Forget Hugh Grant-filled rom coms and fancy fashion, there’s a new reason to love Notting Hill.
The W11 postcode was where Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi opened their first deli/cafe.
The bijoux premises on Ledbury Road was where the explosion of modern Israeli food all began. I used to cycle past on my way to chef school, stopping sometimes to drool over the pastries in the window. It was these kitchens that launched a whole generation of Israeli-inspired chefs.
Several years later, Miznon arrived in the UK (in 2022) with the W11 branch opening in November.
Now there are two more places to get excited about food – both within walking distance of the (Ottolenghi) OG and due to open later this year.
In August, New York-style bagel bakery/cafe, It’s Bagels, launches a second London store — this time on Kensington Park Road. Not Israeli food, not even remotely, but definite Jew-ish vibes.
This bagel brand, which started off selling NY-style bagels out of Caravan’s Caledonian Road premises has gone down a storm in Primrose Hill. With that branch still attracting queues that snake around the leafy, manicured block it made sense for founder, New York émigré Dan Martensen, to open this second store.
Expect to see the same New York styling with a huge lightbox menu plus a selection of artwork on the walls by mates of Martensen — who is also a professional photographer — including photographs, album covers and posters.
Whether or not you’ll need to build in an extra hour (and snacks) for the line remains to be seen.
Less than a 10-minute walk away the Maddox Gallery, it’s been announced is set to become the third restaurant from Zoe and Layo Paskin’s brand — The Barbary.
Like Ottolenghi, this pair have had their part to play in London’s brilliant Israeli food scene. They’re the entrepreneurs who enticed the team behind Jerusalem’s Machneyuda to London to open The Palomar with them. The Israeli/English collab is no more, but The Palomar and this brother-sister partnership are still going strong, running some our favourite London Middle Eastern restaurants.
The original Barbary was a tiny space where diners sat around a bar in the middle of which the cooking action took place. They later opened an equally small operation next door — creatively named The Barbary Next Door. And now this Westbourne Grove location will make three.
On the menu will be a list of Levantine-influenced dishes predominantly cooked over fire. The Covent Garden branch serves up a range of favourite flavours including labneh, dukkah-coated salmon; Jerusalem bagels, spicy zhug and more. The new restaurant promises seasonal flatbreads, aubergine ajo blanco and fried fish collars (*) followed by fire-baked basbousa (syrup-soaked semolina cake) and ‘hashcake’ — not something you’d expect to find in Amsterdam, but an addictively good, sticky cake made from ground pistachios that has become their signature bake
(*) If you’ve never tried them, I first heard of fish collars at Eran Tibi’s Kapara — it’s an otherwise wasted part of the fish that yields enough ‘meat’ to be worth salvaging instead of throwing away as it once was.
