The tease and trap of Canteen
Ruthiecore, pumpkin ravioli and perilous simplicity at Notting Hill's hottest new restaurant
Hello,
My name is Jimi and I’m a journalist, author and broadcaster. 2025, somewhat terrifyingly, marks exactly two decades since I shuffled out of university, in ill-advisedly paint-spattered Diesel jeans, and started writing professionally. In that time I have covered the arts, sport, fitness, tech, a Russian-language interview with Michael Stipe and, perhaps most significantly in the last six years, restaurants and food culture. There’s lots about me and my journey that can be found all over the internet. I understand that maiden Substack posts are meant to be a kind of introductory mission statement but, without wishing to yadda yadda what has been a hugely enjoyable, award-winning career, I’m hoping you’ll allow me an in medias res opening. Seconds will be a place for London restaurant reviews, cultural recommendations, information on my upcoming events and appearances, and other things. It will, I hope, continue the work of suggesting interesting places to eat with the vital context of exactly what it is that makes them noteworthy. It is a bid to explain the city, one must-try bite at a time.
This is a first taste. I sincerely hope you’ll come back for more.
Cheers
Jimi
Canteen
310 Portobello Road, London, W10 5TA
In one sense, Canteen is just another contemporary Italian in a city already perilously full of them. Another set of tables bearing austere plates of gnocchi and tagliatelle and rumpled scrims of prosciutto; another place to drink little rattling tumblers of negroni, slurp the puddled remnants of an overnight beef ragu, and mispronounce ‘cicoria’ in a manner so garbled that it might actually constitute inadvertent hate speech.
But then, from another angle, this four-week old, lunch-only spot, set within a glowing corner site at the intersection of Goldborne Road and Portobello Road, feels both unusual and gently significant. Occupying and appropriating the shell of a former Pizza East, it is the latest opening from Public House: the ambitious aesthetes behind a collection of camera-ready, precisely indulgent pubstaurants – The Pelican in Notting Hill, The Bull in Charlbury, and The Hero in Maida Vale – whose locations chart the vague migratory pattern of the business gilet set. The chefs here, Jessica Filbey and Harry Hills, are graduates of the River Cafe and disciples of its rigorous, vividly plated approach to Tuscan hyper-seasonality. It launched, with an atypical lack of preparatory back-lift and press fanfare. And the Instagram account (where the ever-changing menu is posted every day) is a caption-light, mysterious mood board of soft-focus kitchen candids.
I have, these past few column-less weeks, pretty much kept up my regular restaurant-visiting regimen; nudging into bistros and burger joints and TikTok-famous noodle bars like a TV cop still dutifully working cases despite the loss of his gun and badge. I was, I think, looking for something or somewhere to grip me enough to turn this newsletter from a perpetually postponed hypothetical into an undeniable reality. Well, from the moment that I started to glean details about Canteen – the Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray-coded pedigree, the pointed minimalism, the irresistible, alluring bullshit of a supposedly “under-the-radar” opening covered by multiple outlets – I felt that nameless tug of urgency and elbows-out, me-first competitiveness. Here was a masterful piece of hype-tapping for the gatekeeping era; a study in self-conscious understatedness whose early buzz spoke to the London restaurant community’s collective horn for quiet sophistication, sleek utilitarianism and gentle exclusivity. Canteen simultaneously signals a pointed vibe shift and a self-conscious throwback. Its name – at once an #iykyk riff on the River Cafe’s initial function and a nod to the fact that plenty of people in W11 probably do think £20 porcini risottos and £34 half chickens constitute everyday canteen food – contains fascinating multitudes. And so I felt, as I often do, that I had to both experience the immodest fuss and parse what it might ultimately mean.
Notting Hill projects a vibe that my south-east London brain has always struggled to adequately process. More culturally complex and demographically interesting than it is ever really given credit for, its headline restaurants and bars nonetheless always seem to be dominated by different forms of the same rackety, mysteriously acquired wealth. Semi-retired ceramicists. Swiss-educated telecommunications scions. Burgeoning functional beverage entrepreneurs with stick-and-poked forearms. They are, somehow, all there in the middle of the working day and they all appear to have turned crab rostis from Dorian and oysters at The Cow into a viable vocation.
That tendency was alive and well at Canteen on a comically dreich Monday. Deep puddles sploshed underfoot, a gnarled man muttered swearwords to himself while carrying a drizzly mirror down Chesterton Road, and Trellick Tower was framed by a greige, old bra sky. It was a day to stay indoors. And yet, merely 30 minutes after the beginning of service, the space’s walk-in only tables were already in short supply. Canteen began life as last summer’s 310 Portobello: a flatbread-heavy, pop-up collaboration with talented neighbour/noted diversity and inclusion expert Thomas Straker, and a clever means to repurpose the built-in brick ovens that Pizza East’s closure had left dormant.
