I can see the Toklas terrace from the Broadsheet London office window. As lunch service ramps up or I’m clearing out my inbox at the end of the day, I hear all the telltale sounds of diners experiencing a top-tier Med-inspired meal: laughter, the clinking of glasses, clattering cutlery. And with every cackle or exclamation from below, I can picture the singular dish that’s bringing those diners such joy: the fried feta with honey and chilli.
When someone first raved about these golden nuggets to me, my immediate (and admittedly cynical) thought was “How good could it really be?” The salty-sweet combo of honey and cheese isn’t exactly groundbreaking. As Toklas head chef Chris Shaw tells me, this is his riff on saganaki, the classic Greek fried cheese that’s often drizzled in honey. “Saganaki has been around forever,” he says.
But despite this flavour combo’s ubiquity, from the first smack of chilli to the last chew of cheese, I was hooked. I visited not two weeks later for another round. Even as you indelicately rip into your crisp-on-the-outside triangle, the salty feta somehow maintains its structural integrity, allowing for an appropriate coating of honey on the exterior, with a slight zing from the chilli and a herbaceous hit from the oregano. It’s precisely what you want to eat before a main course – and honestly, if it was socially acceptable, at regular intervals throughout the meal.
Shaw says it took a while to find the right cheese; they settled on a Greek barrel-aged feta from Natoora mainly due to its firmness and shape: a rectangle that could be cut into two triangles. “It’s a lovely feta, nice and salty, a little bit sheepy,” he says of the rich, slightly tangy, cheese. It earns its crisp outside layer from a double coating of egg and panko breadcrumbs, after which it’s plunged into a deep fryer filled with quality rapeseed oil, then given a lick of Oxfordshire honey, dusted in oregano and showered in chilli.
Shaw says he never meant for the snack to become a menu mainstay, but now the restaurant sells hundreds a week. “A few regulars were like, you can’t take this off the menu.
“At the end of the day with Brits and fried cheese, you’re never going to go wrong, are you?”
I Can’t Stop Thinking About is a series about London dishes Broadsheet editors and contributors are obsessed with.
