London: food trends to look out for this summer
From community-sourced fermentation recipes to airport food worth flying for, find out what and where we'll all be eating in London over the next few months.
London: food trends to look out for this summer
From community-sourced fermentation recipes to airport food worth flying for, find out what and where we'll all be eating in London over the next few months.
Baking with the stars
Former Michelin-starred head chef Christoffer Hruskova was a major player in bringing new Nordic cuisine over to the UK around six years ago, with his restaurant North Road in Clerkenwell. He’s since hung up his chef whites and exchanged them for a baker’s apron, opening The Bread Station in London Fields. Christoffer now spends his mornings baking incredible sourdoughs, rye bread and classic pastries that are all natural, very Nordic and as moreish as they are Danish. Dominique Ansel – inventor of America’s most coveted pastry, the Cronut – will also be opening his first UK bakery in Belgravia, so expect snaking queues of sweet-toothed sugar-lovers eager to try his world-famous creations.
Small plates, big flavours
Tapas, pintxos, mezze – whatever they’re called, the small plates concept is great if you want to try everything on the menu (which, for us at least, tends to be most of the time). There are so many examples of why this style of eating works so well, but we’re particularly fond of Robin Gill’s Counter Culture – a new BYOB Basque-influenced pintxos bar that celebrates everything fantastic about fermentation (you can even submit your own preserving recipes and see if they make it onto the menu). Meanwhile, Adam Byatt has opened the top floor of his famed Trinity restaurant and created a casual, laidback atmosphere, where dishes change every day and are plated as and when they’re ready.
Pints on point
You might not expect a pair of Michelin-starred chefs famous for cooking classical French food to open a very English pub, but that’s exactly what the Galvin Brothers have done. Galvin HOP in Spitalfields serves big, bold dishes like sausage rolls, Scotch eggs and pies alongside more sophisticated dishes like Barnsley chops, salmon steaks and Dorset snails. You can pick up one of the duo’s incredible ‘Dog Deluxe’ hotdogs to take away, too, or just pop in for a pint of fresh craft beer, held in giant copper tanks above the bar. The brothers are opening another free house in Essex and want to roll out more across the capital in the coming years, making old bags of nuts and questionable pickled eggs a thing of the past.
Airport food goes gourmet
Whether we’re after a few drinks to calm the pre-flight nerves or something to fill us up so we don’t have to subject ourselves to the dreaded inflight meal, restaurants in airport terminals have always traditionally been overpriced chains not worth a second glance. This is beginning to change, with the likes of Heston Blumenthal’s hidden gem The Perfectionists’ Café in Heathrow’s Terminal 2 and Bruno Loubet’s Grain Store in Gatwick. The food and drink on offer is so good, it’s almost worth booking a flight just to get access to the terminal.
Viva Italia
London has always had a good share of decent Italian restaurants, but recently there seems to have been a bit of a revived interest in the country’s incredibly varied cuisine. After leaving the lauded L’Anima, Francesco Mazzei took over Sartoria on Saville Row, refurbishing the restaurant and bringing a taste of his Italian childhood to hungry Londoners. There’s also been much fanfare surrounding Padella, a pasta restaurant at Borough Market where you can watch the pasta being made from the street.
SITES
