The Restaurants
After the Scottish Gaelic word meaning bread or loaf, Aran is the artisan bakery tucked away up in the Scottish Highlands and founded by baker and food writer Flora Shedden. Flora’s sourdough bread, cakes, tarts, cookies and savoury lunches keep the local residents of her hometown Dunkeld well fed and watered with great coffee. Understandably it also attracts a fair few admirers and travellers from afar.
Caravan is the all-day dining restaurant group and coffee roastery from New Zealand trio Miles Kirby, Laura Harper-Hinton and Chris Ammerman. Having first opened in Exmouth Market in 2010, the team have opened five more restaurants across London. They are known for their ‘well-travelled’ menu, which takes influence from ingredients and flavours from across the globe, and their craft coffee roasted in their North London roastery.
With an all-female team, Asma Khan’s restaurant Darjeeling Express is a statement in home-cooked, regional Indian food. An unstoppable force for social change in the food industry and beyond, Asma has been revolutionising the London restaurant scene since 2017 with her world-renowned Indian food and her commitment to training immigrant women.
The Good Egg started life with friends cooking together on the street food markets of London in 2012.
Since then, their menus have stayed inspired by the food that co-founders Oded, Joel & Alex grew up eating and loving; travels to the vibrant city (and Oded’s hometown) of Tel Aviv, afternoons spent in classic Jewish delis of North America and childhood memories of Brick Lane beagles make up a menu that we can’t quite pin point on a map.
Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich opened up their first restaurant Honey & Co on Warren Street back in 2012, and they’ve made their mark on contemporary Middle Eastern food in London ever since. Across their four cookbooks, not only are the recipes just as delicious as the dishes you’ll find in their restaurants, but their stories (and also, importantly, their Instagram stories) are so entertaining they warrant reading beyond the kitchen.
Nestled on Blandford Street in London’s Marylebone neighbourhood, Jikoni is a restaurant founded by chef Ravinder Bhogal. The food is inspired by immigrant cuisine and the rich, shared flavours and cultures across parts of South Asia & the Far East, the Middle East, East Africa and Britain.
@jikonilondon
www.jikonilondon.com
Juliet’s is one of South London’s most exciting food spots, serving up deliciously inventive dishes like their Smoked Pumpkin Omelette and Sourdough Bread-End Waffles with toppings that change with the seasons. Their housemade kombucha and marshmallow chocolate cookies are, in our opinion, some of London’s best.
Llewelyn’s is Herne Hill’s much-loved neighbourhood restaurant, serving a seasonal, weekly-changing menu of modern European dishes in a warm and relaxed dining room setting. The food champions seasonality, allowing the produce to guide each beautifully served dish.
Margot opened in a dilapidated shop in North London in February 2016. It has become a centre of community life and a place to buy wonderful bread and pastries, all leavened with sourdough for the best quality and flavour possible.
Everything is produced on site by Michelle Eshkeri and her team, with a changing menu guided by what the team in the kitchen are excited about; customer favourites, festivals, celebrations and seasonal produce.
Osip is small farm-to-table restaurant in Bruton, in the heart of Somerset. It is the first solo project by chef Merlin Labron-Johnson, and was awarded its first Michelin star in January 2021, just over a year after opening its doors and only welcoming diners for a few months before and during the pandemic. Osip’s ever-changing menu sets out to celebrate the the bounty of the countryside that surrounds the restaurant, and shines a light on the produce that Merlin grows himself at his nearby vegetable garden.
Pophams was born out of an idea to bring an innovative spin on traditional viennoiserie baking techniques. In April 2017, Ollie Gold made the decision to take on on a derelict chemist in Islington and turn his dream of opening a bakery into a reality. Pophams is now known not only for some of the best pastries in London, but also pasta, small plates and even homeware.
After years of searching for the perfect site, Jemima Jones and Lucy Carr-Ellison launched the neighbourhood restaurant, Wild by Tart in Spring 2019. Nestled in an incredible space in Eccleston Yards, the restaurant brings the pair’s seasonal, produce-led cooking into a dining room, bar, kiosk space and photography studio.
Zahter is the first London restaurant by acclaimed Turkish chef Esra Muslu. With beautiful Turkish-inspired interiors, an incredible wood-fired oven to bake bread and cheese made just downstairs in the house kitchen, the ground floor of the restaurant offers counter dining at an open kitchen and cosy, side-by-side window seating – perfect for two – with larger tables on the second floor.