Nandine, Camberwell

Another week, another fantastic new restaurant in Camberwell. I try not to moan too much on this site about the fact that certain areas of town seem overly saturated with great places to eat, while others have to wait decades between worthwhile new options, but it's hard not to be wildly jealous of the residents of Camberwell who have such a selection on their doorstep they could conceivably eat somewhere different and good every night of the month without having to leave SE5.

The latest addition to Church Street, fitting quite comfortably into the spot recently vacated by Mike & Ollie (opposite FM Mangal, a few doors down from Silk Road and Camberwell Arms FFS), is Nandine, a modern Kurdish restaurant. The menu at Nandine is that unbeatable combination of mostly familiar and wonderfully offal-forward ingredients treated in exciting and unfamiliar (at least to anyone who isn't already familiar with Kurdish cuisine, which definitely includes myself) ways. So although you may not recognise words like Tapsi, Tirshak, Kubba, Dandok and Jipa, you might - as I did - read descriptions such as "Pan-seared chicken heart with Kurdish Riha chilli sauce, garnished with watercress and pomegranate" and allow yourself to become very excited indeed.

First to arrive though, was turnip. And if you think I'm playing down the description of this dish for dramatic effect, you'd be right. Because Shelim e Kulaû is one of the most surprising and delightful dishes I've eaten in the last couple of years. Sort of a cross between sweet potato and turnip, so sweet and soft but earthy and rich, came dressed in a remarkable black tea and mulberry molasses mixture that nimbly danced a line between sweet and sour, herby and fruity - partly strangely familiar and partly completely new. But the stroke of genius was a sprinkling of smoked sea salt on top, which created a whole other level of flavour profile, like eating salted caramel in vegetable form. We were told this is a traditional Kurdish street snack that the kids eat on the way home from school. Lucky kids.

Tirshyat was a bowl of house pickles, which arrived with the warning "careful with your lighter clothing, they stain". Which is both a useful bit of advice and also a nice neat way of demonstrating how lovingly home made they were. Cauliflower, carrots and cabbage were all expertly balanced, not too sweet and not too vinegar-y, but predictably my favourite were the miniature pickled chillies which had a lovely bite and packed quite a punch of heat.

Kinger were little deep-fried balls of potato, caramelised onion and Kurdish wild foraged artichoke roots, and if you're wondering how a restaurant in Camberwell gets hold of wild Kurdish artichoke then you're not the only one. Turns out that certain key ingredients (the artichoke, and the wild pistachios for the dessert) are sent over by her family back in the Middle East, so not only is the food at Nandine excellent but you have a very good chance of coming across an ingredient literally not available anywhere else in the Western hemisphere.

Chicken hearts were also on the menu, so obviously they had to be ordered. Chilfra had wonderfully tender little morsels of offal, with just enough bite without being chewy, in a herby chilli sauce studded with mint and pomegranate seeds. Perhaps if I'm going to be brutally honest this dish was closer in style to the kind of thing I'd had before, but the fact this stood out as being more familiar just shows you how unique and exciting everything else had been.

At first glance, this tray of lamb kebab may seem familiar - ordinary, even. But this is an artifice that lasts only until you take your first bite, because believe me there is absolutely nothing ordinary about the way these things are constructed. Instead of the more usual homogenous dense mince, the texture of these Lula kebabs is a mixture of lamb flank and mutton, with - we were told - a specific type of fat from the outside of the mutton shoulder that loosens and enriches the meat to a texture so soft and light it's apparently a skill to not have them fall apart on the grill. The result is a "kebab" closer in form to a kind of rustic grilled mousse, a dark salty crust encasing a fluffy, gamey filling that's so dangerously easy to eat they can almost be inhaled. Incredible stuff.

I had also, of course, to order the stuffed lamb tripe - Jipa, which was every bit as lovely as I'd hoped. Soft, wobbly bits of fat alongside firmer - but not chewy - tripe, stuffed with fragrant cinnamon rice and almonds, and all in a smooth bone broth, it was another offal masterclass. To provide texture to contrast with the main ingredients they'd cleverly deep-fried strips of tripe into offal scratchings, which would have been a nice little snack by themselves.

After having polished off all of the above - the food at Nandine, despite looking unfamiliar and intense on paper, is remarkably easy to eat - it's testament to the quality of this homemade Qazwan baklava that this, too, didn't last long. As I mentioned before, the pistachios on top are foraged from the wild and sent over by owner Pary Baban's family back home, and came on top of a silky smooth milk pudding and folds of delicate filo pastry. Like everything that had come before, it was inventive, rewarding, and that beguiling mix of unique yet eerily familiar.

There can be no greater compliment to Nandine that I don't think there's anywhere else like it in London, and if there is then I need to know about it. It takes a lot to surprise and beguile a jaded London food blogger in 2024, and yet the team at Nandine have somehow come up with a restaurant concept at once fiercely distinctive and authentic while flattering with just enough that's familiar to allow you to enjoy it to the fullest. It's one thing to introduce an unfamiliar cuisine to a new audience, but to do it so lovingly and successfully requires real skill and a genuine gift for hospitality. Nandine has all that going for it and more, and judging by the crowds packing into this buzzy little spot on a cold Wednesday night, it's already struck a chord. Another great place to eat in Camberwell, then. I'm not jealous, honest.

9/10

I was a friend's +1 to this invited meal, and we didn't see a bill. From a brief tot-up of our dinner though I think the bill would have come to around £50 a head with plenty to drink, so pretty reasonable.

Shawarma Bar, Exmouth Market

There's a little Lebanese restaurant near the office in Holborn that does a very smart trade serving lamb & chicken shawarma (sliced off a vertical spit), meshwi (cubed, grilled over coals) and kofte (minced and grilled) wraps to a lunchtime work crowd. The wraps themselves can be good, but they have an annoying habit of preparing a huge pile of the ones they think they'll sell in advance of the lunchtime rush, meaning that if you go in any time between 12:30 and 2pm they'll invariably reach for one off the cold pre-prepared pile, give it a quick blast in the sandwich press and then hand it to you. But, if you ask for a fresh one (yes, I am that person) they will (after a bit of huffing and puffing) usually shave you off some fresh shawarma and you can enjoy a half-decent kebab; not brilliant, but better than anything from Pret next door.

But it got me thinking; what if someone did this kind of thing properly? Quality slow-cooked lamb shoulder, seasoned and spiced to perfection, home-made pickles, house chilli sauce, proper fluffy fresh bread, all made to order? If even a fairly thrown-together lamb kebab can satisfy (even when not eaten at 3am after chucking-out time), surely one made with skill and attention would be a revelation? And it is with this in mind, I'm sure, that Shawarma Bar was born.

If anyone knows how to make a success of Middle Eastern comfort food it's the team behind Berber & Q, whose cavernous restaurant in Haggerston served me some of the most exciting dishes of 2015, and who, along with places like the Palomar, spearheaded London's newfound enthusiasm for this kind of cuisine. But it wasn't so much their ways with grilled meats as the exciting variety and quality of their vegetable offering that made more of an impact - their grilled cauliflower dressed in tahini and pomegranate seeds was an instant star dish, and house hummus showed you just how vital and vibrant this Levantine staple can be when made by someone who both knows and cares what they're doing.

It's no surprise, then, that it's the side dishes, the details, that turn Shawarma Bar from being a very good kebab shop into something rather special. House pickles, for example, showed the full range from soft and sweet (carrots) to sharp and sour (onions), with soft gherkins, black olives and crunchy cabbage providing support. There was even a slice of shocking dyed purple turnip, something I really miss when it's not there despite it not being the most natural looking thing on earth.

Mesabaha was - and there's no other word for it - wonderful, a perfect marriage of silky smooth tahini and juicy chickpeas, studded with some kind of chilli chutney which added both heat (though not too much) and a supremely addictive citrussy tang. The chollah it came with was soft and gently toasted over coals, and though perhaps not quite as brilliant as the Palomar's version (not quite as sweet or fluffy) it did a great job at scooping up the chickpeas. Nobody should go to Shawarma Bar and not order the Mesabaha.

