Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! Today, Six of One returns with half a dozen excellent restaurant recommendations from Ruby Atkin, Amanda Villanova, **Tristan Rendell, Ana Abram, Alfred Yatlong Yeung **and **Sama Ansari Pour. **As well as gaining access to the entire Six of One back catalogue, paid subscribers can view the Vittles Restaurants map, which features almost 500 venues, across every borough of London; Jonathan Nunn’s review archive; the 99 best restaurants list; and our three-part central London lunch guides, which covers Soho, Clerkenwell, and the City.
You can also catch up on the latest free episode of the Vittles ** podcast**, which features a conversation with baker and pastry chef Anna Higham. In it Anna discusses a career which has spanned the Gordon Ramsay group, the Gramercy Tavern in NYC, Lyle’s and the River Café. And how at Quince, her celebrated London venue, she’s created
Located between a Scottish-baronial style castle and a skyline of endless newbuilds is Manor House’s West Reservoir: 23 acres of blissful, marshy open water. Built in 1833 with stone lining from the old London Bridge, the site became a leisure facility in the 1990s after a community campaign contested development plans for a conference centre. Today the West Reservoir is a TikTok-approved ‘hidden gem’ swimming pond, and over the past year has been subject to a £3.5 million investment by the Greater London Authority. For over 20 years it has also been home to the Madeiran family-run West Reservoir Cafe, which recently won its own campaign to stay, appealing the council’s new tender process against a number of chains.
I’ve lived in this area my entire life, but as with most leisure centre cafés, I’d had little more than the occasional coffee. That was until recently, when the newly opened footpath led me to the café’s skewer chalkboard. Here was a perfectly seared and salted, buttery espetada – the Madeiran national dish; it arrived speared, hanging and rarely sighted north of the river. Serving grilled meat like this so close to Green Lanes is a brave endeavour, but the cafe delivers. As Bartolomeo Sala wrote in his espetada tour of Little Portugal recently, much can be said for the theatrical presentation of the dish, and in this case the sides are easily upstaged. The sardines, however, are richly flavoured and artfully charred, while for dessert, the cakes include deliciously flaky pastel de nata and a coconut bun with a milky texture that reminded me of tres leches.
Like the reservoir, the café is a rare survivor of rapid redevelopment. Now easily accessible to the public, the family decided when reopening to keep the same prices they’d had for years (the two-person espetada is £25 with two sides; the pastel de nata is £2.20) and focus on a few family favourites. It’s this warmth that makes the café an essential staple to the West Reservoir swim pond. Ruby Atkin
West Reservoir Centre, Green Lanes, N4 2HA
Behind the paywall: Bandera Domincana and bachata in Camberwell, another Bromley dispatch, a curious new opening in Stoke Newington, a Thai/Lao pub and koobideh in Kensington.
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 best restaurants in London, three central London lunch guides, and much more.
