds every day, drooling, screaming, and waxing lyrical; a largely male band of content creators who have, in many ways, become the dominant force in food media today.

We also examine the influencer industry as an extension of the advertising industry, and the problems both influencers and PRs encounter when influencers lose their audience’s trust. Stephen gets at the structural, algorithmic forces underpinning influencers’ past success, their anxiety about the future, where influencing might be going next, and - most importantly - how everyone is getting paid. We also delve into the reporting process itself: the shocks and surprises, what didn’t make it into the final piece and without too many spoilers, try to figure out how all this happened.

We hope you enjoy it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is with one of the UK’s most talented and idiosyncratic chefs. If you haven’t heard of Will Gleave, then your favourite chef will have. Through his early cooking at the wine bar P. Franco, and then at the restaurants Bright and Peg, Will has exercised an immense influence over the modern London restaurant industry – its focus on natural wine, borderless cuisine, high-level cooking in relaxed environments, and a type of effortlessness that many aspire to.

In a rare public appearance, Will spends an hour talking to Adam about his early years cooking in London restaurants, setting the small plate-natural wine bar template in the city at P. Franco, looking outside of Europe for inspiration, what he likes to eat himself and why, ultimately, he decided to leave the capital and set up home on the Kent coast with his young family, and cook at Sargasso in Margate.

Will traces his journey from the kitchens of Harvey Nichols, The Square, and Arbutus in London to Tasmania, where he found himself at Garagistes, one of Australia’s most celebrated restaurants. When returned to the UK, he co-founded P. Franco, which was named Eater London’s restaurant of the year in 2017. Bright and Peg followed, before all three abruptly closed in 2022 and 2023 to the shock of the London restaurant industry. This was followed by a year-long residency at Hill & Szrok on Broadway Market - which was our own restaurant of the year in 2024 - where he revived the British steak and chop house with his signature elan.

During the episode, we discuss what it was really like taking over two induction hobs inside a wine shop with no extraction (or licence to trade as a restaurant), the relentless misery of working in London’s most renowned Michelin-starred kitchens, the influence of Australia and Japan on his cooking, the greatness of 40 Maltby Street and its chef Steve Williams, the story behind the closure of Bright and Peg, tradition and innovation, cooking steak, who the best pasta chef in the city is right now, and whether we have really yet to have THE ‘Will Gleave restaurant’.

We hope you enjoy it.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub, the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and immediately went viral on social media.

In the episode, we discuss creating something that people really want in a moment when so many hospitality businesses are feeling the pain; about the meaning and importance of community and authenticity; about navigating virality and hype online; and about how, despite all their early success, neither are trained chefs.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney.

When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients.

Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast!

Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group.

As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording.

Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.

We hope you enjoy the episode.

Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.

We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.

Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving.

In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged.

In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits:

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June.

One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or embellished by PR – to pull back the curtain and give a true insight into what’s actually going on with workers, customers and finances. She’s remained faithful to that approach with Gina, publicly disclosing that it cost more than £500,000 to open the restaurant and we wanted to know more about the parts of that sum. And to ask – when knowing all she does about the many challenges facing restaurateurs and chefs in the current economic climate – why she would open her own restaurant?

Elsewhere in the episode, we cover how Rav and Mattie ended up opening in Chingford, her food backstory in Southampton and Leyton, dream customers, nightmare customers, her mentors and the ‘pastry idol’ who taught her that you should never work for your heroes.

Finally, we discuss the beauty of the invert puff pastry that she used in the two galettes she brought for us to taste at the recording.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ravneet Gill Taiano is the author of Pastry Chef's Guide, a judge on Junior Bake Off, founder of hospitality platform Countertalk and the owner of restaurant Gina in Chingford.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with some making it a matter of pride to never use or engage with it. Whatever your opinion, PR remains a significant and integral part of London’s restaurant scene. Almost every new restaurant hoping to get press uses PR... and it seems that the more they do, the more the rest of them need to as well.

So it felt like the right time to invite a titan of the restaurant PR industry on this podcast. Gemma Bell is one of the most influential restaurant PRs in the country today, heading up her own agency Gemma Bell & Company, whose clients over the last 15 years have included St. JOHN, Dishoom, Yotam Ottolenghi, The River Café, Koya, Padella, The Clove Club and many more.

Adam Coghlan has known Gemma for about 15 years and in that time, the industries of public relations and restaurants have changed dramatically, particularly due to the influence of social media. In this podcast we talk about those huge changes, about what clients want from PR, what she feels her role in the industry is, the influence of her mentors (including Elizabeth Crompton-Batt and hotelier Ian Schrager), parting ways with Yotam Ottolenghi and the biggest lesson she’s learnt from the last two to three decades of working in the restaurant world.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Gemma Bell is the founder of the agency Gemma Bell & Company.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

This month’s episode is an interview with someone you might already know — a restaurant owner who embodies many of the critical themes of the London restaurant industry, not just in 2025, but over the course of the last 20-plus years: community, trends, family, uncertainty, hype and more. Ferhat Dirik is the lifelong front-of-house, founder’s son, and now owner of Dalston’s Mangal 2, the family-run Turkish restaurant he’s been working in since he was 11 in the late 1990s.

