The Best Restaurant in London Is Almost A Secret

December 12, 2015

I get an email from various London ‘news’ roundups at least every week, no matter how often I mark TimeOut as the spam that it is, boasting that they found, yet again, the best restaurants in London. Not only are many of the reviews in these types of outlets actually sponsored (did anyone think today’s journalists followed ethical guidelines?), but they’re also always wrong. Always. Wrong. How can I say this so assuredly? Because the actual best food in London is at Persepolis.

Persepolis is this tiny, and I mean like baby shoes, cafe located in the back of a shop in Peckham, so when (not if) you go, you’ll be like “oh I can get the bus there in 40 minutes” but no silly you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned about traveling in London and you will really get there an hour late. The main chef is bright-red-haired firecracker Sally Butcher, author of middle eastern cookbooks including Veggiestan and Snackistan, and despite only having one burner in the cafe, the food she sends out is beyond imagination. She and her Iranian (I think?) husband sell middle eastern sweets and interesting spices and all kinds of fun stuff in the shop (including what is supposed to be the greatest rice cooker ever), and the cafe – now with more than 3 tables AND a toilet – is a flinging flanging gem. The fact that I returned there before I learned that they now have a toilet (they didn’t the first time I went and I had to go into a nearby chicken shop like 8x) says much more about how miraculous the food is than I can say with other words, but I’m going to go on anyway for like 9 more pages probably because that’s how I do.

If you live in London or its surroundings (I’m going to say, for these purposes, that those surroundings stretch to within 2-3 hour flight time), you need to go now till December 23 for their Christmas feast, offered at lunch and dinner times before the baby Jesus’s birthday. For $30 (remember that is GBP but I don’t have the pound sign on my keyboard…though I could have copied and pasted one instead of typing this aside but whatever), you get, well, a feast of Persian delights. It takes a while (our meal took about 3.5 hours) because of that aforementioned single burner, but like I said, it’s the best food in London. It’s hard to remember what everything was, but it was all delicious. NB, we had one or two extra dishes in our feast because I was with a VIP, but even half of this amount of food would have been more than enough, and still an insanely good deal. Considering the quality and the quantity, this feast was more akin to the gutbusting Michelin-starred meals we’ve had, but for the price of, well, not them.
I’m also going to talk about their regular menu at the end so you can see what you might be able to enjoy if you can’t go immediately. But first, the Christmas feast!
As you can see, our table was decorated with a fun Christmassy tablecloth and lots of toys and ribbons. Christmas crackers were on the table waiting for us. Christmas crackers, I have learned, are not a crunchy edible item that smells of cinnamon or something. No, they are cardboard tubes that you pull apart to make a loud obnoxious sound. We all did ours at the same time so all the other diners knew not to mess with us.
We were treated to pomegranate juice Prosecco early on, but it took a very, very long time to get someone’s attention to ask for water, and even longer for them to bring it, so bring a bottle to save you. Finally, our cold mezze arrived.

Admiral ajvar

I don’t like yogurt

These little oil balls were so good

We got a plate of ajvar, a red pepper puree that I learned to love in Sarajevo; a mild rice and pea dish that came with a tangy dilly yogurt sauce; and makhdoush with fresh herbs, Peter Piper’s pickled peppers, and sweet potato crackers. Oh, and every round comes with unlimited baskets of warm lavash or crispy lavashy chips. I think both the flatbread and cracker forms can properly be called lavash, actually. Anyway, all good, but the makhdoush was the one where you’re like, oh snap, this is blowing my mind. The flavors were so complex, it was like spicy and sour and also allspice-y? I have the palate of a fast food fry cook so I can’t identify subtle spices correctly but it was incredible. They are baby eggplants filled with a sort of walnut paste and preserved in oil. That oil was really good to dip the second bread basket into.

After a much less painful wait (considering all we just ate) came the warm mezze, otherwise known as happy fried things.

