Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! Today, Six of One returns with half a dozen excellent restaurant recommendations from Jude Wanga, **Jake Witz, Alexandra Pereira, Ria Parmar, Alex Douglas, and Tim Bonvoisin. **We have also fully updated the Vittles Restaurants map - removing closed restaurants and adding more than 50 new ones – which now includes a staggering 451 venues in every borough of London.
Next week, look out for the latest episode of the ** Vittles podcast**, when Adam will be chatting to chefs’ chef Will Gleave who is known in London for P.Franco, Bright, Peg and the steaks at Hill & Szrok, but who now heads up the kitchen and Sargasso in Margate.
There’s a theory among the Congolese as to why we don’t open restaurants – namely because, to paraphrase Arsène Wenger, everyone thinks they have the best cook at home. Yet we all place this aside for Deluxe, as we all affectionately call it. I have been coming to Deluxe for years, but on a recent hot Wednesday evening I managed to get a table there for a special occasion: DRC, where the restaurant owner and I are from, were playing Portugal in the World Cup, having qualified for the first time in 52 years. On the day, the atmosphere is indescribable; we have no right to dare to dream, and yet everyone in the restaurant is decked out in football shirts and flags, convinced we can go far into the knockouts. Because, as the Congolese say, “Angleterre ba za maitrisable.” (England are beatable).
There aren’t many Congolese restaurants in the UK, so Deluxe has very little competition from compatriots. Because of this, it still holds core memories for the diaspora; it’s the first place you go when you want a break from cooking at home, or you want to introduce friends and colleagues to the food of your home nation – pondu (cassava leaf stew), ntaba (slow-grilled goat), biteku-teku (amaranth stew) and, of course, fumbwa (spinach stew). Today, I order the Deluxe platter, a behemoth that includes just enough of everything I want to eat so I don’t have to order 10 different plates. But something is missing. So I add the makayabu (fried saltfish cooked in Deluxe’s slightly sweet onion and yellow pepper sauce), the liboke (catfish baked in cassava leaves) and, because I’m with the family, the malangwa (grilled pangasius – catfish – topped with a sensational green scallion sauce). All accompanied by the softest kwanga (cassava dumplings) one can purchase in London, perfectly flavoured jollof rice (we all have a variation) and cocktails containing a generous serving of alcohol.
My mum is not a fan of restaurants, but she loves Deluxe. It reminds her of home in Kinshasa and, as Yoane Wissa equalises for Congo and the place erupts into pandemonium, I realise it does for me too. It’s too good to gatekeep. Go to Deluxe, get a taste of the greatest cuisine from the greatest country in all of Africa. Jude Wanga
135-137 High Cross Rd, N17 9NU
Behind the paywall: Old-school French (moules frites, bottle of plonk); old-school Italian (giant pepper mills and zabaione); Henanese breakfast soup; shawarma; a truly excellent laksa variation, and more. You can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to restaurant recommendations from the last six and half years, including the Vittles Restaurants map, the Vittles 99, the central London lunch guides, and the Newcomers Guide To London.
