Vittles
Vittles is an online magazine based in the UK and India, publishing new food and culture writing. The podcast brings the publication's insightful essays and stories to audio, exploring how food shapes identity, society, and everyday life. Each episode features writers and voices from the magazine's network, offering fresh perspectives on cuisine, history, and culture.
Episodes
The Chefs’ Chef w/ Will Gleave
Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is with one of the UK’s most talented and idiosyncratic chefs. If you haven’t heard of Will Gleave, then your favourite chef will have. Through his early cooking at the wine bar P. Franco, and then at the restaurants Bright and Peg, Will has exercised an immense influence over the modern London restaurant industry – its focus on natural wine, borderless cuisi
Community, Authenticity and Virality w/ Logma's Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub
Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub, the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches —
The Staying Power of Koya w/ Shuko Oda
Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda, the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney.When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London resta
Behind the Scenes of London's Most Influential Restaurant Group w/ Songsoo Kim
Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim, head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the gro
What happens when a restaurant wins a Michelin star? w/ Joké Bakare
Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast.Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles: Joké Bakare, the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing. We couldn’t have predic
Why Does Anyone Open a Restaurant? w/ Ravneet Gill Taiano
Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June. One of the things t
The Volatile World of London Restaurant PR w/ Gemma Bell
This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for
The Life and Times of Mangal 2's Ferhat Dirik
This month’s episode is an interview with someone you might already know — a restaurant owner who embodies many of the critical themes of the London restaurant industry, not just in 2025, but over the course of the last 20-plus years: community, trends, family, uncertainty, hype and more. Ferhat Dirik is the lifelong front-of-house, founder’s son, and now owner of Dalston’s Mangal 2, the family-ru
The Race to the Mid (w/ Feroz Gajia and Montague Ashley-Craig)
We are living through an age of online extremes: hype machines, queues, hidden gems, while at the same time, for some of those embedded in the London restaurant industry itself, there’s a fundamental sense of malaise, of boredom, with a creeping homogenisation of restaurants and food culture. This is ‘the mid’: a term that is now common parlance for those who feel adrift of a discourse in which ev
All Consuming, w/ Ruby Tandoh
In this special episode, Adam Coghlan is joined by Ruby Tandoh, the author, journalist (and Vittles contributor) who has just published the book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. The book is an attempt to explain the growing power and absurdity of food culture via the mediums it is transmitted through, whether supermarkets, newspaper supplements or Instagram reels (Tandoh’s ‘15 Cookboo
Summer Special w/Simran Hans
In this month’s episode, we have a special guest: writer, critic and part-time Vittles reviewer Simran Hans, who joins Adam and Jonathan to talk about the summer in London restaurant news. Our main topics are two eccentric London food spaces: Singburi and Leila’s Shop. We discuss what didn’t make into Jonathan’s review of Singburi, our thoughts on the new one, and what the restaurant’s evolution s
The Lost Food of Soho
The Lost Food of Soho is a one-episode podcast by Lucy Dearlove. You can listen to it for free on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, which are now hosting all back-issues of the Vittles podcast. You can buy prints of today’s map, created by the artists Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby exclusively for Vittles. A reminder, too, that we’ve released prints ahead of the publication of issue 1 of Vittl
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 3
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.comVittles Quarterly: The Peasant Food RemontadaGood morning and welcome back to our series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here and the second episode here.On this episode, for our end of year review, we’re joined by Heste
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 2
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.comGood morning and welcome to the second in a series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here. This month we discuss the biggest story in food media in 2024 - the resignation of Pete Wells from the most powerful job in restaur
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 1
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.comGood morning and welcome to the first in a new series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. Every three months or so we’re going to talk about what and where we’ve been eating, the best meals we’ve enjoyed, things that are annoying us, exciting us, and what
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