Persepolis’s delicious kibbeh is filled with chickpeas or surprisingly with chopped walnuts in their fried bulgur croquette-like shell. Their great falafel was also included, and another fried ball that I’m going to say was sweet potato but I really forget. It was all so delicious, but what pushed it over the top was the harissa cole slaw on top. Super spicy yet incredibly flavorful, this was the kind of condiment every fried thing should always come with. I want to make harissa cole slaw and put it on everything now. It’s also a pretty color.
This is probably where normal people would be full, especially because by now we have gone through 4 baskets of bread per head, but we’re just getting warmed up. Next we had a traditional chickpea, spinach, and crispy fried bread dish and a most delicious peanut and Brussels sprouts stew.

Fried bread

Yahmmm

These were two of my favorite things. The chickpea, bread, and spinach dish is already a combination of my 3 favorite foods, but it also came in a super thick tahini sauce with a huge dollop of thick as hell tahini cream in the center, so it’s pretty much the perfect dish you could ever create for me. Sally doesn’t even know me. With that taken care of, what’s the next most perfect dish you could give me? Brussels sprouts of that super hard to achieve properly edible texture, in a robust tomato-based peanut sauce full of crushed peanuts. I eat at least 4 peanut-based things per day (usually 4 chocolate peanut butter cups) so this was welcome, and super delicious. Damn. These really seemed tailor-made for me and I am just reveling in the memory of how good they were.
But we’re not done! That was just the mezze/appetizer portion! We haven’t even gotten to the mains. I’m full just remembering all of this.
First came the traditional and very recognizable dolmeh: imam biyaldi (from the webiste), Turkish stuffed aubergines with tomato, onion, and garlic; and Persian stuffed red peppers with rice and nuts. Stuff vegetables are common, almost expected vegan mains and might not seem exciting to you, or me, but even I would happily order this magical plate again. It helped that the oil-dredged roasted veggies came on a bed of thick lavash, rendering the bread soaked through and pretty outstanding in its own right.

Magic

The peppers and the eggplant fell apart at the touch of the fork, they were so tender and amazing (and, yes, oil soaked). Oh I almost forgot; you can see in the background the white cabbage wrap as well. It looked like an organ donation from the ice box but it tasted like heaven. The delicious dish came with a tangy peppery relish in a cup and a green salad to offset all the comforting heavy tastes. I really liked how much fresh greenery seemed to abound.
The next main was so unique and special, both in taste and appearance. The chestnut tagine with a buttery basmati rice and shirazi salsa (and more green salad!) showed off chestnuts, chickpeas, and other legumes and vegetables stewed for a very long time in tamarind, resulting in a black dish with extraordinarily deep levels of flavor.

Black magic

It was such a fun dish to eat because, since the stewing left everything black and unidentifiable, you’d pierce an object with your fork and expect, say, a chestnut but then it would be a parsnip, or vice versa, or you’d expect a chickpea and it would be a walnut, &c. You get it. Fun game. Delicious food.
After all of this food, plus 7 baskets of lavash each, we were busting at the seams. But Persepolis’s desserts are just as remarkable as its savory food, so we knew that more challenges awaited us. We did not quite anticipate the extent of those challenges. We all laughed in disbelief, shock, and excitement when our tray of middle eastern sweets arrived with the stern order from Sally that we were to finish every last bite. (Yes ma’am.)

Ne’er hath these eyes beheld a more beauteous sight.

Paklava (for Persian cuisine it’s a p not a b). Turkish delight. Halva. Semolina cake. Coconut bars. That’s just the bottom right corner. I loved the big bowl of pomegranate seeds in the center, making us feel at least a tiny bit healthy. As long as you eat a spoonful of pomegranate seeds between every sugar-soaked piece of phyllo-wrapped pastry, you achieve balance health-wise, though you do have to spend more time in the underworld. It was all so delectable that I’m actually using that word even though it usually makes me cringe. Before we even finished our first pieces, however, Sally came out to test us even further:

At this point I thought I was being punked.

Yup, she dropped mugs full of vegan ice cream in front of each of us. We simultaneously groaned in pain, fear, and absolute delight. Even though they use Swedish Glace (a popular dairy-free ice cream in the UK that, if you take it out of its container and place it on a tabletop overnight, it will melt YET NOT LOSE ITS SHAPE (this is a troubling experiment that my vegans have actually done)), Persepolis has the absolute best sundaes I’ve ever had, so here was a chance to make my own! I simply put everything from that sweets tray into the mug and mashed mashed mashed it up. Perfection. And then I slept and/or cried for 15 hours with my hearing and vision both going in and out as my body focused on digesting instead of anything else.
The Christmas feast includes mint tea or coffee to end, and even though fresh mint tea is my favorite, none of us could stomach another thing, even a liquid. It was an amazing, incredible, unbeatable meal, and for only $30 there’s no better deal, especially in this town. Run don’t walk.

A view of the quaint shoppe. You can’t read it from here, but all those little taped signs say the most hilarious things, like “if you can’t control your child we can laminate him for you” or stuff like that.

But what about for the rest of the year? Or what if you aren’t in the mood for a half day of sublime eating (who are you)? You’ll still have the best meal ever. It’ll still take a long time, but it’s worth it. Here are some moments from previous visits. HIGHLIGHTS!

liquids

solids

Persepolis has a really interesting drinks menu. Pictured is a mixed carrot and apple juice (I think. I don’t remember) but they offer intriguing things such as a carob, halva, and banana smoothie; a mango, tamarind, and ginger smoothie; and vegan hot chocolate with carob and spices. Foodwise, we started with bread (yay bread) and incredible individual portions of carrot soup. P.S., this was a really long time ago, I didn’t take notes, and I’m making up 70% of it. Just know it was all delicious. I remember that much.

We shared an overstuffed plate of traditional mezze: hummus, falafel, their wonderful kibbeh, tabbouleh, Peter Piper’s pickled peppers, olives, pickled other things including garlic which requires a warning, and lentil chips. All so good. I will never turn down a middle eastern mezze plate especially if there’s hummus, and this was a great batch of everything. I even ate that pickled garlic. I remember that.
The next dish was the most incredible standout, one of Persepolis’s best and most interesting offerings. It’s soft tofu cooked with the most insanely deep-flavored dates of all time. You probably think that sounds disgusting, because I did, and I would never have ordered it if my friend didn’t insist, thanks to her prior knowledge. But this puts all other tofu scrambles to shame. To damn shame. Somehow, these amazing Iranian dates meld with the tofu to create this magical flavor that you never imagined existed. And then it’s all over warm bread. Yes.

Sugar dates and figs! Sugar dates and tofu.

Next is ANOTHER of Persepolis’s standout must-gets! I think maybe everything they make is? Anyway, get the foul medammes because 1) foul is the best, but more importantly b) it comes with eggy za’atar bread, and although it takes ages to make, Sally’s tahini-flavored vegan version is off. the. chiz. arts. I don’t know what all the components are or if it really is just pure magic that I can’t imitate, but it is insane.

Look at that eggy mess of delight

As I said above, Persepolis’s desserts are not to be missed. At one visit, since there were three of us, we ordered three gigantic sundaes to share. Duh.

NOT MY HANDS

We got the Knickerbocker sundae and I still don’t know what that is so don’t ask, but I know it was insane amazing. I think it had date caramel, and probably halva, probably chocolate, just definitely get it, okay? We also got the Turkish Delight, which is doused in bright pink rose syrup and lots of bits of sugar-bomb Turkish Delight. This was too much for me, though others seem to love it. It’s sugarrrrrr on another frequency, one that I don’t think I communicate on. But the Hot Paklava Meltdown, our last sundae, was exactly my speed. It’s the vanilla ice cream with, you guessed it, hot syrupy paklava mixed it, so you have to dig in asap before all the ice cream melts. We of course stopped to take pictures because we are vegans with blogs. But oh man, in that mid-melt stage, it’s the best thing you can imagine.
So obviously you can see that Persepolis is not to be missed. Not one thing on their menu is to be missed. If you can’t get to London, you should check out Sally Butcher’s cookbooks. But really, you need her to cook for you. I imagine how I feel about her now is along the lines of how Eric Ripert and all those award-winning NYC chefs feel about that old woman living in a monastery in South Korea who cooks for the monks.

PERSEPOLIS, PECKHAM, LONDON
Water speed: Nonexistent at first, but then they really became attentive.
Service: It depends how crowded the place is. They are doing a million things at once but will be super helpful when they can be.
Bathrooms: There is one now!
Food: The best. Go hungry and don’t expect to eat for the rest of the day.
Bonus: Fun, cozy atmosphere, extremely affordable and so cheap for what you are getting.