King Cookdaily, an inconspicuous, easy-to-miss glorified kiosk with a few seats on Hanbury Street in Shoreditch, east London, serves a mere 11 dishes with names such as “Infamous”, “Yoga Fire” and “High Grade” advertised above the till. The store’s frontage is defiantly anonymous, and its signage understated, so perhaps you will also walk past two or three times while looking for it, as I did.
In a postcode that’s full of shouty, shiny rooms to eat in, and to be seen eating in, most of them places that overpromise and under-deliver, King Cookdaily is befuddlingly low-key, especially considering its revered status among plant-based diners. The old joke goes that vegans are constantly announcing their presence, apropos of nothing, lest anyone miss their very saintliness. At King Cookdaily, however, it would take the unfamiliar guest a few long, hard looks at the menu to realise there’s not a scrap of meat or animal by-product on offer here. The vibe is Buddhist, but there’s devil in the detail.
That High Grade bowl, for example, is a deft blend of fresh veg – carrot, cabbage, mushroom, yam, plus plenty of minced garlic and ground dried red pepper – stewed until soft and served in a thoughtfully engineered, smoky sweet-and-sour barbecue sauce. It is all then topped with a crumble of hemp. Life is too short to crumble your own hemp, even if it is a superfood, plus I wouldn’t know where to begin. You can have your High Grade over steamed coconut rice or load it with extra tofu or, if you like, chick’n. Yes, that sort of chick’n, where the apostrophe is literally the difference between life and death, because no clucky things are harmed in its making.
The Yoga Fire, my go-to on this menu, is a delicately spiced yellow curry of soft chickpeas, sweet potatoes and mung bean dal, all simmered slowly in golden coconut milk, served over steamed rice and garnished with cucumber raita. It is a bowl of profound, restorative goodness. In fact, this is literally the only “fast food” that my body thanks me for. I love vegan dining, but recently so much of it has slipped towards the decadent, the “dirty” and the deep-fried. King Cookdaily, however, errs on the fresh, the crunchy, the al dente and the fibrous, and serves vegetables in an instantly recognisable form.
Chef King Cook himself has been perfecting his plant-based offering since 2009, when he attracted all sorts to his previous shop in the nearby Box Park; they included armfuls of hip-hop artists, US film stars and British young bright things – in other words, the sort of people who look as if they get their five a day. When he opened this new venture, then, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that this was the point when the bells, whistles and hoopla would finally begin, with a multi-floor dining space, living greenery walls, Insta-friendly staging and maybe a merch shop at the entrance. But no, it’s the same low-key, let-the-food-sing-for-its-supper vibe as before. There are still no plates, just the same biodegradable bowls and cardboard forks. There are no fancy signature sodas, no premix cocktails; rather, there are five varieties of Thai Foco pop on offer – guava, pomegranate, sugar cane, mangosteen and soursop. I asked if they had a fancy, middle-class kombucha, like Guardian readers drink, but they shook their heads and offered me a Peak Calm “mood drink” with tryptophan to help soothe my furrowed brow.
King Cookdaily doesn’t even have the obligatory open kitchen, where we could maybe catch sight of the man himself sweating over his increasingly famous vegan lao bowl, a meat-free take on the national dish of Laos that loses nothing by omitting blood and sinew. After all, perhaps we want to see where the unami-rich chick’n mince is cooked with green herbs and served over sticky plantain and toasted sticky rice. Perhaps, like Salt Bae with his salt, we’d like to see him flourishing his fresh radish.
King Cookdaily will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for many this is the sort of cooking that makes you question why you’re cluttering your innards with flesh. Perhaps the answer is just that a normal mortal can’t cook vegetables this well at home. Take another signature, the Hard Bowl, which features glorious, twice-cooked cassava: cooked by the wrong hands – in fact, cooked by my hands – it’s always a complete mess, but here it is soft, yielding and mixed with ackee, boiled dumplings, fresh thyme and a judicious amount of scotch bonnet chilli. This is futuristic vegan cooking, using old, beloved ideas. It’s food for people who, like Mark E Smith, want to Eat Y’self Fitter, but don’t quite know how to do that at home. I have no idea how to scramble tofu with black Indian salt, as King Cook does in his KCD pad Thai, or how to add it to flat noodles without creating a vast, gelatinous lump. But I’m quietly pleased that there’s a man in east London who resolutely, if rather quietly, does.
King Cookdaily 10 Hanbury Street, London E1 (no phone). Open all week, noon-9pm (Sat 12.30-9pm; closes early if sold out). From about £15 a head, plus drinks
Should we all be vegan? On Tuesday 30 January at 8pm GMT, food writer and Guardian columnist Meera Sodha joins a live-streamed discussion on the pros, cons, realities and myths of a plant-based diet. Tickets available here.
