Podcast · Arts & Books

Vittles

Vittles is an online magazine based in the UK and India, publishing new food and culture writing. www.vittlesmagazine.com

New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 54 min
Latest: 30 Sep 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

30 Sep 2026 · 56 min

Creating the Modern British Bakery w/ Anna Higham

Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is an interview with baker and pastry chef Anna Higham , the owner of the lauded Quince Bakery and Clementine, a café opening soon in Islington. Higham’s story is as rich and varied as her bakes. Her career spans some of the world’s most famous kitchens, beginning with the Gordon Ramsay Group in London. After moving to New York, she spent time at the legendary Gramercy Tavern. While in the city, the mentorship of Claudia Fleming would prove formative for Higham, and when she returned to London in the late 2010s she brought with her a focus on provenance…

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Earlier episodes 16 most recent

28 Aug 2026 · 54 min
How Restaurant Influencers Work w/ Stephen Buranyi
Today’s very special episode of the Vittles podcast is with journalist and editor Stephen Buranyi , who spent six months reporting and investigating the world of restaurant influencers for our Issue 3 cover story, titled ‘Who’s Paying for All of This? When he set out reporting at the beginning of this year, Stephen, an experienced reporter, soon realised the London restaurant influencer industry was much more tight-lipped than he’d anticipated, more discreet ‘than the civil service’. ‘I found in general here people did not wanna talk,’ he tells us in today’s conversation. ‘I think there’s a…
8 Aug 2026 · 52 min
The Chefs’ Chef w/ Will Gleave
Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is with one of the UK’s most talented and idiosyncratic chefs. If you haven’t heard of Will Gleave , then your favourite chef will have. Through his early cooking at the wine bar P. Franco, and then at the restaurants Bright and Peg, Will has exercised an immense influence over the modern London restaurant industry – its focus on natural wine, borderless cuisine, high-level cooking in relaxed environments, and a type of effortlessness that many aspire to. In a rare public appearance, Will spends an hour talking to Adam about his early years cooking in…
26 Jun 2026 · 35 min
Community, Authenticity and Virality w/ Logma's Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub
Today’s episode of the Vittles podcast is a joint interview with Farsin Rabiee and Ziad Halub , the duo behind Logma, the Iranian-Iraqi bistro cafe, which opened close to London Fields at the end of last year. Earlier in the spring, Rabiee and Halub began opening one evening a week, on Wednesdays, for a communal, supper club style dinner service, which is Logma’s genesis. However, its sandwiches — or in the words of Hester van Hensbergen, who reviewed the café last month, ‘gargantuan pitas filled with lamb kofte or aubergine’ — have since taken the ‘Goldsmiths Row Riviera’ by storm and…
2 Jun 2026 · 47 min
The Staying Power of Koya w/ Shuko Oda
Today’s episode is an interview with Shuko Oda , the co-creator and executive head chef at Koya, the Japanese udon noodle restaurant with sites in Soho, the City and Hackney. When Koya arrived at 49 Frith Street in Soho, a whole 16 years ago, it replaced Alistair Little, the mighty influential temple of modern British cuisine. Since then, Koya itself has become a huge part of the modern London restaurant, revolutionising how Londoners think of Japanese food. It was the brainchild of former City trader John Devitt who, inspired by Paris’ Kunitoraya, installed Shuko alongside head chef Junya…
2 May 2026 · 53 min
Behind the Scenes of London's Most Influential Restaurant Group w/ Songsoo Kim
Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast! Today’s episode is with Songsoo Kim , head of sourcing and development for the Super 8 group, one of the most influential restaurant groups in London. They’re behind Basque restaurants Brat and Mountain, headed up by Tomos Parry, as well as Kiln and Smoking Goat, the modern Thai-inspired restaurants in Soho and in Shoreditch. Last month, the group opened Impala, perhaps the most anticipated new restaurant to arrive in London in the last 12 months. Four years in the making, it is chef Meedu Saad’s first solo project but a restaurant which…