Mangal 2 is one of the most well-known and cult-followed ocakbaşıs in north London. Opening in 1994, it was the follow-up restaurant to the U.K.’s first ocakbaşı (Mangal 1) which Ferhat’s father Ali Dirik opened 1991, and has been at the centre of that community ever since. Catering first to the Turkish community of Stoke Newington High street, then through the hipster era of Dalston in the 2010s, to serving Action Bronson, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and so many others over the course of the last half decade. But during the course of the last 15 years and increasingly under the stewardship of Ferhat, the restaurant has gone from the community fringes of neighbourhood restaurant territory and into the mainstream. A fully fledged member of the London restaurant industry.

So it felt like the right time, as the sun sets on another challenging year for London restaurants and in light of a series of illuminating blog posts authored by Ferhat in recent months, for Adam Coghlan to talk Ferhat about his journey, about the history of his family’s restaurant, what it means to serve people in London, about change, about speaking out, and about whether the end might well be nigh for one of the city’s most well-known and beloved places to eat.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ferhat Dirik is the owner of Mangal II in Dalston.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

We are living through an age of online extremes: hype machines, queues, hidden gems, while at the same time, for some of those embedded in the London restaurant industry itself, there’s a fundamental sense of malaise, of boredom, with a creeping homogenisation of restaurants and food culture. This is ‘the mid’: a term that is now common parlance for those who feel adrift of a discourse in which everything is either ‘absolutely incredible’ or ‘totally garbage’.

In this month’s hour-long episode, we go deep into some of the forces shaping what we deem to be good, bad and, critically, mid in food right now, with not one, but two heavyweight London influencers: Feroz Gajia, food Instagram chief and chef-owner of Bake Street in Clapton, and Montague Ashley-Craig, author of the Everything’s Toasted newsletter and founder of luxury-small-plate-wine-bar-friendly soap brand, Montamonta.

We discuss distinctions between London and other big cities in the world, the role of influencers, a recent New York Times list of 25 essential London restaurant dishes, delivery apps, PR and the subjectivity around ideas of quality. At the end, and in a bid to animate some of our theories, we debut the Vittles Podcast show-and-tell, as our host and guests reveal, eat and discuss a food stuff they feel represents the best of the middle ground.

Like our previous two podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer, and to the whole team at Young Space, the beautiful location where we record. We’ll see you again next month, when Adam will be speaking with Mangal 2 owner Ferhat Dirik.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Montague Ashley-Craig is the creator of the ‘fancy restaurant handwash’, montamonta. She is also a Glaswegian, begrudging London Fields resident, cosmetic scientist, and annoying over-sharer with strong opinions loosely held.

Feroz Gajia is the founder of Bake Street in London. Sometime food writer, Instagrammer and consultant, he is always obsessed with something, mostly food. He makes what you want to eat.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

In this special episode, Adam Coghlan is joined by Ruby Tandoh, the author, journalist (and Vittles contributor) who has just published the book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. The book is an attempt to explain the growing power and absurdity of food culture via the mediums it is transmitted through, whether supermarkets, newspaper supplements or Instagram reels (Tandoh’s ‘15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything’ which was published on Vittles earlier this year was loosely based on chapter on cookbooks).

As a sprint through the terrain of contemporary food culture, All Consuming covers everything from the rise of bubble tea, restaurant critics in the US and in the UK, food influencers, supermarket battles, the dominance of the queue, TikTok, wellness elixirs, trad wives, the invention of Viennetta and modern ice cream culture, Mob Kitchen, recipe development, and the impact America has had on British food (via Wimpy). We talk about the process of writing the book, the speed at which food culture is changing, and the democratisation (and regression) of food media.

Later on in the podcast, Adam checks in with Vittles founder and editor Jonathan Nunn, who has some thoughts about the current state of fine dining, including reviews of Row on 5 in London, and Wilson’s and Upstairs at Landrace in the West Country.

Like our previous two podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you normally listen to your podcasts. The Vittles Podcast will continue later this month with an episode in which we speak with two ~tastemakers~ about some of the undercurrents affecting the London restaurant industry and their own competing versions of what’s good and what’s… mid.

