East London’s Transformation Into a Magnet for Top Chefs

Sitting at a sun-dappled, marble-topped table at Taberna do Mercado, washing down a prawn-paste and beef prego sandwich with a chilled glass of Super Bock lager, I feel like I’m on holiday in Lisbon. But as buzzing as the Portuguese capital’s food scene is at the moment, I’m eating somewhere arguably even more enthralling to foodies: East London.

In a restaurant housed in one of the East End’s most iconic spaces – Old Spitalfields Market – I’m feasting on the carefully rendered, Portuguese-by-design, gourmet-by-execution food of Nuno Mendes, one of the East London food scene’s most epoch-defining chefs. Portuguese-born Mendes shot to fame in London a couple of years back when he became the “chef curator” for the glitzy Chiltern Firehouse hotel – a playpen for celebrity A-listers who flocked to be spotted picking over his moreish crab donuts. But long before he found his name jumping from the pages of newspaper columns, Mendes was quietly causing a stir of his own making, far from the upscale streets of Marylebone, in the darkest depths of pre-gentrified East London.

I asked Mendes to write the foreword to my new book, East London Food – a collaboration with the brilliant food photographer Helen Cathcart – precisely for that reason. We wanted to create a book that documented the rise of East London as one of the most diverse, creative and exciting food regions in Europe at the moment, covering everything from the traditional pie-and-mash shops and Cockney-Italian-run cafés to the smoke-filled Turkish eateries, Vietnamese canteens and the area’s relatively newfound gastronomic gravitas.

And that’s where Mendes comes in. Over the past decade, he’s been leading the stampede to London of young, interesting chefs – many of whom, just like him, have trained in some of the best restaurants in the world, and have since shunned the glitz and high rents of the West End, traditionally London’s dining capital, in favor of the grimier East. Last year, new restaurant openings in East London outnumbered those in the West End by more than double.

Mendes was one of the first serious chefs to see the East’s potential as a dining district, and played an instrumental role in engineering the foundations of this gastronomic revolution. In 2007, fresh from the kitchens of the now-defunct Michelin-starred restaurant elBulli, Mendes set up Bacchus, his first solo venture in London. It was housed in a former pub in Hoxton Square, an area that – at the time – was more known more for its run-down bars and cheap Vietnamese takeouts than for gourmet dining.

Although Mendes had also been offered the chance by a famous restaurateur to helm a central London eatery – not to mention a significant amount of money – he relished the opportunity to make his mark in uncharted culinary territory. He remembers answering an ad put out by the owner of the pub on Gumtree, a popular classified-advertisement website, who wanted to create a food destination there.

“Hoxton was a dead end at the time,” Mendes says. “It was rough as hell, and “This was a big pay drop,” Mendes recalls. “But I was like, ‘Man, I like it! Let’s go with it!’ And I remember thinking at the time: If I can pull this off, and I can do what I want to do, from here, from this moment on, I’ll always be my own person. I’ll never be a hired gun.”

And he wasn’t. Even when Bacchus proved ahead of its time, and ultimately closed, Mendes stuck with East London. Shortly afterwards he launched his pioneering supper club The Loft at his flat on Kingsland Road, which hosted intimate dinners cooked by him and chefs carefully chosen from all over the world, including Magnus Nilsson, head chef at the pioneering Swedish restaurant Faviken. Then came his triumphant Viajante restaurant in the Town Hall Hotel in Bethnal Green, which earned this part of town its first Michelin star.

When Viajante closed in 2014, the chef went on to open Chiltern Firehouse. Now he’s returned to East London with Taberna do Mercado, a restaurant which draws on his Portuguese heritage and the bold, punchy flavors of his native cuisine. Hearty bowls of coriander-perked pig’s trotter and cuttlefish stew are accompanied by the aforementioned surf-and-turf prego sandwich, as well as the best pastel de nata (Portuguese egg custard tarts) in London, oozing with molten egg custard.

