In the 'like, comment, subscribe' economy, Vittles is one of very few publications that I'm willing to pay for.
If you don't know Vittles and live in London (or are a regular London visitor), you should. In their own words:
Vittles is a food and culture magazine based in the UK and India. At Vittles, we think about food as economy, class, inheritance, and political agency, rather than just a dish on a table. We publish essays about all aspects of food culture, from deep dives to polemics, from personal essays to reported journalism, as well as restaurant recommendations, recipes, and reviews.
Last year, Vittles published a guide to 99 Places To Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus That Aren’t Pret which was one of the most practical food guides I've used and allowed me to embrace my anti-Pret sentiment whilst pandering to my loss aversion and fear of something far worse. Like Leon. You can't move for guides to the new new thing or for reviews of Michelin starred restaurants but what if all you want is a decent lunch? The first guide covered Soho, Chinatown, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, and Mayfair and was built on a simple premise:
Pret a Manger does not offer value or quality but it does promise something priceless: ruthless consistency. Most of the time we don’t want to take a risk on a bad meal, so we accept a known one. Pret and its ilk – Itsu (Japanese Pret), Joe and the Juice (Scandi Pret), Leon (Pret for anhedonists) – prey on this well-founded fear, and have become so much a part of the everyday infrastructure of our lives that sometimes we can no longer imagine an alternative.
Leon as Pret for anhedonists is as perfect as prose can be. The chef behind Leon is as ghastly and viscerally irritating as Jamie Oliver and the one and only time I exercised poor judgement in visiting Leon, it was a one horse race and they succeeded by being open. But they were circumstances where I was hungry enough to eat a gas station sandwich.
There appear to be quite a few self aware meditations on the tension between loathing and reliance with respect to Pret. Marina O'Loughlin weighed in via her column in The Financial Times only this morning with "Why I can't quit Pret" [Paywall]
Vittles brightened my inbox yesterday morning with an update to the original list and Part II covers Farringdon, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Clerkenwell and Covent Garden.
I'd add Nusa Kitchen to the Clerkenwell list, I have not been in the longest time but their soups were always phenomenally good and tasted fresh. They also provided a naan style flat bread as the perfect accompaniment versus the default of a french stick which was invariably too much. They've expanded considerably since the 1-2 stores that existed when I was a regular. I once persuaded the owner to share their Seafood Chowder recipe, it was exceptional and was not on the menu nearly enough. I remember having to scale the recipe down from the 100 litres of fish stock and 30 litres of fish sauce that it opened with. I see they also made a brief foray into YouTube.
