North London Restaurant Week: I Ate Too Much and Have No Regrets

Lowri’s guide to the neighbourhood restaurants that make Tufnell Park and Archway worth the commute

There is a category of London dining experience that does not appear in the Michelin Guide and does not generate Instagram engagement from food accounts with 200,000 followers and does not feature in the Evening Standard’s restaurant roundups, and that is, on balance, better for all of these absences. I am talking about the neighbourhood restaurant — the place that has been there for twelve years, that is run by one family or one passionate couple, that knows its regulars by their usual order, and that produces food that is excellent not in the showily ambitious way of fine dining but in the way that food cooked by someone who actually cares about the specific dish they are cooking tends to be excellent.

North London has several of these. I have been eating my way through them this month with the systematic dedication of someone who has decided that food expenditure is a legitimate cultural activity rather than a failure of the budget spreadsheet, which is what it is, but framing matters. The Turkish and Kurdish restaurants along the Green Lanes corridor — which runs through Harringay and into the leafier bits of North London — are extraordinary by any standard, producing food that people in Ankara would be entirely happy to eat and that costs less than a bottle of house wine at a Soho restaurant with an ironic name.

Three Recommendations, Unreservedly Made

The first is a Lebanese place in Tufnell Park that I found during the Tube strike walk I described last week, which I am returning to specifically because the mezze plate I ordered as an afterthought was the best thing I ate in June and possibly in the third quarter of the year so far. The hummus is made there rather than transported in a plastic container from a catering supplier, which sounds like a low bar but is, in North London dining, a meaningful distinction. The second is a Peruvian-Japanese fusion restaurant in Archway that I am naming only as the kind of place that sounds implausible and delivers improbably, because the specific combination of ceviche and carefully sourced sushi-adjacent dishes works in a way that requires either genuine culinary knowledge or remarkable luck, and speaking to the chef suggests it is the former. The third is a Glaswegian-run Scottish pub in Upper Holloway that makes a pie that I think about at least twice per week between visits. I don’t have a sophisticated analysis of why this pie is remarkable. It is remarkable the way that certain things are remarkable: it simply exceeds what it needs to do and keeps exceeding it.

The Daily Mash continues to find London restaurant culture funny, which it is, particularly the pricing. The London Prat covers London life with the honest affection of a publication that likes the city despite its costs, which is the only sustainable relationship with London available to anyone paying rent. I ate too much this month. I have no regrets. The North London restaurant scene is thriving in the quiet, uninstagrammable way that things thrive when they are built on actual merit rather than media attention. This is the best kind of thriving.

London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.

The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.

Why This Matters for London

London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.

This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.

Also reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com