Good morning and welcome back to acid reflux, a column that died and has now risen.
Last week I was in Brittany, taking a pit stop rest after signing off on Issue 3 of our brilliant new magazine, which has just gone to the printers. This is probably not news to many of you, but the fact that you can get on an evening ferry that’s almost as large as the Titanic in Portsmouth and wake up in St. Malo is as miraculous as getting on the Eurostar – except it’s far more comfortable and much cheaper. Brittany, as a whole, punches above its weight culinarily: galettes, buckwheat everything, Breton cider, Brets crisps. The best meal I had was at Le Bistrot de Cancale, a seafood restaurant just north of Cancale owned by the Roellinger family that has the setting and menu simpatico you normally associate with eating on Greek islands: delicate fried squid, lobster from the bay cooked with fennel, langoustine bisque, a perfect turbot with brown butter, blueberry and cardamom soufflé.
In St. Malo itself, I enjoyed the restaurants opened by the Maison Hector group, who are basically the Corbin and King of Brittany, specialising in old-school, kitsch, touristy restaurants that are far better than they need to be (I had more luck eating at these types of places than, say, the Breton take on an izakaya). Their seafood restaurant Cafe de l’Ouest is a huge amount of fun: huge, cold spider crabs, cheap pots of mussels covered in liquid roquefort, impeccably tanned fries, random things flambéed at the table. But I left wishing that I had ordered something from this automat (below), offering various fish rillettes, along with two dozen oysters and an oyster knife. The French just sometimes do it better.
On Thursday 30th July, a group of food businesses in Netil Market, including Jupiter Burger, World Famous Gordos, and Paradox Design + Coffee, will be joining forces to raise money towards the victims and families affected by the recent earthquakes in Venezuela, which have so far killed almost 5,000 people, and displaced 20,000. Each stall will be fusing what they usually do with Venezuelan dishes, plus there will be Venezuelan coffee and music. To read more about it, click here.
Last month, the best shop in London (and my former employer), Postcard Teas, announced that they are going to start doing Ambient Nights on Thursdays and Fridays from 6.30 to 7.30pm, where you can try various cold- and ambiently- brewed teas and tea-based drinks. The idea of running a bar dedicated solely to tea was something that was in discussion when I used to work there, and I thought might never come to fruition – I am very excited to see that it has! You can book a place here.
A new tantuni shop, Tantunim, has opened in north London, spawning maybe my favourite Enfield-Turkish innovation so far:
Meanwhile, Mersin Tantuni, London’s third-best tantuni shop, has been killing it on social media lately:
More tantuni news as and when it happens.
The Americans are at it again. First, it was opening a restaurant called Appalachia in Shoreditch that doesn’t really serve Appalachian cuisine, which was already mildly annoying. Then the least humorous Americans on Bluesky found it, claiming that the restaurant had ‘socioeconomically missed the mark’ and that ‘the worst meals of my life have been in the UK, this just seems like their whole thing’, while missing the fact that the owners are American.
Far be it from me to defend a menu with something called ‘hillbilly loaf’ on it, but can you imagine what it must be like to see a rich and varied regional cuisine get mislabelled and misinterpreted by a global hegemon, then be given an inaccurate name that has nothing to do with the cuisine being served, which itself has been created for the consumption of people who have never even been to the place the cuisine originates from?
Our lead piece from Issue 3 by Stephen Buranyi is a six-month investigation into the world and economics of restaurant influencers. If you want to read it first, and find out who has been charging what, then you need to ** pre-order the magazine now**.
One of the reasons the article had a long gestation is that every week there would be a new update from Stephen – a new piece of information about who was paying who, or who was on the take — that would upend a previous theory. The list of footnotes we could have included would be as long as the article itself. In the end, Stephen just had to stop reporting.
A footnote we would have loved to include is this week’s Shawarma Hut beef, which I am going to recount in excruciating detail. At some point reading this, you’re going to say to me ‘Jonathan, I have one life in this precious world, do I really need to fill my mind with the knowledge of any of these guys?’ which is fair, but it all gets to the core of what is going in the influencer world right now, and consequently, what is going on in food media.
The story starts with Shawarma Hut opening on Walworth Road back in 2021. I visited it then because its first menu had things like ‘jerk shawarma’ and ‘Mexican shawarma’ on it, and I cannot resist absurdity. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t as interesting as the concept and I forgot about it. Last year, Shawarma Hut suddenly rebranded online, with its owner Ali Alsahlane taking centre stage on Instagram. Its new selling point was that it was for the community, offering free shawarma for the unhoused and 5p shawarmas for those who asked. The restaurant quickly went viral, attracting the attention of many prominent influencers who know a good story when they see it.
Earlier this year, Alsahlane pivoted again, becoming an influencer himself, reviewing chain restaurants he considered to be overcharging and taking on a more aggressive persona. I wrote about this phenomenon five years ago in an article about Salt Bae, arguing that there is a huge overlap between the Attitude Era of wrestling and Salt Bae’s theatrics, both of which rely on kayfabe – the unspoken agreement to pretend that the absurd is real. Back then, I predicted ‘the Attitude Era of restaurants’, and this has come to pass: now, almost all restaurant influencers operate like this, particularly the successful heels that we love to hate.
Adopting this persona – which included going to Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et to denounce it – has been hugely successful for Alsahlane in drumming up publicity. But last month, The Londoner reported on a fight he had got into with the Albanian mafia running dodgy ice cream vans. The most interesting tidbit from the article was that the Shawarma Hut content was now being directed by Robbie Thompson, himself an influencer, who in June 2025 had posted ▶a negative video about Shawarma Hut and its undercooked shawarma, and by October 2025 was standing in front of Stonehenge with a Shawarma Hut meal extolling its virtues.
After the paywall: the muddied line between influencing and paid advertising; the PR misstep of the month; where right-wing politicians eat in London; critics watch; and the worst review this month.
