Hello and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants! When we started Vittles Restaurants three years ago, our aim was to improve every Londoners’ life in a tangible way by writing about the city’s food scene in as much depth as possible. Today, we’re publishing the first in a new series of Vittles Neighbourhood Guides, written for locals by locals, which we hope will eventually cover the entire city. We have guides to Finsbury Park and Bermondsey coming up, but are kicking off with a tour of Leyton and Leytonstone by Angela Hui who has lived in the area for the last six years.
Paid subscribers can access the full guide, which takes in everything worth knowing about from Leytonstone High Road to Lea Bridge Road, as well as a handy map plotted with all the recommendations. If you reckon we’ve missed anything, then let please us know in the comments - we hope these contestations will become an important part of the guides too!
You can also now listen to or watch the latest episode of the Vittles ** podcast** – a conversation with Sonora’s Michelle Salazar de la Rocha and Sam Napier, owners of London’s best taqueria, which closed permanently this week. We discuss why it closed, the toll running one of the most hyped food businesses in the city has taken on both of them, and what they might do next.
By Angela Hui
**In Leytonstone, there is BS and AS. Before Singburi and After Singburi. Like Christ, it died for our sins in Leytonstone and rose again in Shoreditch. **Since Singburi left, I’ve heard from people who are now unwilling to venture past Hackney, suggesting that there’s nothing worth eating in E10 and E11. To that, I say: absolute nonsense.
I’ve lived in Leytonstone for six years, longer than anywhere else in London, and it’s where I’ve felt most at home. In 2024, * Time Out* named next-door Leyton one of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods, prompting Redditors to speculate that the editor owned a house in the area. Whether it’s cool is debatable, but Leyton and Leytonstone have leafy streets, a close-knit community and independent cafés and neighbourhood pubs alongside long-standing local businesses. Not everything is chasing the next big opening, and the area isn’t the next Dalston or Hackney Wick to be worth paying attention to.
Francis Road is one of the neighbourhood’s affluent stretches, with plenty of buggies, coffee shops and a Kerb street food market on Saturdays. On Thursday and Friday lates, it can feel like Dante’s seventh circle of hell, with screaming children running amok while their parents drink natural wines at Yardarm and Marmelo. Still, I’m glad Leyton and Leytonstone remain Gail’s-free.
Among the newer arrivals is CCP Kitchen, a cosy Cantonese restaurant run by Hong Kong friends Calvin Liang, Cody Ho and Paula Cheung. Expect homely dishes on rice, from gooey fish-fragrant aubergine to moreish squid in black bean sauce, plus comfortingly mild curries, seasonal mooncakes, bolo bakes and snow fungus tong sui. It feels like a neighbourhood cha chaan teng, somewhere to drop in, fill your stomach and feel a little more human after a long day. As traditional Cantonese restaurants die off and give way to trendier regional Chinese cooking, I’m glad one has found a home here.
Post-Covid, E10 and E11’s food scenes have been predominantly oriented around the arches near Leyton Midland Road, which local writer Stephen Emms says has ‘Coal Drops Yard vibes’ on his Leytonstoner Substack, but in my mind it’s more like Paradise Row in Bethnal Green. Before the arches, the only things worth the trip were **Gravity Well’**s taproom and Unholy Bagels, which operated out of Perky Blenders coffee shop. Like Singburi, it became a victim of its own popularity, and the queues took over the coffee shop. Its owner, Martin, made one of the best New York-style bagels I’ve had in the city. The Tex-Mex-inspired Cinco de Egg Mayo sounds like a lot: it was loaded with egg mayonnaise, sweet chilli jam, chipotle mayo, guacamole, refried beans and tortilla chips, but somehow it all balanced in flavour and texture. Then he got tired of making bagels and, at the top of his game, quit to become a qualified massage therapist in Walthamstow. Now the old mechanics’ workshops you glimpse from the forgotten ‘Goblin’ (sorry, Suffragette) line are a destination in their own right. You can eat and drink your way through a whole day here without going much further than Tilbury Road.
Behind the paywall: Twenty more recommendations; fish and chips and Leyton’s old guard; Bushwood and beyond and Angela’s favourite pizza in London; Portuguese surf and turf on Lea Bridge Road; one of London’s most impressive new cafe-bakeries, A MAP with all the recommendations 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 best restaurants in London, three central London lunch guides, and much more.