This spirit of creative upcycling is helpful when trying to understand the restaurant’s final form. What was initially planned to be another schmancy pub (a return to the days when this site was home to a place called the Fat Badger; still mooted for upstairs) has instead been lightly retooled into a kind of counter-focused, neo-trattoria where both the food and aesthetic is very much oriented around the twin, wood-fired furnaces that flicker, like infernal portholes, at the heart of the room. The rest is discreetly logoed orb lanterns, bistro wood-panelling and slatted mustard yellow bench-booths; a pair of curved, zinc-topped bars with studded edges, massed ranks of Campari on high shelves and a matte metal back wall that frames the youthful, almost exclusively female chef team, and is an occasional smudged canvas for menu items scrawled out in white marker. I sat, solo, at the arse-end of that main counter, watching a diminutive, high-ponied chef lever a crackled, bubbling taleggio and girolles pizza out of the oven. The urbane, powerfully NPR guy next to me spoke of morning joints and weekends in Lake Como; blaring country music jostled with conversation at a volume seemingly intent on overloading the hearing aids of half the clientele. It was, I suppose, a bit like a River Cafe for the Monzo Flex generation.
That sense of Ruthiecore chefs transposing a philosophy and way of working to a new environment carried over into the first dishes. Winter leaf salad had a kind of luscious, painterly sensuousness: a butch, autumnal pile-up of bitter radicchio curls, puckering, thin slivers of persimmon and snapped walnuts, all lightly cloaked in a racy, gorgeously weighted dressing. Focaccia – which comes in tiny little £1 bumps – had such squishy, aerated lightness and deep, unfurling flavour that I instantly ordered the second portion I’d expressly told my server I wouldn’t need. The deep-fried olives, however, were not quite right. Sausage-stuffed, golden-crumbed and fried to what restaurant critics are legally obligated to describe as a greaseless crisp, they nonetheless lacked the carefully calibrated umami-slap of the ones at, say, Manteca. Heavily brined, creamy gordal olives plugged with salty pork made for a discordant, wincing combination that may have been helped by dialling down the saline somewhere. The champagne-problem of an enthusiastic, cack-handed massage, but a problem all the same.
Pumpkin ravioli – which currently feels like one of the semi-permanent fixtures on a menu that really does change quite a bit every day – was much more like it. It is hardly the most original of combinations; a mostly sauceless plate of flopping, hand-rolled parcels, enlivened by seasonally apt, stress-tested embellishments. Even so, the fine-hewn details of it, the papery crisp sheafs of pancetta and the attentively seasoned pumpkin mush spilling from butter-drenched pasta, accumulated into something with its own transfixing magic. After that, there was a perfectly lovely hazelnut ice cream that formed the basis of a messily constructed, climactic affogato. And then, along with the £50 bill, the pervading sense, lingering like a stubborn odour, that the occasionally flawed, mostly pretty pleasant meal I had just had did not really seem to justify my own expectations or the crowds still thronging the door as I pushed my way back out into the afternoon gloom.
I may be ambling towards a harsher than intended conclusion. Canteen fizzes with atmosphere, a pleasing quantity of edge and occasional flashes of considered, committedly unshowy deliciousness. Its lo-fi brand language and aesthetic has a boldness and cool that I’m sure will soon be ripped off everywhere from Deptford to Digbeth. What’s more, I had a front row seat to appreciate an atypically sororal, nurturing and collaborative kitchen environment. In Filbey’s open kitchen, praise is forthcoming, discipline is high, and the natural response to an inexperienced cook’s honest mistake is not a prolonged public bollocking.
The issue with Public House’s newest venture, really, is something I have wanged on about on cooking competition shows more times than I care to remember. Unadorned and ordinary are two sides of the same culinary coin. If your food traffics in familiarity and unshowy comfort, if you are consciously evoking the glamorous simplicity of one of the city’s most famous restaurants, then it significantly raises the skill expectation bar and narrows the margin for error. Canteen is hostage to the promise and tease of its winking name; a white-hot opening lacking the service speed and inexpensiveness to be a glorified cafeteria, and yet not quite exceptional or grand enough to be a big ticket, special occasion spot. Real restaurant-world canteens – Wong Kei, Sweetings, Regency Cafe and E. Pellicci – tend to be organically created by repeat custom rather than self-declared. When the dust of excitement around its opening settles, Canteen could tack towards that path if it so wishes. For now, it is a capable, promising little restaurant, toiling in the eye of an intriguing and not especially justified storm.
