The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Tuesday.
Hello there.
This is the very first edition of The Counter, my all-new, regular column for Broadsheet London. Though deciding what to call things is often painful (here we turn to every single team-naming montage on The Apprentice) we have, I think, landed in a fitting place. Counters are where the action is in any half-decent restaurant – lively, clamorous thresholds of exchange where the view is top-tier, the vibe is unmatched, and the eavesdropping possibilities are as tempting as the freshly plated agnolotti that’s just been nudged your way. Counters thrillingly blur the line between the hidden, complicated alchemy of operating restaurants and the highly personal business of enjoying them. In my weekly dispatches, I want the innate spirit of the counter to be ever-present, whether I’m giving invaluable intel on notable openings, exploring the issues shaping London’s wider cultural landscape, or offering contextualising, clear-eyed takes on the food world stories lighting up group chats. I hope these words will make you feel like I have met you at some two-top with a mischievous glint in my eye and some new pet theory or intriguing industry whisper burning a hole in my pocket.
But, having said all that, we are actually going to kick things off not at a gleaming, raised counter, but at a knee-knockingly low table in a moodily lit Soho pub. This is The Shaston Arms – Patty & Bun founder Joe Grossman’s food-led reimagining of a storied Carnaby boozer – that I visited a few weeks ago. I was in the midst of a dinner with a new acquaintance; a LA-based, restaurant-obsessed TV writer, on secondment in our fair city for a few months and in love with just about everything he encountered. What was striking about the meal, beyond the finely crisped beef fat onion rings hauled through thick swoops of smoked cod’s roe and the extraordinary mussel and pork arroz, was how much he wanted to enthuse about London’s dining scene. Did we know just how good we had it? Did we appreciate the enviable miracle of a metropolis clogged with a multitude of walkable restaurant neighbourhoods, each more interesting than the last? Could we even begin to conceive of the unspeakable things most Angelenos would do to have places like Quality Wines, Gymkhana, Tollington’s and, yes, The Shaston Arms, just a short Lime bike ride away from them?
I have to admit that, even as a veteran of documenting the capital’s restaurant scene, the burning intensity of his ardour gave me pause. To be a Londoner is to be both fiercely proud and protectively cynical. We love the place madly but also – as we claw-grip our phones to protect them from being yoinked by speeding e-bike opportunists – can’t help but focus on the shared joke of its challenges and deficiencies. Did you know that, according to recently compiled data from industry guidebook Hardens, 2025 has seen the highest number of new London restaurant openings since 2017? Does that feel possible? As one hugely successful restaurateur drily observed to me last week, this does slightly make you wonder about the potentially record-breaking volume of closures coming in 2026. What’s more, you’d have to be optimistic to the point of blinkered delusion to look at the number of high-profile shutterings this year (including a recently confirmed hiatus for Lee and Kate Tiernan’s seminal FKABAM) and see a straightforwardly rosy picture.
But it’s a statistic that feels like a useful corrective. And an accurate reflection of the fact that every chef I speak to at the moment seems to be balancing existential dread with talk of visits to potential new sites. Plaza Khao Gaeng is about to double up in Borough. Nathaniel Morley’s 2210 is storming Herne Hill with a modern take on Caribbean cuisine. Just last week, a frankly absurd number of people joined a Tuesday morning queue outside The Marlborough for Guinness and Crisp’s crackle-edged Vecna pizzas. Lots of extremely talented food people are registering the creatively buoyant culinary landscape described by that TV writer friend and, perhaps despite their better judgement, deciding that they very much want to be a part of it. That animating resourcefulness and creativity is going to be a big part of what I’ll be documenting each week with The Counter. Enthusiasm and incisiveness can go hand in hand; to be celebratory is not the same as being bland. And, sometimes, you need to see your city through the covetous eyes of an outsider, to truly appreciate the mad, whirling brilliance of it.
Dish of the week: Cumberland sausage tantanmen; Supa Ya, Arcade, WC1A 1DB
The original Arcade beneath Centre Point remains the sort of overloading, tourist-magnet environment that can be a challenge for most food-literate Londoners. Still, it abides as one of the most intelligently curated food halls in the city and that run continues with the newest guise of Supa Ya, Luke Findlay’s wildly creative modern ramen shop. This bowl – rich chicken broth, firm, toothsome noodles and scrags of succulent, spicy pork meat in a sinus-clearing chilli oil – was typically off-beam and enthralling.
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