This bowl of Mejaderah contained fragrant spicy rice, crisply dry-fried onions and lentils, and was a comforting and interesting side dish showcasing - again - Shawarma Bar's mastery of texture and seasoning. Maybe if you're very well travelled or an aficionado of Levantine cooking in London you may have come across something like this before, but for many people (myself included) dishes like these are still a delightful novelty. And hugely enjoyable to eat, too, of course.

And so to the main event, the lamb shawarma. Firstly, and most importantly, the meat is lovely, bags of lamby flavour and with all the variation in texture (soft fatty bits, crispy dark bits, smooth meaty bits) that you'd pick for your own kebab if you were there at the spit shaving the meat off yourself. The salad is fresh and crisp, the harissa sauce not too punchy but lending a nice gentle burn, and a generous handful of herbs, crunchy and bright as if they'd been pulled straight out of the ground, added more colour, literally and figuratively. And finally, binding it all together, a good dollop of that beautiful nutty, earthy tahini.

The only thing that wasn't perfect about the shawarma - and I'm sure they have their reasons - was the bread, which was a bit too thick and doughy and meant that every bite was a bit heavy on the bread element. The pitas are flown in from Israel, I was told, and while doing their job well enough I can't help wonder how much nicer they would have been fresh out of the oven, or even cooked that morning somewhere in town. Perhaps that's the plan eventually, but meantime that's the only thing I'd change about what is otherwise pretty close to the best kebab in London.

I'll be going back to Shawarma Bar - of course I will, I work 15 minutes away and it's brilliant - but I feel confident enough to post this review after only two and a half dishes because of their pedigree and because sometimes, the quality of a place is evident just on the first bite. Shawarma Bar takes all the things that made the Haggerston spot great - the skill with grilled meats, the radiant salads, the exotic Middle Eastern herbs and spices - and repackages it for an informal short-stop takeaway crowd in a lovely little room with no communal seating or annoying loud music. It is, essentially, Berber & Q - The Selected Highlights. The Greatest Hits. And I'm predicting massive chart success.

9/10

There's every chance Shawarma Bar will be in the next version of the app. Meanwhile, see what I had to say about what else is in the area.

Black Axe Mangal, Islington

Perhaps it's a good thing I've had a bad meal at a restaurant everyone else seems to love. Consensus is certainly useful, especially when making a guide (or even, hint hint, an app), but runs the risk of getting at best boring, at worst counterproductive. Over the last few months I've barely heard a word against Chick'n'Sours, the Marksman, Hoppers, Bao and the rest and while it's great that these places exist (and are clearly excellent by most standard measures), the overwhelming agreement across online and print media starts to look a bit less like objective appraisal and a bit more like group think. Nowhere, despite my occasional 10/10 score, is *perfect* - a healthy approval rating for even the greatest restaurants in town shouldn't really be over 90%. This is, after all, a democracy, not Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

So here's my attempt to bring down the average on Black Axe Mangal a bit. I wanted to enjoy it of course; that goes for every restaurant I visit. But from the moment I stepped through the door of this self-consciously grungy spot near Highbury & Islington tube it felt like the customer was the least important part of some kind of strange student art project where eye-catching ingredients, ironic blokey cocktails and an insanely loud heavy metal soundtrack took precedence over anything close to hospitality.

But let's start where it matters - the food. Unable to choose between the two £3 snacks, and against, it has to be said, the advice of our waitress, we ordered both. Smoked cod's roe and crisps was pleasant enough, chips clearly home made and the roe with plenty of flavour and nicely seasoned. Salt pollack with crispy pig's skin was less enjoyable - a very greasy slab of puffed skin, so fresh out of the fryer it popped quite painfully in the mouth, with a blob of bacalau (as they'd call it in Catalonia) that didn't really go with the pig and wouldn't combine with the greasy skin even if you wanted it to. And yes, that is a pool of grease you can see at the bottom of the bowl.

"Lamb offal" was a decent piece of fresh flatbread, covered in indeterminate mush of lamb, and beaten into submission by onions, mayonnaise and way too much chilli. Sweet, soggy and way too fiery, it was a bit of a chore to eat.

"Sesame" was more edible, but I've still had way better flatbread from Green Lanes for a lot less. It was hot and fresh and had a decent texture, but was not really any more than that.