A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove who produced it, and to the Young Space who provided the beautiful recording space.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ruby Tandoh is a writer and hater on food and culture whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vice, Taste, Eater, Vittles and more.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

In this month’s episode, we have a special guest: writer, critic and part-time Vittles reviewer Simran Hans, who joins Adam and Jonathan to talk about the summer in London restaurant news. Our main topics are two eccentric London food spaces: Singburi and Leila’s Shop. We discuss what didn’t make into Jonathan’s review of Singburi, our thoughts on the new one, and what the restaurant’s evolution says about the state of the London industry more generally. We also talk about Leila’s Shop and its current fight for survival on Calvert Avenue in the context of Simran’s March review, It’s Time to Talk About Leila’s (the alternate name for this episode was ‘I would just like to state for the record that I have signed the petition’). Plus! Stupid summer beverages, what we’ve enjoyed and not enjoyed in London restaurants this year, and a short look back at five years of Vittles.

Like our previous special podcast on The Lost Food of Soho, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you normally listen to your podcasts. A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove who produced it, and to the Young Space who provided the beautiful recording space.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Adam Coghlan.

Simran Hans is a writer in London. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, GQ, VICE and many others. You can read some of it at simranhans.com or find her on Instagram @simranhans.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

The Lost Food of Soho is a one-episode podcast by Lucy Dearlove. You can listen to it for free on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, which are now hosting all back-issues of the Vittles podcast.

You can buy prints of today’s map, created by the artists Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby exclusively for Vittles.

A reminder, too, that we’ve released prints ahead of the publication of issue 1 of Vittles magazine, which you can shop here.

Cast of The Lost Food of Soho

Hilary Armstrong – writer, worked in Andrew Edmunds Marcus Harris – DJ/promoterRussell Davies – creator of eggbaconchipsandbeansJeremy Lee – chef proprietor of Quo VadisChristine Yau – former owner of Y MingDarren Coffield – artist and author of Tales From The Colony Room: Soho’s Lost BohemiaIain Sinclair – authorPolly – sex work and organiser with SWARMMegan Macedo – writer and former Sister Ray employee

There are many versions of Soho. ‘Italian caffs and delis Soho’. ‘Private members club Soho’. ‘Jazz bar Soho’. ‘Blitz Club Soho’. ‘Terence Conran Soho’. ‘Film industry Soho’. ‘Music industry Soho’. ‘Paul Raymond Soho’. All existing separately but simultaneously: sometimes overlapping, sometimes built on the rubble of each other.

We often talk about an ‘Old Soho’ of the mind – sometimes entirely of the imagination. Usually the qualification for a person or an establishment being worthy of the description ‘Old Soho’ is for it to be no longer with us, but there are some exceptions: Trisha’s, Bruno’s, The Admiral Duncan, Ronnie Scott’s, Algerian Coffee Stores, Bar Italia, Andrew Edmunds. Then there is a ‘New Soho’, mainly made up of restaurants. These two places, taking up the same physical space, are often pitted against each other, but I have little nostalgia for Old Soho. As the historian Dan Cruickshank puts it in his book Soho: A Street Guide to Soho's History, Architecture and People: ‘from the debris of death and destruction has sprung new life, often strange and exotic.’

But even allowing for nostalgia, you can’t avoid that Soho has experienced huge, irredeemable losses. Many of them restaurants. Many of them since 2000. The Stockpot, Alastair Little, Ed’s Easy Diner, Dionysus, the New Piccadilly, Y Ming. Then there are the many unheralded takeaways and late night restaurants serving the area around Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street and the northern streets of Soho during the early 2000s before various factors, Crossrail included, physically decimated the night time economy.

These are the places I want to celebrate in The Lost Food of Soho. Soho is constantly shifting and evolving, and I wanted to draw a line in the sand for the period during the 2000s in which I got to know it, which often feels overlooked. ‘My’ Soho now feels like it qualifies as Old Soho too. Millennial Soho — just like its patrons — had one foot in the past and one eye on the future, whether it liked it or not. In a strange way, it has changed the way Londoners eat. Lucy Dearlove

Places named in The Lost Food of Soho, in order of mention:

Dionysus, The Astoria, The French House, Metro Cinema, The Palomar, Burger King, The Stockpot, Ed’s Easy Diner, Wimpy, Presto, Zed Cafe, Burger and Beyond, Patty and Bun, The Breakfast Club, Cheat Meals, The Admiral Duncan, Comptons, Joe and the Juice, Andrew Edmunds, Maison Berteaux, Patisserie Valerie, Quo Vadis, Bifulco, Debono, I Camisa, Cheung Dam, Y Ming, Bar Italia, Ronnie Scott’s, Garlic and Shots, Alastair Little, Koya, Hoppers, Ciccone’s Pizza Bar, Wheeler’s, The Colony Room, Duck Soup, Bar Pollo, Soho House, Zilli’s, Cafe Boheme, The Gay Hussar, Bob Bob Ricard, Pizza Express, Sister Ray, Vital Ingredient, Tossed, Soderbergh, The Blue Posts, Berwick Street Market, Pizza Pilgrims, Bone Daddy, Supreme, Bar Bruno, The Intrepid Fox, Byron, Madame Jojos, Raymond Revue Bar, The Box, Rooms by the Hour, The New Piccadilly, The Devonshire.

Credits

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St. Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

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