Romanian special
Romanian special
A close-up look at four Romanian places
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 everyday places in London with unusual staying power, like shops, buildings, restaurants and public spaces.
Wooden City is a reader-supported publication and paid subscribers get much more. This includes access to maps, full articles and an archive of material covering almost 150 places so far.
In Shakespeare’s day, “strangers” mostly came to London from neighbouring countries such as France and the Netherlands, because the journey across the water was comparatively short. Later, Britain’s first post-war Caribbean migrants travelled by boat too, many continuing on to London by train. For the latest wave of Hong Kongers moving to the capital and its edges, I suspect most complete the first leg of their journey by plane.
When I moved to London, I came from my parents’ house by car. It was 2015, when Britain hadn’t yet decided to leave the EU. Although that didn’t shape my own journey, this was a time when it was easier for those from further afield to settle in London. Member states had recently lifted working restrictions on people from Romania, which saw a large increase in Romanians moving to the UK.
Between 2011 and 2021, the number of people in Britain who were born in Romania increased more than sixfold, rising from 80,000 to 539,000. In London specifically, 159,000 people reported Romanian as a main language in the most recent census. I was only dimly aware just how Romanian my city is until I read these figures, and they made me think that I should start doing more to understand its Romanianness, by going to places where Romanian Londoners go.
I’ve been going back to the same three restaurants – and one bakery – for a number of months now, in Hendon, Burnt Oak, Palmers Green and Canning Town. Aside from Romanian BBQ in Nine Elms, I’d hardly eaten any Romanian food before this, so these four spots are where I’ve tried many dishes for the first time, including sarmale, papanași, tochitură, ciorbă de burtă and ciorbă de perișoare. I’ve tried to paint a standalone portrait of each place, their crowd and the food they serve below.
Restaurant Noroc
You’ll find Restaurant Noroc on that part of Green Lanes that touches the North Circular, one of many nodal points where people leave, enter and revolve around the city. Inside, you may notice a shiny suit of armour, its visor closed and its steel hands clutching a scabbarded sword. Nearby, a light fixture formed of faux antlers creates dramatic, claw-like shadows.
While there isn’t a bus stop directly outside Restaurant Noroc, buses often wait in traffic in front of its windows, darkening the dining room for a few moments before they move off. As you eat, bouncy pop songs play, their vocalists singing in both English and Romanian.
The still-life paintings on the walls depict things like cheese, bread and cured meats. On one wall a mock stone arch frames an agrarian scene, which makes me think of a similarly framed mural at Italia Uno in Fitzrovia. All of these bits of decor come together to create the restaurant’s mood, which one of many positive Google reviewers compares to “an old Romanian tavern from the Middle Ages.”
I’ve enjoyed four meals here so far, the most memorable of which involved my first ciorbă de burtă – tripe soup. Before I tried it, more than one person told me that it was a particularly accessible way of eating offal. I was surprised just how true that was: more than anything, it tasted to me like a buttery, garlic soup.
I loved its Simpsons yellowness and its quiet tang, which offset the creaminess. The strips of tripe reminded me a bit of crackling in appearance, stippled with small bumps on one side and smooth on the other. But unlike crispy skin, these fragments of stomach lining were very tender and you barely needed to chew. As I ate, I heard someone at the table behind me slurping more quietly than I was, something that has happened during several of my visits here.
149 Green Lanes, London N13 4SP