Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants! Behind the paywall today, Mohammed Ali Salha evaluates the London food hall through the legacy of Oriental City and current standard of Bang Bang Oriental in Colindale.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Restaurants! Behind the paywall today, **Mohammed Ali Salha **evaluates the London food hall through the legacy of Oriental City and current standard of Bang Bang Oriental in Colindale. To read it all, subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59 for the whole year, which gives you access to hundreds of 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.
Earlier this week, we released the latest episode of the Vittles Podcast — a conversation with Quince Bakery’s Anna Higham. In it, she discusses the creation of the Modern British Bakery as well as the River Café’s vanilla budget, lessons from the Gordon Ramsay Group, baking in New York City, the Lyle’s era, why hype bakeries are not her thing and more.
Mohammed Ali Salha considers the legacy of Oriental City and the current standard of Bang Bang Oriental food hall
The sweet, acrid funk of durian was always the first thing to hit. Then it was the perma-chaos of busy vendors and hawkers moving at the only speed migrant uncles and aunties move (fast). Then it was the sounds of heavy-footed DC skateboarding kicks repeatedly hitting the malfunctioning Dance Dance Revolution machine in the Sega Dome. There was an unexpected poetry and beauty to the original Oriental City in Colindale, and its legacy is deeper than you’d expect from a community and food hub in lowly NW9. Its shadow is still cast on Colindale’s Asian community and its successor: the much-loved TikTok-baiting and somewhat clinical Bang Bang Oriental.
Despite London appearing to have grown in concentric circles from The City outward, the truth is it matured from joining up the various villages and towns that surrounded it. What Oriental City created was an unerring centrifugal force whose influence pushed trends and culture in waves back into the commercial centre of the city. It captured the spirit and ethic of the local migrant communities, incubating and transmitting unfiltered tastes of East and South-East Asian culture. It’s a subtle difference – there was no ‘food hall’ but a hawker market at the back of Oriental City that really distilled the spirit of what the Malaysian owners would have experienced back home. It was focused on affording good cooks the time and space to serve good food at affordable prices. There were also community spaces, karaoke booths, an arcade and a legendary bookshop. In fact, it’s fair to say that Oriental City was the first of its kind, and brought to London the entire concept of a food hall – now a ubiquitous format.
But that’s the story of a bygone time, before a deliberate, top-down effort to implement private equity-backed transformations and gentrification in a patch of the city which once seemed ungentrifiable. After a decade of operation, Oriental City closed in the financial maelstrom of 2008 after a protracted redevelopment battle. It lay barren for nine years before Brent Council’s apportioning of the site for ‘Far Eastern and Oriental uses’ saw it metamorphose into Bang Bang Oriental. The number nine is actually our throughline – this summer Bang Bang (a play on words in Mandarin that roughly translates as ‘good good’ or ‘so good they named it twice’) celebrated its ninth birthday. Now, it feels fitting to re-evaluate a place that’s been adorned with more than 10,000 reviews and a 4.4-star rating on Google.
Over the last 30 years, I’ve clocked in dozens of meals at both the original and modern iterations of the space, which opened in 1993 as a luxury shopping centre called Yaohan Plaza. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Bang Bang Oriental actually means for eating in London and what it says about our habits. Ultimately, I also asked myself: is it any good? Or is it now just another boring food hall that its legendary predecessor helped to create?
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