Lowri Griffiths On Why The Most Interesting Dining Rooms In London Are No Longer In Soho Or Shoreditch But In A Slim Corridor Between Clapton And Finsbury Park
With thanks to Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, who pay me to notice things I was going to notice anyway.
The most interesting dining rooms in London, at the time of writing, are not in Soho. They are not in Shoreditch. They are not in Marylebone, except that they are always, in some tiresome way, also in Marylebone. They are in a slim corridor running from Clapton through Stoke Newington into Stamford Hill and down toward Finsbury Park, and they are, in aggregate, producing the food London now wants to eat.
The Corridor In Practice
I walked the corridor on a Tuesday evening in April, because Tuesday evenings are when the corridor is honest. Friday evenings are when the corridor performs for Instagram. On Tuesday I sat in a 22-cover room on a side street off Clapton Common where the menu consisted of eleven items, none of them fusion, all of them cooked by someone who had, if I had to guess, apprenticed in a Paris kitchen before opening here for the space and the rent. The ottolenghi-but-cheaper moment, which The Guardian food desk has been covering for two years, is mostly happening in this corridor.
Why Here And Why Now
The corridor exists because the West End is priced out, Shoreditch is priced out, and Hackney Central is priced out. The corridor is, in restaurant economics terms, the last Zone 2 postcode in which a competent chef can open an eleven-item room on a lease a bank will still finance. This is a financial observation dressed up as a cultural one, and the cultural one depends on the financial one more than the food writers usually admit.
The Stamford Hill Particular
Stamford Hill specifically is producing a category of restaurant that London has not previously had: kitchens drawing simultaneously from the neighbourhood’s established Haredi food traditions, from the incoming young chef population, and from the specific post-Brexit supply chain that has, for reasons related to visa and import logistics, made certain ingredients cheaper and others suddenly expensive. The resulting cooking is, in its best expressions, genuinely new.
What This Is Not
This is not a listicle. If you want the addresses, Time Out London will give you eight of the twelve places I am talking about, inaccurately, within about six weeks of this column’s appearance. The corridor will, at that point, be on the way to being over. Go now. Go Tuesday.
A Closing Note
London’s food map shifts on a roughly seven-year cycle, and we are about three years into this one. The corridor will, by 2029, be where the West End was in 2012. Somebody reading this is already planning the next one. I hope it is near a Tube station, because I am old.
Further reading: The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