"Brussel[sic] sprout, cauliflower & preserved lemon" was just an unseasoned bowl of raw sprouts and cauliflower, dressed with nothing more than lemon juice as far as I can tell. Fine if you're on some kind of raw food diet and allergic to salt and pepper but oddly enough that's not why I'd travelled to a kebab shop in Islington.

I'd wanted to try Mangalitza pork since the boys at Pitt Cue started playing around with it in their place in Soho. In many ways, I wish I'd waited for my first taste - this was just a big slab of chewy meat, dripping with bland fat and pretty unpleasant. It was topped with rock hard sticks of greasy pork fat and a few bits of winter veg. The scallop was hiding underneath somewhere, as if it belonged to a different dish altogether. Not nice.

Finally, the Deep Throater wrap, hilariously stamped with its student-joke name - more decent bread containing a sweet, mushy filling of bland slow-cooked mutton. There was no trace of anchovy, the salty savouriness of which may have lifted it a bit, just an underwhelming faint note of mayonnaise and stewed meat. By this point we'd lost all patience, with the food, the lack of elbow room, the having to scream to be heard above a speaker system set to "fuck the customers, at least the staff are having a good time". We sipped the last of our ironically-decorated cocktails, paid the not insubstantial bill, and left.

Maybe I'm just getting old, I thought to myself, as we rested our ear drums and nerves in the lovely, quiet Canonbury pub just around the corner. Black Axe is clearly popular, there was a queue when we left and every table was taken, and this in a part of town with genuinely excellent competition like Trullo and Le Coq just over the road. Maybe I was missing something, or underestimated the population of hearing-impaired death-metal loving kebab lovers in N1. Maybe I'm just not their target audience.

But then I remembered that Smoking Goat have all the same acoustic, queuing and seating issues as Black Axe but also serve food so good that all those other inconveniences are just that, inconveniences. No, I didn't like Black Axe Mangal because the food wasn't very good. And you can blast your Spotify playlist at me as loud as you can, make me wait for hours in the rain and sit me three inches from a table of ten who've been drinking since midday, but if my dinner's not up to scratch, I won't go back. I won't go back.

4/10

Chifafa, Clerkenwell

I had heard rumblings of appreciation about Chifafa, about how they were trying to do for the kebab what MeatLiquor did for the burger, about how they were making their own bread, pickling their own vegetables, and generally going about things in a way guaranteed to grab the attention of any overeager foodie (that would be me, then). And so when I made the trip myself and spotted a Big Green Egg lurking in the back of the Chifafa kitchens, I knew I was onto a good thing.

Other than that Egg though (every home should have one) at first glance Chifafa doesn't look that much different from any other lunchtime sandwich shop aimed at local office workers. There's a few tables and chairs, a drinks cabinet, a bar with a few cakes on display, queue and pay one side, pick up the other. The menu is short but attractive in a don't-run-before-you-can-walk kind of a way, with chicken, lamb, veal, falafel and halloumi options each with a slightly customised set of accompaniments and with an option to have a bread-free salad box instead of the usual wrap. So far, so Clerkenwell.

But a lamb wrap was clearly a cut above what you might ordinarily expect from high street kebabbery - tender chunks of marinated meat, with diced salad, a nice sharp tahini yoghurt, mango pickle and - a clever touch - chunks of feta cheese. Yes I could have done with a bit more of a char on the meat (they say the meat is 'finished' on the char-grill but I couldn't detect much sign of that) and £7 is quite a lot to pay for a sandwich, but it did feel like a premium product, thanks also to the fantastic bread which was soft and salty and just chewy enough to be a perfect wrap bread without being tough.

On a second visit, I was hoping for a similarly impressive experience with the veal (£8.40), but sadly it wasn't to be. The meat was, weirdly, and despite being cooked pink, dry and chewy, with no discernible flavour and swamped by a hardly powerful minty tzatziki dressing. Like the lamb there was no crunch or smoke from the grill, which may have improved things slightly, but unlike the lamb the salad and marinade wasn't enough to compensate - I'd asked for 'medium' hot sauce with the lamb and didn't get any chilli kick at all, so I was hoping for a bit more from the "hot" requested with the veal. In the end, I may just as well have not bothered, as I couldn't detect even a hint of a burn.

