Vittles

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is an interview with Sonora owners Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier, who this week closed their Stoke Newington taqueria, following its most successful year. On Monday morning, a little under a month since announcing that Sonora taqueria in Stoke Newington would close at the end of October, its owners Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier wrote on Instagram, “Thats’ it.” Last month, they noted the toll it has taken on each of them – and how running one of London’s most hyped food businesses for the better part of the last decade has stressed them out, animated them and ultimately become their lives. The irony of closing just as the business has begun to thrive in a moment when many others are struggling, is not lost on either of them. But they’ve always done things their way. “We are exhausted!” they wrote on Monday. “We could have never imagined that what originally was a tiny project for a visa sponsorship would eventually become our entire lives, give us a purpose and immense satisfaction.” I first met Michelle and Sam at Pollo Feliz, the stall which came before Sonora in east London’s Netil Market in early 2020. I got to know them better during the Covid-19 lockdown when calling on them weekly for Michelle’s peerless flour tortillas, initially their USP, which Sam would deliver on his bike. In the two years or so following, since I worked in an office building nearby, I witnessed first-hand the queues at the market in the post-Covid era. I always enjoyed the tacos, the Friday burrito specials, the moments of innovation. Even before they moved to their first bricks-and-mortar site in Stoke Newington in 2023, it was Michelle’s quiet fastidiousness and Sam’s candour that set them apart and kept me and so many others engaged. Both Michelle and Sam have always been publicly honest about how hard they’ve found doing a thing they never meant to do, while at the same time reluctantly acknowledging that they’ve advanced Mexican cuisine in London maybe more than anyone else in the modern era. Though there’s no sense of what, if anything, might come next, it felt like a good time to talk to them about the last few years and the last few weeks. I wanted to really understand what’s it’s been like behind those grills, what happened with Mexa at Arcade, the cease and desist from Taqueria in Notting Hill and the Sonora superfan lawyer who got them off on a technicality.We hope you enjoy the episode. Let us know what you think in the comments! Adam Coghlan This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is an interview with baker and pastry chef Anna Higham, the owner of the lauded Quince Bakery and Clementine, a café opening soon in Islington. Higham’s story is as rich and varied as her bakes. Her career spans some of the world’s most famous kitchens, beginning with the Gordon Ramsay Group in London. After moving to New York, she spent time at the legendary Gramercy Tavern. While in the city, the mentorship of Claudia Fleming would prove formative for Higham, and when she returned to London in the late 2010s she brought with her a focus on provenance and seasonality.Higham’s name quickly became known to pastry aficionados in the capital via her work at the landmark new-wave Modern British restaurant Lyle’s. While the pastry section broadly subscribed to the sometimes sparse aesthetic and precision preferred by Lyle’s head chef James Lowe – she shared his obsession with hyper-seasonality, British fruit and heritage grains – her desserts were subtly different. Higham would ensure her creations were generous and delicious, with less voguish fixation on oats, fruit and yoghurt than her colleagues had, whose desserts could sometimes pass for breakfast bowls. Instead, there were cakes, cream, meringues, caramels – as well as an abundance of berries. During our conversation, Higham discusses what drove that approach, who shaped it, and how she gained the confidence to finally go it alone. Following the immense success of Quince and ahead of the opening of Clementine next month, she also shares her view on the ‘hype’ bakery scene in London – and her venue’s own place within it. We hope you enjoy the episode. Let us know what you think in the comments! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s very special episode of the Vittles podcast is with journalist and editor Stephen Buranyi, who spent six months reporting and investigating the world of restaurant influencers for our Issue 3 cover story, titled ‘Who’s Paying for All of This?When he set out reporting at the beginning of this year, Stephen, an experienced reporter, soon realised the London restaurant influencer industry was much more tight-lipped than he’d anticipated, more discreet ‘than the civil service’. ‘I found in general here people did not wanna talk,’ he tells us in today’s conversation. ‘I think there’s a sense that they don’t want anyone to know how this whole thing actually works.’Eventually, he found people who would talk. In this podcast, we learn more about how those conversations came about, why ‘a lot of restaurateurs and PRs find influencers a little bit distasteful and a bit vulgar,’ but also why they rely on them nonetheless, even when they claim they don’t. He gets into the humans behind the characters that pop up in our feeds every day, drooling, screaming, and waxing lyrical; a largely male band of content creators who have, in many ways, become the dominant force in food media today.We also examine the influencer industry as an extension of the advertising industry, and the problems both influencers and PRs encounter when influencers lose their audience’s trust. Stephen gets at the structural, algorithmic forces underpinning influencers’ past success, their anxiety about the future, where influencing might be going next, and - most importantly - how everyone is getting paid. We also delve into the reporting process itself: the shocks and surprises, what didn’t make it into the final piece and without too many spoilers, try to figure out how all this happened.We hope you enjoy it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is with one of the UK’s most talented and idiosyncratic