Head to the wonderful, but certainly tourist trap adjacent hell of London’s Borough Market and you’ll find two new Greek-ish restaurants from superhero chef David Carter. Downstairs is Agora, a slightly more casual walk-ins only joint. Upstairs is the more lavish Oma, where you will probably have to auction off a kidney in order to get a booking, but honestly, it really is worth it. (Side note: does anyone have a kidney I can borrow?)
Why? Because, bread. Sure, sassy little baskets filled with pillowy rolls never really went away; go to central London bigshot Brasserie Zedel and they’ll deliver a pink-napkin lined offering of carbs to you before you even get to your menu, while at the newer and hipper likes of Tollington’s in Finsbury Park – an Iberian style seafood bar in an old fish and chip shop – slices of San Sebastian-style baguette are practically flung at your head as you walk through the door.
But at Oma things are different. The menu is vast and varied, spanning sea bass crudo with jalapeno and lime, a spanakopita gratin and a mussel saganaki, but it’s the opening salvo of ‘breads, etc’ (as they oh-so-casually write on the menu) that everybody’s in a fizzy tizz about.
First, there’s a squidgy, charred round of laffa – a kind of hot, deeply artistic pita that’s perfect on its own, but even better smeared with Oma’s sublime salt cod, xo sauce and labneh dip. Next comes a boiled and incandescently chewy açma verde, a bagel made specifically for consumption by angels. The ‘etc’, is hot, house-made potato crisps. Heaven. And this is all before starters are even mentioned. It makes for a heroic opening, and we’re certainly not saying that everything that follows this bounty of breads is a let-down, but, well, we were thinking about the laffa long after we stopped thinking about the saganaki.
Other outrageously good breads doing their best to outshine the rest of London’s menus include rounds of grilled potato bread at Brunswick House, accessorised with a quenelle of gloriously green garlic butter. A run of hype-worthy independent bakeries across the city, from Peckham’s Toad and Bloomsbury’s Fortitude to east London mini-chains Jolene and Dusty Knuckle are also dishing out seriously good loaves (and branded tote bags) to daily queues around their respective blocks. Similarly, neighbourhood spots like Baban’s Naan in Finsbury Park and Ararat Bakery in Dalston are doing epic business with more wallet-friendly takeout flatbreads.
Bread has been a staple in the human diet for roughly 10,000 years. After such an epic run, it was a surprise to see it fall foul with foodies due to a perceived lack of nutritional value and accusations of empty calories. Happily, the prevalence of sourdough – a bread that might do something very nice to your gut indeed – helped ease many of us back into a more carby life.
Wildfarmed, a company who use regenerative agriculture to grow the wheat that makes their flour, are also now a mainstay of London’s chicest restaurants. You’ll see Wildfarmed flour proudly used in the infamously imaginative flatbreads at sustainable sister spots Fallow in St James’s and Roe in Canary Wharf (snail vindaloo flatbread, anyone?), while the Wildfarmed family were a core part of this summer’s dedicated sandwich festival Sarnie Party in Camden.
Bread is most definitely back, and this time it might even be good for the planet, as well as you.
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