Eating out for £8 or less
In Sutton, Southall, Barking and Leytonstone
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Every other week I publish an article about locally important places such as pubs, shops, restaurants and public spaces.
Wooden City is funded by its readers and paying subscribers get much more. This includes access to maps, full articles and an archive of material covering over 250 places so far.
I’ve been writing for almost long enough to start asking myself why I write, and I think I do it mainly to learn, to understand places and to celebrate things I feel are undersung. With this column, I’m trying to learn about food, understand London and celebrate neighbourhoods that aren’t in the centre of the city.
I hope the low prices pull readers in, but these restaurants are about far more than what they charge. Today’s piece is the fifth one I’ve done with a pound sign in the headline, and you can read the others here, here, here and here.
This instalment features a chaat stall in Southall, a suya spot in Barking, a Trinidadian restaurant in Sutton and a historical Italian caff in Leytonstone. I ate filling dishes in three of these restaurants for less than £6, but a more substantial meal cost £8 in the other place, so that’s the figure I’m leading with. In one entry, I also touch on a larger dish that costs more than that.
George’s Cafe
I was at George’s Cafe the other day and by the time my breakfast arrived, there were six customers in the room including me. Each of us had a table to ourselves, except a guy and a kid who sounded like they were father and son.
There are seven tables at George’s and I find them interesting because they’re fixed to the ground, while the chairs around them are not. When I eat here, I like to look at the patches of gingham laminate that have started to fray like knitwear, the mark of decades of elbows, plates and boiling hot mugs.
George’s has a sign that says that it started trading on 31 August 1983, so if these tables were installed before it opened they have been here for over 41 and a half years. A poster on the door explains that a married couple called Sarah and Antonio Bibbo run the business, and that Antonio trained under his parents, who came to London from Italy and founded the place.
This is a room that catches sunlight beautifully. It’s neat and well-maintained and its diminutive wooden chairs are like none I’ve seen anywhere else. Sometimes I worry that I’ll get bored of places like this, but going back to George’s recently makes me think that day is still a long way away.
In any case, I’m just as interested in newness as I am with oldness at the moment. I think any restaurant with character and a local crowd is valuable, regardless of its age. What I like about history is that it forms in the present, as places accumulate bits of decor over time that reveal something about who chose them and when.
I reckon the lucky horseshoe above the door is an older fixture, and that the little slogans dotted around are where the personalities of the current proprietors really come through. They make me think this restaurant is a second home to them, because those signs are the types of thing that people put up where they live.
This link between life at home and in the workplace also comes through in the egg, bacon, chips and beans here, which costs £6.80 with a cup of tea. I love it because the chips are hand-cut and the egg always looks so perfect and professional, steamed as much as it is fried.
665 High Rd Leytonstone, Bushwood, London E11 4RD