Eating out for under £8.56
In Edmonton, Tooting, Greenwich and Wembley
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.
This column still doesn’t have a name, but its goal remains to improve my knowledge of London and its food. Most of the pieces have had a pound sign in the title and all of them aim to offer something practical, by creating a repository of restaurants which, so far, serve food between £2 and £8.55.
I’ve learned a lot while working on these articles, but the main thing that’s struck me is how low-priced meals look similar across cuisines. Whether it’s rice and dal, mutton biryani, bariis with xaniid or jollof rice and a chicken leg, the biggest, least expensive meals tend to be a mound of rice with a serving of protein. To get below £5, you’re usually talking about some variety of soup, chaat, wrap, pastry or sandwich, or chickpeas served with unleavened bread.
I’m interested in the food at these inexpensive restaurants, but also their vibe, local function and customer base. This week’s edition is about a Turkish canteen in Edmonton, a Polish restaurant in Tooting, a dumpling spot in Greenwich and a Peshawari place in Wembley. You can eat at all of these places without spending more than £8.55, but I also touch on items below that price point and one dish above it too. I’ve been to each restaurant at least twice.
You can find all previous newsletters in this series below:
Edmonton Çorbacisi
Edmonton Çorbacisi is a soup and stew factory about 30 seconds from Silver Street station. I recently went there on two consecutive Mondays. On the first, I ate a steaming bowl of mercimek çorbası. This pale yellow lentil soup cost £7 and came with bread, lemon, onion, tomatoes, pickled peppers and wrinkly black olives. Islands of garlicky red oil floated on its surface and clumps of potato as soft as cheese settled in its depths.
When I arrived, the room was full of men of varying ages chatting quietly and looking at their phones. Every customer had either tea, coffee or soup, except one guy with a spiral-bound notebook, who was holding an informal meeting with the person opposite. Then, suddenly, everyone left. I must have caught the tail-end of the breakfast rush.
I chose to visit this place because I want to get a better grasp of this city’s higher north, and this restaurant seems representative of a certain kind of Turkish London space. At first, it made me think of Sophocles Bakery in Camberwell, in that it’s a local hangout and some of those locals are elderly men. In both places, a hot drink entitles you to a seat as much as buying a meal would.