Vittles

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 cuisine, high-level cooking in relaxed environments, and a type of effortlessness that many aspire to.
In a rare public appearance, Will spends an hour talking to Adam about his early years cooking in London restaurants, setting the small plate-natural wine bar template in the city at P. Franco, looking outside of Europe for inspiration, what he likes to eat himself and why, ultimately, he decided to leave the capital and set up home on the Kent coast with his young family, and cook at Sargasso in Margate.
Will traces his journey from the kitchens of Harvey Nichols, The Square, and Arbutus in London to Tasmania, where he found himself at Garagistes, one of Australia’s most celebrated restaurants. When returned to the UK, he co-founded P. Franco, which was named Eater London’s restaurant of the year in 2017. Bright and Peg followed, before all three abruptly closed in 2022 and 2023 to the shock of the London restaurant industry. This was followed by a year-long residency at Hill & Szrok on Broadway Market - which was our own restaurant of the year in 2024 - where he revived the British steak and chop house with his signature elan.
During the episode, we discuss what it was really like taking over two induction hobs inside a wine shop with no extraction (or licence to trade as a restaurant), the relentless misery of working in London’s most renowned Michelin-starred kitchens, the influence of Australia and Japan on his cooking, the greatness of 40 Maltby Street and its chef Steve Williams, the story behind the closure of Bright and Peg, tradition and innovation, cooking steak, who the best pasta chef in the city is right now, and whether we have really yet to have THE ‘Will Gleave restaurant’.
We hope you enjoy it.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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 — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and immediately went viral on social media.
In the episode, we discuss creating something that people really want in a moment when so many hospitality businesses are feeling the pain; about the meaning and importance of community and authenticity; about navigating virality and hype online; and about how, despite all their early success, neither are trained chefs.
We hope you enjoy the episode.
Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.
In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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 restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya Yamazaki, who had both worked at Rose Bakery in Dover Street Market, to create a restaurant based around udon noodles. Soon, chefs and diners from all over London were flocking to Koya for its blackboard, where Shuko and Junya reinterpreted Japanese cuisine with British ingredients.
Since then, Shuko has gone onto open more Koyas, including Koya Ko in Hackney. It remains a restaurant that is principally Japanese – built on the success of its house-made udon noodles and dashi – but, as we talk about in the podcast, its storied blackboard menu of specials of small plates, salads and its relationships with some of Britain’s best suppliers, has made Koya a restaurant that exemplifies a type of modern London dining, and has allowed it to stand the test of time.
We hope you enjoy the episode.
Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.
In an exciting development you can now also watch this podcast on YouTube. For that, huge thanks to our videographer Zaineb Abelque and editor Callum Winter.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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 group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which he would admit owes a lot to the culinary expertise, vision and meticulous sourcing of Songsoo, who liaises between farmer and chef to shape dishes across the group.
As well as talking in-depth about the making of Impala and what being a head of sourcing and development actually means, we go into Songsoo’s past (she was born in Korea but grew up in rural Colorado and the south of India), we discuss her influences and the importance of food and the role of plants in her life, why she loves Thai food so much and what being part of supplier-led restaurant group has been like in practice. “I’m very curious about plants from different worlds, eating habits from different worlds, and I have a deep respect for eating and cooking as a cultural entity,” she says during the recording.
Songsoo also moonlights as a writer, and is a regular contributor to Vittles’s cooking section. It was during a conversation about the writer-editor/chef-protégé relationship a week or so after the recording of the podcast that Songsoo told me about a word in Korean, transliterated as ‘gyeol’. It means ‘texture, grain or flow’, a word that extends ‘metaphorically to the texture of a person’s soul, breath, or the rhythm of emotions.’ This is a mutuality she seeks from her collaborators: when she’s trying to convey a specific feeling in a sentence, or a particular flavour profile in a dish, there must be always depth and texture.
We hope you enjoy the episode.
Like our recent podcasts, this episode is free to listen to for all subscribers. You can listen to it here in Substack, on Apple Podcasts or through Spotify. If you’re so inclined, please like, share, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts.
A massive thanks as usual to Lucy Dearlove, our producer and to the whole team at Young Space for hosting our recording sessions.
We thank you for listening, reading and supporting our work. We'll be back again later this month with the next episode: a conversation between Adam and Shuko Oda, the co-founder and executive head chef of the beloved Japanese udon-specialist Koya. We’ll see you then.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe

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 predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course of a two and a half year period, Joké introduced many Londoners to many different styles of West African cooking, before moving the restaurant to Fitzrovia with her business partner, Matt Pace. The next year Chishuru won a Michelin star, making Joké the first Black female chef in the UK to hold a star — an accolade she never sought nor imagined receiving.
In the Vittles 99 guide to the best restaurants in London, Jonathan described the appeal of Joké’s cooking as ‘food in which you can feel the presence of the chef.’ Many others feel the same. Joké is self-taught and cooks in a very distinct way, with a modern and inclusive approach to the traditions around which she grew up and incorporating pan-African influences that stretch beyond Nigeria and West Africa. At the same time, the star has made her a figurehead for West African food in the U.K., turning Chishuru into a very different type of restaurant to the one she initially envisaged.
In this episode, we talked about the pressure of having a Michelin star, how it has changed Chishuru, her own particular culinary heritage, ‘pan-Africanism’, the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia, and the somewhat unlikely journey she’s taken to becoming one of the most respected chefs in London.
We hope you enjoy it.

Credits:
The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.
Joké Bakare is the chef-owner of Chishuru.
Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com/subscribe