London’s always a hotbed of culinary innovation so keeping up with the latest developments can be a struggle. To make sure you’re abreast of all that’s new, we’ve put together a list of the hot, new food trends for 2019…
In recent years ice cream parlours have started popping up around the city. We’ve had Bubble Wrap serving ice cream in bubble waffles and ice cream made with the help of liquid nitrogen at Chin Chin Labs and Four Winters. Expect this year to see more intriguing flavours – we’re talking savoury. Gelupo offer a white truffle flavour in season, while nearby La Gelateria has become famous for flavours such as basil & chilli, watercress & lime, and Cornish blue & walnut. Don’t be surprised to find restaurants getting involved, for example with avocado or sweetcorn ice creams served with seafood.
We’ve all got ras-el-hanout and pomegranate molasses in our kitchens so you might think that our penchant for Middle Eastern influenced flavours is dwindling. But no. It seems Londoners can’t get enough of the flavours of Levant, because while the likes of Berber & Q, Honey & Co and the Ottolenghi empire continue to thrive, there’s more to come. Nutshell, an Iranian restaurant, is slated to open in Covent Garden early this year and Istanbul import Yeni will take up residence in Soho. Our delight in all things Turkish – and beyond – isn’t going anywhere soon.
Once upon a time you only found a collection of restaurants under one roof at the top of a mall, where identikit fast food chains would form a windowless food court. But these days you can barely move in London for carefully curated groups of bars and restaurants. Maybe it was Kerb assembling London’s best street food, or the renaissance of the original Brixton market and now Tooting, but from Mercato Metropolitano in Elephant & Castle to the recently opened Market Hall in Victoria, food markets are taking root all over the place. This year we’re set to see Mercato Mayfair (from the people behind Metropolitano) and, although it won't be fully open until 2021, Time Out are turning the old Eurostar platforms at Waterloo into a London version of their hugely successful Time Out Market. Expect much more...
If you didn’t have kombucha, kimchi, or kefir on your menu in 2018, well, what were you doing? Our increased understanding of the importance of gut bacteria for overall health – and the impact that fermented food and drink can have on the gut microbiome – means these aren’t going anywhere. Robin Gill’s restaurants The Dairy and Counter Culture both heavily feature home pickles and ferments, so expect to see echoes of this at his new restaurant Darby’s in the Embassy Gardens development. And now the Noma crew have released all their fermenting secrets in their latest book, The Noma Guide to Fermentation. Chefs across the capital will undoubtedly be serving up pickled gooseberries with their oysters – and more…
You’ve ditched plastic straws, started taking doggy bags home and even have your own worm farm. This year more and more restaurants will also be focusing on their eco credentials. Some will use the Karma app to offload their excess food, whilst others will follow in the footsteps of Spring and the new Motley restaurant at Qbic hotel in Whitechapel to create leftover menus so nothing is wasted. In the same way that supermarkets have started selling off their uglier fruit and veg cheap, we wouldn’t be surprised to see restaurants making a virtue of sourcing ingredients that might otherwise have gone to waste.
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