The world on a plate

It is 10.30am and cold and wet on Gerrard Street, the main artery of Chinatown in London. Sacks of beansprouts and rice, shoulders of pork and cases of Tiger beer are being unloaded from white vans and steered on porters’ trollies towards dormant restaurants. Mangoes, papayas and lychees are being arranged outside supermarkets. Boxes filled with chillis and cabbages are stacked in towers to be lowered into cellars through doors that spring up from the pavement. It’s a vision of Chinatown – generally a post-pub/theatre/cinema destination of bright lights and colourful window displays – that few outsiders take the trouble to experience. Already, I am struck by the way in which Jenny Linford, who has suggested we meet here, is able to open windows on to London’s culinary arena that are not so much hidden, as simply ignored by most of the capital’s residents.

Linford, 42, is the author of Food Lovers’ London, a directory of the vast array of food stores and restaurants that serve the capital’s protean communities. There are sections on Chinese London, Greek London, African, Japanese, Spanish, Jewish, Polish and Middle-Eastern Londons, and so on. A glossary of food terms explains what, for example, a soursop is – “a large, oval-shaped fruit with a thick, green spiny skin” – while other chapters guide readers towards the finest butchers, fishmongers, tea and coffee outlets, spice sellers, farmers’ markets, and cheese and chocolate shops. For anyone interested in exploring the metropolis’s untapped gastronomic resources, the book is both a revelation and a joy.

“People don’t think of there being bakers in Chinatown,” says the elfin author, tucking into a freshly baked red bean mooncake in Far East, a tiny caf? which by night becomes a restaurant. Linford’s seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of global cuisine in London is matched by a passion that soon has her despairing over the vulnerability of small shopkeepers to the interests of big business. “I’m really sad that so many food shops in Central London are under threat,” she says. “When I first wrote Food Lovers’ London [in 1989] there must have been six or seven Italian delis in Soho. Now there are two. Their rents go up implacably, and they can’t just suddenly make more profit. Now there’s a whole block of Chinese food shops around Newport Place that have been moved out by the developers – a fishmonger, two fantastic food shops, a Chinese kitchenware shop selling woks. A whole history is being taken away. After all, what are big cities supposed to be about? Lots of different communities living side-by-side. Those shops are people. It’s tragic.”

Warming to her theme, the softly spoken Linford decries similar plans to replace Queens Market in the East End with a supermarket. “London’s old street markets are dying,” she laments, “and yet this [Queens Market] is a thriving place, so alive. Because of the multi-ethnic nature of the community, people are buying there every day – cheap food, fresh food, that they can cook from scratch. It’s amazingly diverse – English traders next to Caribbean traders, African traders next to Asian traders. There are ingredients there that I’ve never even seen before! We’re supposed to be encouraging people to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables, and yet this is going to be taken away. What kind of supermarket is going to stock five
different kinds of plantain – yellow, black, green – with all their different uses? That kind of thing just doesn’t exist in supermarkets.”

Despite having been raised by her librarian father and Singaporean mother in such far-flung locations as Ghana, Trinidad, Singapore and, during her teenage years, Florence, it wasn’t until she was given a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook while studying English and politics at York university that Linford’s interest in exotic cuisine really took off. “It was a real eye-opener to me,” she says, “that you could take something really cheap, like mince, and add a few spices and just make the most delicious meal.”

Post-university, Linford was manager of Hatchards book shop in the Strand when the idea for Food Lovers’ London first came to her. “I’d always be searching high and low to find ingredients,” she says. “It’s astonishing how much things have changed in just 15 years. Then, if you wanted ricotta cheese or mascarpone, you had to go to an Italian deli. If you wanted coconut milk or lemon grass, you went to a Chinese shop in Chinatown. Supermarkets didn’t stock anything like that, so I thought it would be useful to write a guide. Researching the book became a great journey of exploration. London is this massive, teeming city full of diverse communities, and what I really like about the food shops is that they’re really important to them, a real part of who they are. Food is such a vital source of identity.”

Uncovering these small islands of foreign culture, though – from the Greek greengrocers of Bayswater to the Moroccan stores on Golborne Road, from Filipino fare in Earl’s Court to Ethiopian treats in Tufnell Park – required some ingenuity. “I had a friend who worked for the World Service at Bush House, and I asked if she could take me into work with her. So she took me round to all the various departments, and I would ask people where they shopped. It was perfect because they were all expats – Iranian, Nepali, Tamil, etc – and often the food shops would be near an embassy, or a place of worship.

“Also,” she continues, “when I met new people, if, say, they had a Japanese wife, I’d ask, ‘Oh, can I meet your wife? Will she take me shopping with her?’ The results were a revelation to me – what there was in London, and how unaware people were of it.”

Linford has just concluded an intense period of criss-crossing the capital for an updated fourth edition of Food Lovers’ London, due out next month. It is exhausting work, but the rewards are constant. “On High Street Kensington, there’s a row of Iranian shops,” she explains. “It’s like a different world. They’ve got a wonderful display of fruit and vegetables; little cups of pomegranate seeds that have been picked out of the pomegranate; an amazing array of nuts, dried fruits, pastries. Those glimpses of other cultures that you get through the food shops in London are really exciting.”

Over the years, she has noted much change, as new communities have established themselves in the capital and others have begun to drift. “There was a shop in King’s Cross, which has gone now, which was an important stopping point for Italians coming over to the UK who wanted information and advice about how to live in London and the shop-owner would help them. Now there are a lot of Russian shops opening up, and East European, Polish.

“Finchley used to be very Japanese, but the Japanese have now moved out to Acton. I went to check up on an Iranian food shop there, and there was a sign up in Polish. I went in, and half the shop has now become Polish, full of cabbage and sausages and pickled herring. That’s been a big change, that sort of compromise. There’s a lot more flexibility as community boundaries change. At Terroni’s in Clerkenwell, which is the oldest Italian deli in Britain, the guy who runs it told me, ‘My customers are now about 60 per cent English, and 40 per cent Italian, whereas before, they were mostly Italian.’ And now we have Italian food shops, like Carluccio’s, designed specifically for, and catering to, the English.”

Londoners shouldn’t wait, however, until Anglicised Thai, Indian or Japanese food shops begin to appear on their high streets. “People don’t seem to shop outside their own environments, but I think it’s really good for you,” says Linford with an evangelical gleam in her eye. “If you’re in Soho, why not step inside a Chinese food shop instead of just into a restaurant? There’s a whole different world out there, with all these delicious things waiting for you to try, and it’s right under your nose!”

The fourth edition of Food Lovers’ London by Jenny Linford is published by Metro Publications on July 23 and is available from Books First priced £7.64 (RRP £8.99) plus 99p p&p on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy