Umami Mart

Although I haven’t been fortunate enough to visit the country, Turkey has always held a fascination for me. It’s long and complex history, the bridge between East and West, the mixing of cultures, languages and religion not to mention the souks and the food. One my earliest memories is reading C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books where […]

Summer this year is a total washout in wet, gray and windy London, so we decided to cheer ourselves up by going    and scoffing some afternoon tea. All lady-like and dainty, of course. Not really. We prepared ourselves by skipping lunch (and I substituted a lie-in for breakfast since it was a Sunday). So we […]

One of the surprising things about London is that you can get very good, cheap Thai food in pubs. My friends and I call them Thai pubs, but they’re just normal pubs serving Thai food cooked by Thai chefs instead of the usual pub fare such as roasts and chips. One of the best kept […]

We’ve been very lucky. Since last summer, we’ve had a bona fide udon-ya (shop) right here in London. Serving sanuki udon (a type of udon from the Kagawa region of Japan) that is prepared in-house, Koya boasts chefs that trained at the famed Kunitoraya in Paris. Proper udon and one even my extremely fussy Japanese […]

One of the best things about living in a multicultural and cosmopolitan city like London is that if you fancy something to eat, you can be sure to find it (…except for proper ramen, that is). Compared to twenty years ago when British food was often accompanied by the words over-cooked, tasteless and terrible, it’s […]

As you may all know, I’m half-Japanese and half-Sri Lankan, so anything to do with either country sparks an immediate interest. So when I began hearing rumours about a new Japanese cake shop and tea salon springing up in trendy Primrose Hill in north London last year, my ears perked up. My sister and I […]

In Junichiro Tanizaki’s celebrated novel, The Makioka Sisters (or Sasameyuki (細雪), loosely translated as ‘light snow’ or ‘a flurry of snow’–titles in translations are always so different but I guess it’s as much about nuance as meaning), the four Makioka sisters, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko, all born and bred in Osaka, take a trip […]

My daily dilemma as soon as I step through my office door is this: what to have for lunch? I work in the slap bang centre of London surrounded by loads of restaurants, cafés, pubs and delis. Chinatown is just down the road. But everyday my mind goes blank and I end up shoveling down […]

You might have heard of a foul-mouthed chef named Gordon Ramsey. No? Just turn on the tv and you’ll see him either swearing his head off at some poor sous chef or cosying to some celeb. I’ve heard his food is amazing but I’m too poor to eat at his restaurant at Claridges and I’m […]

August is the month of sloth so we rolled into Wembley, north London for a laaazy Sunday brunch at Sakonis. Surrounded by shops selling everything South Asian from sarees and cricket bats to sweet Pakistani mangoes, this cheap and cheerful eatery is the perfect place for a South Indian vegetarian breakfast. Food is served all […]