Perhaps it's still early days. A tweak to the controls of the Big Green Egg, longer contact with a hotter charcoal grill, a more liberal use of chillies, and we could have a real destination lunch spot. Plus, Chifafa has two more tricks up its sleeve - house pickles, which looked a bit washed out but tasted great, with a lively crunch and good balance of vinegar/sugar, and the homemade hummus which is probably the best I've tried in London, and I've been to more Dalston ocakbasi than I care to remember.

So I'll stop whingeing about what I'd like to change and praise instead what we already are lucky enough to have, a friendly, forward-thinking kebab shop on Clerkenwell Road that could very well end up taking a large chunk of my lunch money. And right next to the bus stop, too.

6/10

Tsiakkos and Charcoal, Maida Vale

I don't know if you've noticed, and I daresay you haven't, but I've been on a mini-quest to find a Greek restaurant in London worth bothering with. At the risk of repeating myself, it makes no sense that just so many Greek restaurants in the capital are so bad - the cuisine isn't a million miles away from Turkish and there are more good ocakbasi than you would ever want, and the Greek community in London is equally long-established and successful. After a poor meal at Lemonia in Primrose hill, commenter Alex C thought that it might be simply that Greeks cook all their best food at home, and whether or not that's true (I've also heard rumours that Lemonia staff get fed exceptionally well, it's just the paying public that suffer), it's not really an excuse. London even has a smattering of good Mexican restaurants now, and there must be far fewer Mexicans making their way over the Atlantic than there are Greek Tavernas already up and running. The whole thing is baffling.


So more in hope than expectation, I battled through the rain with a friend last week to Tsiakkos and Charcoal, subject of a number of healthy recommendations from various individuals and, given the pain of previous meals, our designated last shot at decent Greek food. And what a weird, ramshackle old place it is - inside is dark and chaotic, walls and counters covered with old cloth and junk piled up in the corners. Outside is even more bizarre - a courtyard containing old sofas and various statues, trinkets, road signs and other ephemera sheltering under corrugated plastic; it was like having dinner at Steptoe & Son's. We ordered the 'mezze' (£20 a head but containing more or less most of the menu) from our friendly if slightly distracted waiter, and a bottle of £13 house Rioja.


Things started well, at least. The cold mezze were all pleasingly rustic-looking, in fact I'd never seen hummus or taramasalata so chunky, and they tasted very good. Potato and beetroot salad, dripping in oil and garlic, was great, and although the pittas were bought-in (or at least felt like it) they did their job well enough. Tzatziki was straightforward but fine.


Grilled halloumi were pleasant if unadventurous, but then grilled halloumi always is. I was more disappointed with a feta salad, which despite having a huge fresh chunk of fluffy feta on top suffered from bog-standard tomato-and-rocket filler and was fairly unimpressive all said and done. Nice olives in there though.


Lamb kleftikos was the best of the meat dishes, and although lacking a bit in spicing or seasoning made up for it by being lovely and crusty on the outside and oozily moist within. The rice it came with was hugely enjoyable too, cooked with the meat juices perhaps and full of flavour. Tsiakkos and Charcoal are so proud of their kleftikos, in fact, they brought out another one for us to try when we were hardly halfway through the first (actually this is a lie - it was just a miscommunication with the kitchen and a mistake).


"Slow burnt pork" sounds like the kind of thing I'd ordinarily beat a path to anyone's door to try, but had unfortunately here been doused in a hugely oversweet marinade of some kind (honey?) and was quite sickly. We didn't eat much of it. And chicken and lamb kebabs, though cooked properly and with good crusty skins, had next to no flavour at all. In fact, flavourless kebabs has been a bit of a feature of Greek restaurants in London generally - either they really do like their meat as bland as possible, or the quality of the raw ingredients back home means they can skimp on the seasoning and still enjoy a nice end result. It's presumably hard to get top-end chicken or lamb in London for £20/head.


I will say this about Tsiakkos and Charcoal - there was a hell of a lot of food (not even counting the extra kleftikos) for your £20 and they refilled the bread without asking, so even though there wasn't much to shout about you still felt like you were just about getting good value. They also happily boxed up the bits and pieces we couldn't finish, so extra points for that too. But even ignoring the long journey into deepest Maida Vale (it's a good 20 minutes walk from the nearest tube), our meal wasn't quite either cheap enough (think - again - about all those amazing ocakbasi grills in Dalston which would be half the price) or exciting enough to be worth the effort.


