Corner Room: London’s best-kept upscale lunch secret

by Alex Robertson Textor on

What makes a secret restaurant a secret? It might be off the standard grid. It might be simply unsung, or empty at particular mealtimes. There’s got to be something, however contrived, that allows it to achieve status as a secret. And whatever it is, there’s got to be something of high quality on offer to merit eligibility as a “secret” in the first place. Secrets have to be good. If they’re not good, they’re just irrelevant shards of information.

Corner Room in London‘s Bethnal Green neighborhood is a secret along this equation: very sophisticated food + lack of customers at lunchtime = lunch secret. It’s not as if the people behind Corner Room are afraid of operating a semi-secretive operation, either. The restaurant has no telephone number or website and doesn’t take reservations.

And to make things even more appealing, Corner Room, located in fact in a corner room at Town Hall Hotel, may very well be the best place in London for grabbing a top-notch lunch without running into debt. The set lunch menu is £15 ($23.50), which in London is a steal for two courses at this level of sophistication. You can expect to pay around £22 ($34.50) for a starter, a main, and a dessert.

Corner Room is helmed by Nuno Mendes, who runs the Michelin-starred and very pricey Viajante downstairs at Town Hall Hotel. Corner Room is Viajante’s little sidekick. Big kid Viajante’s menu, with its hodgepodge of Asian and Iberian influences is full of surprises, including wild foraged herbs and grasses. Corner Room repeats some of Viajante’s motifs at a much lower price point and with less variety. The Corner Room menu is short, sweet, and to the point.

Each meal starts with an anchovy-stuffed olive, dense and exciting. The courses that follow are all delicious and surprising. A beetroot and salmon main is probably the best thing I’ve eaten there, though there’s never been something that didn’t delight: fresh granitas; the shock of shiso against goat’s cheese; and unbelievably tender meats, to name three.

At dinnertime I’ve watched Corner Room fill up rapidly and a conversational din gather like vapor over tables, but I’ve never had trouble getting a table at Corner Room for lunch. On my last visit, I had the most delightful long lunch with a friend, three lovely hours.

There are two downsides to a lunch at Corner Room. The kitchen can get overwhelmed with orders, rendering service slow. And portions are on the small side. Otherwise, this is a treat. Just remember that no reservations are taken. You’ll just need to show up and hope that this blog post and other snippets of media attention will not have ruined your ability to have a nice, long, leisurely lunch over a trio of extraordinary courses.

Corner Room is located upstairs off the lobby at Town Hall Hotel, at Patriot Square near the Bethnal Green Tube station.

[Image: Maxine Sheppard]

Amazing ball camera lets you create panoramic photos

by Melanie Renzulli on




Think your iPhone or Android camera and a panorama app is all you need to take 360 degree photos? Then I’d like to introduce you to the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera. As you’ll see in the video above, the ball camera is equipped with 36, 2-megapixel mobile phone camera modules which all click together to create a full panorama when the ball reaches its peak of flight. This crazy cool project is the work of German student Jonas Pfeil and four other students from Berlin’s Technische Universität. The throwable panoramic ball camera is not yet available for purchase (its patent is still pending), but you can be sure that after more people see this video of the camera in action there will be a run on demand. Though, I wonder, just how expensive could a gadget with 36 mobile camera lenses be?

Suya: the next kebab?

by Sean McLachlan on


One of the great things about the world getting smaller and everyone getting all mixed up is that we can try fast food from all different cultures. Take suya, for example. I’d never heard of this Nigerian fast food until I lived in London.

My house was on the northern end of Old Kent Road. This area has a large population of African immigrants. I met people from Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia, and I’m sure many other countries are represented. The Nigerians were very visible with lots of restaurants selling suya. It’s like shish kebab with beef, chicken, goat, or fish. The meat is rubbed with tankora powder. There are various recipes for tankora and generally include red pepper, powdered nuts, salt, ginger, paprika, and onion powder. Check out this tankora recipe if you want to try it at home.

As you can imagine, it’s pretty thirst inducing. Luckily many suya restaurants serve palm wine, a smooth, tasty alcoholic drink that’s not too strong. Many restaurants also have live music. West African music is very participatory, with the singer pointing to various members of the audience and staff and making up verses about them. I always got included but not knowing any West African languages I had no idea what the singers said. :-)

I’m thinking suya could replace kebab, which is currently the snack food of choice in London, especially at two o’clock in the morning after ten pints of lager. I’ve never liked kebab, which in most places is unhealthy and more than a little nasty, so suya would make the perfect replacement. It’s filling, salty, and quick, all the things you need after a good pub crawl, and with live music and palm wine thrown in, it makes the perfect end (or start!) to a fun evening out.

This photo, courtesy secretlondon123, shows some of Presidential Suya’s takeaway, with beef suya on the left and chicken suya on the right. Presidential Suya is one of my favorite West African restaurants in London.

Food, Travel and the Definition of Nowhere While on the Road

by David Farley on

It seemed like any other Tuesday afternoon in Calcata, the loony medieval hill town 35 miles north of Rome where I spent a couple years living and researching a book. I was trudging down the hill from Calcata Nuova, the ancient hill town’s modern sibling, my hands weighed down with bags of groceries and six-packs of one-liter water bottles, when I heard something.

“Hey. Davide,” a voice said. It was Capellone, the local fascist, who liked to hang out in his shack-cum-cantina, lodged into the hillside between the two villages. It was here that Capellone–local dialect for “Big Hair”–liked to lure people in to imbibe his putrid homemade wine.

And soon enough, the bearded man himself, hunched over, emerged from the blackness like some kind of cave-dwelling hermit, imploring with a wave of his hand and some incomprehensible grunts to come inside–just for a goccione, a sizeable drop. Within seconds I was sitting on a log inside his musty dark shack, a white plastic cup of disgusting wine in my hand, and listening to Cappelone grunt out stories in incomprehensible Italian.

Suddenly two silhouettes appeared at the door of his cantina and Capellone jumped up to greet them. I followed. The two men wore light-pink button-up shirts and dark sports jackets. I peered up the hill toward Calcata Nuova and saw at least 10 more, all dressed the same way, marching toward us, followed by Zio Avelio (Uncle Avelio), the food shop owner, and Cesare, the sweet but mentally slow village idiot, carrying tin containers of food.

Capellone dispersed his trademark cheap white plastic cups, the aluminum foil was ripped off the tin food containers and suddenly the party was on. The identically dressed men roared with laughter and slapped each other on the back.

I stood behind everyone for a second and watched the scene, wondering: why does this only seem to happen to me when I’m traveling? These impromptu invitations, often by complete strangers, become our most memorable experiences from a trip. Food and/or drink is always the connecting bond. At least for me it is. Am I just not open to it happening in the United States, my home country? Or does this sort of thing just not really happen there as often as it does elsewhere in the world?

“So, what’s going on here?” I finally asked. “Why the party?”

“We love funerals in Calcata Nuova,” one of the guys said, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a paper plate of mixed seafood with the other. “We do funerals all over the area, but when we hear of a job in Calcata, we always call Capellone ahead of time and he’s waiting for us here at the cantina with food and wine.”


“So, the funeral is over and now you’re celebrating a hard day’s work?” I asked.

“No, the funeral is happening right now,” the man said, looking at me like I’d just asked if he could take me on a joy ride in the back of his hearse. Pointing up the hill in the direction of the cemetery in Calcata Nuova, he added: “We don’t have anything to do until it’s finished. Then we have to drive back to Civita Castellana.”

Before I could respond, I noticed that everyone had grown silent, their attention focused on Cesare, his bulging hands like they were sculpted straight out of a Soviet propaganda artist’s workshop, shoveling calamari and unidentifiable fish parts into his mouth with the determination of a competitive eater. Cesare was sweet, but so mentally slow I wondered if it would take hours before his stomach would finally be able to get the message to his brain that it was full. Six and a half feet tall and balding, Cesare spoke in a slow, grinding, and slurred monotone that made understanding him impossible. Moreover, he spoke Calcatese, a clipped dialect that sounds nearly incomprehensible to most other native Italian speakers. I once asked my friend Elena what happened to him and she said he was in a car accident.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” I said. “So he was normal before the accident?”

“No,” she said with a straight face. “He was pretty much the same. He just didn’t limp.”

After about 10 minutes of Cesare chomping down, the front of Capellone’s cantina an arena for his eating prowess, the funeral workers began shouting out jovial jabs at him. “He’s an eating machine,” one of them yelled out. “Hey, Cesare! Why not save some for the rest of us?” another screamed in a light tone, for which Cesare cracked a smile and grunted, keeping his intent stare on the tin container of seafood.

A few minutes later, the men–their bellies full of wine and seafood–gravitated back up the hill to join the funeral they were hired to work at, leaving Capellone and me standing there, just like we had been about 20 minutes earlier. I was left wondering if the last few minutes I just experienced were real or some kind of travel dream. It was like I’d been no where and everywhere at the same time, lodged on a hillside between two obscure villages in the Roman hinterlands, yet right then at that moment there was no other place I would have rather been than drinking bad wine with a bunch of funeral home employees and watching a machine of a man scooping handfuls of seafood into his mouth. Where else, I thought, can a trip to the supermarket be so memorable? Anywhere, it seems, but where we live. Such is the beauty of travel to appreciate the moments that at home we might completely ignore.

I picked up my grocery bags, said goodbye to Capellone, and walked home to Calcata.

Expat fusion cuisine: combining foreign foods with favorites from home

by Meg Nesterov on

Part of the fun of traveling is trying new and exotic foods. Many travelers try to eat only locally and eschew the familiar, though eating at American chain restaurants abroad can be its own experience. But when you make a foreign country your home, you have to adapt your tastes and cooking to what’s available locally while craving your favorites from home. I’m lucky enough to live in Istanbul with an amazing food culture heavy on roasted meats and grilled fish, fragrant spices, and fresh produce. Some foreign foods like pizza and sushi have been embraced in Istanbul, but Turkish food has remained largely uncompromised by outside influences and passing trends. Convenience foods are still a new concept in Turkey but you can always grab a quick doner kebab or fish sandwich on the street if you aren’t up to cooking.
In my own kitchen, I’m learning to work with Turkish ingredients and dishes and mix in some favorites from home, creating some “expat fusion” cuisine. Meat-filled manti ravioli gets an extra zing with some Louisiana hot sauce. In the hottest days of my pregnancy this summer, I craved pudding pops from my childhood, making them more adult with some tangy Turkish yogurt. One ingredient I miss here is maple syrup, which is generally only produced in North America, and hard to find and expensive in the rest of the world (a small bottle in Turkey costs about $20!). One of my American friends brought me a bottle this summer and I poured it over pancakes (surprisingly easy to make from scratch when you can’t get a mix) and my favorite Turkish treat, kaymak. Kaymak is a clotted cream popular on the breakfast table, served with a crusty loaf of bread and honey, available in most local supermarkets but best eaten fresh in a cafe like Pando’s Kaymakci in Istanbul’s Besiktas neighborhood. I draw a lot of inspiration from my friend and fellow expat Joy, who was a professional pastry chef back in Baltimore and now chronicles her mouth-watering cooking in her Istanbul kitchen on her blog, My Turkish Joys. She posts beautiful food photos and recipes with both American and European measurements to help US and Turkish readers recreate her dishes such as sour cherry pie. Afiyet Olsun (that’s Turkish for bon appetit)!

Gadling readers, have you created any expat fusion foods with ingredients from your travels? Make us hungry and leave us a comment below!