Cafe François
Did someone say glorified cafeteria? Ostensibly part of London’s genuinely fascinating sudden mania for ersatz bistros, the particulars of this sprawling, insta-hit follow-up to Maison François also mark it out as having appreciably high levels of Big Canteen Energy. I will not bore you with a rehash of all the things you’ve probably read in approving early reviews and Instagram posts. But I will say that it was the thoughtful little gracenotes of a giddying recent lunch there – the chic luggage racks that gird some of the tables, the fact large glasses of wine come as a personal carafe in an iced mini bucket – that gave the lasting impression of what happens when a sharp eye for pleasing hospitality details meets the unfathomably deep pockets necessary to bring them to life. The croque monsieur flatbread was the most indelible dish: familiar pleasures in an enthralling, reconstituted new form and with mustard correctly applied in a quantity that is just on the edge of violence.
Hill & Szrok
One of the weird tendencies of a regular restaurant writing beat, in my experience, is that eating at short notice and purely for pleasure can become a rarity. These past few weeks have brought some natural combatting of this. After drinking and yammering at The Dove on a Friday night – with my friend Tayo Popoola and the drinks writer Abbie Moulton – the three of us ended up ambling up Broadway Market to this butcher’s/alt-steakhouse/broom cupboard. A place I mostly remember for an extraordinary, lockdown-era burger (rest in power, foil-scrunched king) but which, of late, has been re-energised by the chef Will Gleave. Everything we ate – soused sardines, ripe, beef sobrasada and guindilla on toast, a heady wagyu tri-tip – had a thrust and sure-footed originality to it. Yet, it was the grilled sweetcorn, anointed in spiced honey and in possession of an almost narcotic succulence, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Bistro Freddie
Two contemporary bistros, Jeremy? Two? That’s insane. Yes, yes. The fact I have chosen these particular meals to highlight is doing nothing to negate the idea that London’s appetite, and, relatedly, mine, is currently a study in Gauloise-huffing homogeneousness. Still, having finally got round to visiting Dom Hamdy’s hugely successful, joyfully scrambled riff on French and English bistro culture (as part of a first, reassuringly excellent and enjoyably unprintable first meeting with one Marina O’Loughlin) just before its first birthday, can I be the 731st person to tell you it’s great? Excellent endive salad (with the roquefort cheese element, smartly incorporated into a rich, liberally dribbled dressing), excellent chicken pie, with an inhaleable bong hit of wafting butter scent, and excellent necessarily unnecessary îles flottante. Great, also, to see the very talented Alexandre Laforce Reynolds, once of the sadly shuttered Eline, back at it and in the kitchen here.
Colin From Accounts
Look, cultural recommendations like this can always get a bit, “Have you heard of this show called The Sopranos?” However, having eked out the last few episodes of this Australian sitcom’s second series, I can’t really suppress the instinct to tell anyone who will listen what a toweringly brilliant piece of television it is. Funny in a way that is both sharp and daft. Devastating and dramatic when it needs to be. Emotionally honest, curious and self-lacerating – the ethical porn episode! – to a degree that is both uncomfortable and life-affirming. I’m in awe of Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall’s boldness, chemistry and cleverness. And I think, if nothing else, it’s a collection of episodes that really show the watchable but madly overpraised Nobody Wants This up as the forced, fan-servicey bag of artistic Cheetos that it was. We have also started Rivals which, yes, really is an absurd pleasure-grenade of a show. A feeling we should keep in mind when all the inevitable copycats/rush-commissioned Jackie Collins adaptations make landfall in a couple of years.
Kaidi Tatham & Andrew Ashong – Sankofa Season
Lately, for reasons that will be announced in due course, it has been quite a head-down period of focused work, concerted wifi-avoidance and voracious ‘writing music’ appetite. When it comes to sounds that I can write to I have particular kinks and rules that would almost certainly make no sense to anyone else (classical is too preposterous/soporific; hip hop is too distracting). Anyway, this 2020 collaborative EP from musicians Andrew Ashong and Kaidi Tatham (discovered via the breadcrumbed inclusion of a remix on Jungle’s third Sunshine Stereo compilation tape) could have been lab-engineered for me. Soulful, jazz-adjacent, propulsive, it’s honestly one of my finds of the year and criminally underrated/little-known. Get on it.
The episode of Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year that I filmed last year is on very soon (genuinely felt my chest tighten when I wandered back into our living room the other day and heard myself in the trailer for the new series). I may well post again in some form about the experience. Suffice to say, it was a ridiculous honour and such an incredible, unforgettable day. You can see me posing for the competing artists and expressing unfaked gratitude and astonishment at what they came up with on 13 November at 8pm.
Separately, the other upcoming thing is my event at the inaugural South-East London Book Fest on Saturday 23 November. I’m part of a great line-up including Caleb Azumah Nelson and The Flygerians, and I’ll be talking about Settlers, with Jason Page from South East Salon. Hilariously, it is going to be in the legendary Peckhamplex so I’m half-hoping for that venue’s signature anarchic audience interaction and contraband food and drink. Lots of tickets have apparently gone but there are still some available here.
Until next time. Big love.