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 team.
Winter's hard launch is a reacquaintance with end-of-year traditions and behaviours that re-emerge once the temperature drops. For me – along with mince pie pastry crumbs on keyboards, group chat polls for festive get-togethers and an exhumed Big Coat with an impulse-bought Lost Mary in the pocket – this inevitably includes contemplating the overriding themes of the restaurant year. Was it dessert windows and the death of late-night dining? Fancy delis? The continued dominance of tavern burgers and Martinis?
I have thoughts on this – a grand unified theory of the dining year – that you can read in the forthcoming second print issue of Broadsheet London. But if there is one 2025 hospitality narrative that I keep coming back to, then it is what we might call The Revenge of Central London. Crisp moved from Hammersmith to Mayfair. Kudu swapped Peckham for Marylebone. Even Singburi closed its mythical Leyton shopfront only to reemerge in a glossy new-build unit in Shoreditch.
What’s driving this trend? The unforgiving economic and demographic pressures of running a food business in this era means that many high-profile restaurateurs have simply had to follow the money and the habitual diners; to converge, either through expansion or migration, on a handful of centrally located areas.
The byproduct of all this is that London restaurants (or at least the ones getting the most critical plaudits and attention) have never looked more slick, professional, or broadly Mayfair-coded.
To be clear (and I say this as someone who has eaten in his fair share of shambolic east London broom cupboards) this is generally a good thing. But I do slightly mourn the days when the hottest place in town was likely to be a charmingly scrappy affair operating out of a New Cross pub, a converted King's Cross petrol station or a malodorous Peckham car park.
I miss the days when hype-magnets occupied former strip clubs as well as former royal residences. What do we lose if edge becomes an endangered characteristic, and the year’s biggest openings all happen to be grand, grown-up affairs in Notting Hill, Marylebone and Mayfair?
I thought of all this a few weeks ago, as I sat in The Macbeth: former Four Legs chef Jamie Allan’s newish Portuguese-inflected kitchen in a former east London gig venue with indie-sleaze heritage.
True, a Hoxton boozer that sits a reasonable walk from an Overground station is hardly an journey into the heart of gastronomic darkness. But if you have already made your way to The Macbeth – taking in the powercut gloom of its dining room; the peeling, red flocked ceiling; and the noisy tableau of passing market life through its cracked windows – then you will know that it possesses a punkish spirit that feels like a throwback.
The bifana is the thing to make these surroundings dissolve: a modestly loaded pork ciabatta, its lower bun drenched with wine-spiked marinade, augmented by chilli oil, mustard and a twin hit of melted mozzarella and the bubbled, fried parmesan skirt of a birria taco. It is more flavourmaxxed British-Iberian bacon roll than faithful Lisbonite staple. But it is also one of the most intensely pleasurable things that I’ve eaten all year.
I did not have very long. The only other thing that I tried on the ever-changing chalkboard menu was a smooshed plate of tuna and shoestring fries – bound up with soft-boiled eggs, olives and the tart heat of pickled guindilla peppers – that, like the bifana, balanced explosiveness of flavour with messiness of form. I left with a reminder of the potency of sensitively cooked, hugely satisfying food that just happens to be served up in a place where the toilets smell of bleach and urinal cakes rather than Montamonta hand wash.
DIY endeavours at London’s fringes (and I am thinking here of places like Doma, Polentina, Comalera and Swilipino’s terrific recent Dalston pop-up) deserve support and mainstream attention. A healthy restaurant ecosystem needs grit as well as glamour; divey personality to temper all the white-jacketed polish. You can start to redress the balance by heading to Hoxton, gazing up at that peeling ceiling, and letting a £12 pub sandwich restore your faith.
Dish of the week: Jikoni's scrag-end pie
Dish seasonality is not just about availability of produce. Each winter, as the temperature drops, Jikoni founders Ravinder Bhogal and Nadeem Lalani Nanjuwany reintroduce this typically polyglot riff on a shepherd’s pie. Lamb neck patiently coaxed to soft, succulent submission; fragrant turmeric-spiced mash; an insistent lick of bright, green chilli heat. During a recent Friday lunch at this Marylebone gem, I finally experienced this warming, weighted blanket of a dish. Nigella is a superfan and I can absolutely see why.
Jikoni, 19-21 Blandford St, London, W1U 3DH
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