This may be deeply unfair to however many excellent Greek restaurants there are out there that have yet to feature on this blog, but I have a suspicion that Tsaikkos and Charcoal may, in fact, be as good as this food gets in London. Perhaps what we need is a restaurateur that will do for Greece what Thomasina Miers did for Mexico or Russell Norman did for Venice - to showcase a greater variety of those cuisines in an affordable and accessible way, served with a smile and an attitude. In fact, according to Daniel Young commenting on the Lemonia post, we may be about to get just that, as Theodore Kyriakou, original founder of the Real Greek long before it went downhill, returns to do business in London once again. But until then, we have Tsaikkos and Charcoal – it’s not perfect, but I just don’t have the time, the money or the capacity for disappointment to keep looking for anything better.

6/10

19 Numara Bos Cirrik I, Dalston

On the one hand, this is going to be yet another blog post about a fantastic, ludicrously cheap Ocakbasi grill, and to that end, I apologise if it feels like you've heard it all before. Londoners are spoiled for decent Turkish restaurants in a way that almost no other cuisine can manage - some are better than others, of course, and I imagine it is at least theoretically possible to have a bad Turkish if you try hard enough, but there are just so many good ones scattered around certain areas of Dalston and Shoreditch that you'd have to be very unlucky to come away disappointed. In one tiny stretch of the Stoke Newington Road there is the brilliant and ever popular Mangal 2, the unpronounceable but apparently very highly regarded Istanbul Iskembecisi, and the cryptically titled 19 Numara Bos Cirrik I, where I spent a thoroughly enjoyable Monday evening.


You know there is some real talent in a kitchen when even something as straightforward as house hummus draws gasps of approval. It was, in fact, the finest example of this humble dish I've had in a very long time - light and smooth, seasoned perfectly and astonishingly fresh. A generous round of lahmacun (sort of a Turkish pizza for want of a better description) was straight out of the oven and lovely and crisp, and cost a pathetic £2; amazing value. And even a plate of yoghurt and cucumber did its job commendably well, cooling the soft house bread and tasting bright and summery.


The only problem I had with the house salad "Esme" was that I wasn't sure how to eat it. Chopped and crushed and ground down so much (I watched them do it) it had turned into a kind of Turkish gazpacho, and the flat plate it came on was hugely impractical. But, needless to say, it was seasoned well, tasted great, and was a lovely colour from the tomatoes and fresh parsley. And while perhaps not quite up there with the version at FM Mangal in Camberwell (and I doubt anything ever could be), the pomegranate and onion pickle was still hugely addictive. The Esme was £4 and the onion pickle was free. Crazy.



Deep fried I think rather than grilled, the halloumi wasn't 19NBC's greatest creation, but tempered with the onion pickle it had crunch and enough salty cheesy goodness to make it worth the effort. And around this time yet another free salad arrived, just a straightforward mix of tomatoes, lettuce, onion and cabbage dressed in olive oil and parsley but still, they went to the effort of making it for us and didn't even charge. The generosity of spirit is heartwarming.



Lamb behti kebabs came served on house bread soaked up the meat juices and soft brown rice. The kebabs themselves were top-drawer, moist and rich and seasoned perfectly, and there was a huge amount of meat here for £9.50. Part of the reason our bill was so low could have been that this was the only significant meat dish we ordered, but as it was midsummer (and 19NBC has no air conditioning, so be warned) we didn't really feel like anything too heavy.


With two beers, a Ribena (don't ask) and as much iced tap water as you could want, the bill came to just £40 for 4 people. All four of us left stuffed, happy and with kebab juice staining our clothing (well OK that might have just been me) and with nothing, other than perhaps the raging heat, to complain about. It is hard not to get complacent when you're tucking into another great Turkish grill and paying a pittance for it, but the astonishing quality and value of so many of these places should not distract for a second from the effort and skill that must go into running them. 19 Numara Bos Cirrik I is Yet Another Great Ocakbasi, and I will never get bored of eating there.

8/10