chefs. If you haven’t heard of Will Gleave, then your favourite chef will have. Through his early cooking at the wine bar P. Franco, and then at the restaurants Bright and Peg, Will has exercised an immense influence over the modern London restaurant industry – its focus on natural wine, borderless cuisine, high-level cooking in relaxed environments, and a type of effortlessness that many aspire to.In a rare public appearance, Will spends an hour talking to Adam about his early years cooking in London restaurants, setting the small plate-natural wine bar template in the city at P. Franco, looking outside of Europe for inspiration, what he likes to eat himself and why, ultimately, he decided to leave the capital and set up home on the Kent coast with his young family, and cook at Sargasso in Margate. Will traces his journey from the kitchens of Harvey Nichols, The Square, and Arbutus in London to Tasmania, where he found himself at Garagistes, one of Australia’s most celebrated restaurants. When returned to the UK, he co-founded P. Franco, which was named Eater London’s restaurant of the year in 2017. Bright and Peg followed, before all three abruptly closed in 2022 and 2023 to the shock of the London restaurant industry. This was followed by a year-long residency at Hill & Szrok on Broadway Market - which was our own restaurant of the year in 2024 - where he revived the British steak and chop house with his signature elan. During the episode, we discuss what it was really like taking over two induction hobs inside a wine shop with no extraction (or licence to trade as a restaurant), the relentless misery of working in London’s most renowned Michelin-starred kitchens, the influence of Australia and Japan on his cooking, the greatness of 40 Maltby Street and its chef Steve Williams, the story behind the closure of Bright and Peg, tradition and innovation, cooking steak, who the best pasta chef in the city is right now, and whether we have really yet to have THE ‘Will Gleave restaurant’. We hope you enjoy it.A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub, the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and immediately went viral on social media.In the episode, we discuss creating something that people really want in a moment when so many hospitality businesses are feeling the pain; about the meaning and importance of community and authenticity; about navigating virality and hype online; and about how, despite all their early success, neither are trained chefs. We hope you enjoy the episode.Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney.When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients.Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time.We hope you enjoy the episode.Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group. As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording. Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.We hope you enjoy the episode.Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions. We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving. In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged. In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.We hope you enjoy it.Credits:The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.The full Vittles masthead can be found here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June. One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or embellished by PR – to pull back the curtain and give a true insight into what’s actually going on with workers, customers and finances. She’s remained faithful to that approach with Gina, publicly disclosing that it cost more than £500,000 to open the restaurant and we wanted to know more about the parts of that sum. And to ask – when knowing all she does about the many challenges facing restaurateurs and chefs in the current economic climate – why she would open her own restaurant? Elsewhere in the episode, we cover how Rav and Mattie ended up opening in Chingford, her food backstory in Southampton and Leyton, dream customers, nightmare customers, her mentors and the ‘pastry idol’ who taught her that you should never work for your heroes. Finally, we discuss the beauty of the invert puff pastry that she used in the two galettes she brought for us to taste at the recording. We hope you enjoy it.CreditsThe Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.Ravneet Gill Taiano is the author of Pastry Chef's Guide, a judge on Junior Bake Off, founder of hospitality platform Countertalk and the owner of restaurant Gina in Chingford.Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.The full Vittles masthead can be found here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with some making it a matter of pride to never use or engage with it. Whatever your opinion, PR remains a significant and integral part of London’s restaurant scene. Almost every new restaurant hoping to get press uses PR... and it seems that the more they do, the more the rest of them need to as well.So it felt like the right time to invite a titan of the restaurant PR industry on this podcast. Gemma Bell is one of the most influential restaurant PRs in the country today, heading up her own agency Gemma Bell & Company, whose clients over the last 15 years have included St. JOHN, Dishoom, Yotam Ottolenghi, The River Café, Koya, Padella, The Clove Club and many more.Adam Coghlan has known Gemma for about 15 years and in that time, the industries of public relations and restaurants have changed dramatically, particularly due to the influence of social media. In this podcast we talk about those huge changes, about what clients want from PR, what she feels her role in the industry is, the influence of her mentors (including Elizabeth Crompton-Batt and hotelier Ian Schrager), parting ways with Yotam Ottolenghi and the biggest lesson she’s learnt from the last two to three decades of working in the restaurant world.We hope you enjoy it.CreditsThe Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.Gemma Bell is the founder of the agency Gemma Bell & Company.Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.The full Vittles masthead can be found here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe