Sourced Market, Marylebone

REVIEW: Sourced Market, Marylebone: Culture Whisper says: ★★★★★

Traditional British cuisine isn't exactly a mouth-watering prospect, is it? Dry and scratchy scotch-eggs, undercooked pies and curiously warm beers tend to spring to mind. There's a reason that Europeans look down their patisserie-dusted noses at us.

Artisan food and drink seller Sourced Market (best known for their permanent set up at King's Cross St Pancras) has opened its brand new site on Marylebone's Wigmore Street to show us how British food should really taste. And - who would have thought it - its time to rethink our cultural clichés. British food is delicious.

The new permanent venue expands on the original Sourced idea: a variety of artisan products await customers on counters, ready for inspection and selection, besides a coffee bar, bakery and hot deli counter.

Over 90% of their produce is British made, with much of it being created by small start-up companies. There's cheese, chocolate, charcuterie, oils, wines and beers, coffee, cakes, as well as hot and cold lunch items - and a downstairs cellar bar where customers can sample beers on tap and kegged wine to take away or enjoy there.




Rediscover old British favourites such as chicken and mushroom pie, transformed into delicate mouthfuls of fluffy pastry with soft chicken swimming in aromatic truffly warmth. And if you thought that scotch-eggs were horrible things to be avoided at family picnics, Sourced's collection of different spiced scotch-eggs infused with chorizo or dripping with runny egg-yolks will make you forget you were so rude and wish you could go house-hunting in the highlands - picnic basket in tow.

If Sourced Market can turn lumpy British staples into artisan delicacies, its nothing to what they can achieve with food from real cuisines. We weren't even slightly surprised to discover their Bordeaux Barrel Aged Negroni was award-winning, nor that their selection of salamis and olives were among the best we'd ever eaten.