After the buzz and exclusivity of the Firehouse, this is a somewhat surprising twist in the chef’s oeuvre. “Opening a restaurant in East London felt like coming home, because it is my home,” Mendes explains. “It’s located in the [Old Spitalfields Market] in a thriving part of East London. You can come in at any time, and have a coffee and a custard tart or a sit-down dinner. It’s taking me back to street level.”

This sense of East London as an enabling space in which a chef can make an impact cooking their own style of food, rather than just fitting in to a restaurant’s own regime, is a sentiment shared by many young cooks who followed in Mendes’ wake.

James Lowe and Isaac McHale cut their teeth at some of the world’s best restaurants, began cooking together as the “Young Turks”, first at Mendes’ supper club and then above The Ten Bells, a pub in Spitalfields infamous for its association with Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. Now both chefs have gone on to open their own restaurants in nearby Shoreditch: McHale at The Clove Club and Lowe at Lyle’s. Both establishments currently hold Michelin stars and coveted places on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – The Clove Club at 26, Lyle’s at 65.

At The Clove Club in the light, lofty Shoreditch Town Hall, Scottish chef McHale cooks seasonal five- and seven-course tasting menus that draw on his Scottish heritage and the best produce he can source. You’ll find delicate, surprising combinations like flamed Cornish mackerel with rhubarb and toasted oats, as well as clever updates on tried-and-tested classics – like his signature buttermilk fried chicken, which is dredged in salt made from pine foraged around East London’s parks. It’s clever, inventive stuff that speaks to time spent in serious kitchens, but The Clove Club exemplifies a new mood for top-drawer gastronomy with a laid-back atmosphere.

“There’s care and attention to detail, but not to the silverware and associated costs,” says McHale. He and his front-of-house co-founders Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis wanted to create a restaurant “for our generation”, and the name of the restaurant originates from the raucous supper clubs the three would throw in their shared house in Dalston. The vibe of the establishment, while much more grown-up, remains fun and unpretentious – you could come and sit at the bar with a well-mixed cocktail and plate of McHale’s home-made charcuterie, or go all-out with a gourmet tasting menu.

Just down the road at the Tea Building, a former factory, McHale’s former culinary partner Lowe is similarly redefining what it takes to be a Michelin-starred restaurant. Lyle’s serves pitch-perfect plates of pared-back modern British food in a relaxed, all-day dining environment, where a rotating selection of rare coffee is also part of the offerings.

Dishes include new-season asparagus with chicken vinaigrette, Burford Brown egg and toasted buckwheat, and smoked eel with beetroot and horseradish – perhaps a subtle nod to East London’s historic love of the dense, meaty fish. The latter dish dates back to the pie-and-mash shops which sprung up in Victorian days to feed the working population with the cheap protein, which was fished from the adjacent River Thames.

Indeed, the East London of old was a poorer, more industrial area than the West, built on manual trades like tanning, rope and lead making. Waves of immigrants – drawn to the cheaper rents of the area – flocked here, from the first Jewish transplants of the 17th century to the more recent 20th-century settlements from the Bengali, Vietnamese and Turkish diasporas. Each cultural group has contributed to the rich and heady cuisine that has come to characterize the neighborhood – from curries and banh mi to bagels and böreks, or Turkish flaky pastries.

That’s what I love so much about East London’s food scene. Other than its ability to compete on a global gastronomic level, it has something delicious to suit every palate or pocket – whether that’s a world-beating loaf of artisan sourdough from e5 bakehouse in London Fields or a classic full English breakfast at the wonderful, third-generation Italian-run E Pellicci café in Bethnal Green, which also does the meanest lasagne in London.

To my mind, there’s no other part of London that lays on such a diverse and generous spread. East London is a feast – an all-you-can-eat buffet for your belly and for soul.

This story first appeared as “East of Eaten” in Mabuhay’s August 2016 print edition.