26 Mar 2026 · 55 min
What happens when a restaurant wins a Michelin star? w/ Joké Bakare
Good morning and welcome back to The Vittles Podcast. Today’s episode is a conversation with someone who is very close to our hearts at Vittles : Joké Bakare , the chef behind the West African restaurant Chishuru. We first encountered Joké in 2020, when she sent Jonathan a pandemic care package of Nigerian condiments, which led to us publishing her first piece of food writing . We couldn’t have predicted what happened next. That year, Chishuru transformed from being a supper club into a restaurant inside Brixton Market, a delayed effect from winning a competition in 2019. During the course…
15 Feb 2026 · 54 min
Why Does Anyone Open a Restaurant? w/ Ravneet Gill Taiano
Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off , the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide . Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June. One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or…
9 Jan 2026 · 50 min
The Volatile World of London Restaurant PR w/ Gemma Bell
This month's episode covers the volatile world of public relations in restaurants. The industry has been grappling with this uneasy relationship between restaurants, journalists and PRs for as long as PR has existed. On the one hand, pioneering PRs like Alan and Elizabeth Crompton-Batt are partially responsible for the London restaurant scene as we know it today, helping to create the template for the celebrity chef that runs from Marco Pierre-White to The Bear. On the other, both restaurant owners and journalists have talked to us about their feelings of resentment about relying on PR, with…
18 Dec 2025 · 56 min
The Life and Times of Mangal 2's Ferhat Dirik
This month’s episode is an interview with someone you might already know — a restaurant owner who embodies many of the critical themes of the London restaurant industry, not just in 2025, but over the course of the last 20-plus years: community, trends, family, uncertainty, hype and more. Ferhat Dirik is the lifelong front-of-house, founder’s son, and now owner of Dalston’s Mangal 2, the family-run Turkish restaurant he’s been working in since he was 11 in the late 1990s. Mangal 2 is one of the most well-known and cult-followed ocakbaşıs in north London. Opening in 1994, it was the follow-up…
21 Nov 2025 · 59 min
The Race to the Mid (w/ Feroz Gajia and Montague Ashley-Craig)
We are living through an age of online extremes: hype machines, queues, hidden gems , while at the same time, for some of those embedded in the London restaurant industry itself, there’s a fundamental sense of malaise, of boredom, with a creeping homogenisation of restaurants and food culture. This is ‘the mid’: a term that is now common parlance for those who feel adrift of a discourse in which everything is either ‘absolutely incredible’ or ‘totally garbage’. In this month’s hour-long episode, we go deep into some of the forces shaping what we deem to be good, bad and, critically, mid in…
9 Oct 2025 · 57 min
All Consuming, w/ Ruby Tandoh
In this special episode, Adam Coghlan is joined by Ruby Tandoh, the author, journalist (and Vittles contributor) who has just published the book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now . The book is an attempt to explain the growing power and absurdity of food culture via the mediums it is transmitted through, whether supermarkets, newspaper supplements or Instagram reels (Tandoh’s ‘ 15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything ’ which was published on Vittles earlier this year was loosely based on chapter on cookbooks). As a sprint through the terrain of contemporary food culture, All…
8 Aug 2025 · 58 min
Summer Special w/Simran Hans
In this month’s episode, we have a special guest: writer, critic and part-time Vittles reviewer Simran Hans , who joins Adam and Jonathan to talk about the summer in London restaurant news. Our main topics are two eccentric London food spaces: Singburi and Leila’s Shop. We discuss what didn’t make into Jonathan’s review of Singburi, our thoughts on the new one, and what the restaurant’s evolution says about the state of the London industry more generally. We also talk about Leila’s Shop and its current fight for survival on Calvert Avenue in the context of Simran’s March review, It’s Time to…
24 Mar 2025 · 55 min
The Lost Food of Soho
The Lost Food of Soho is a one-episode podcast by Lucy Dearlove. You can listen to it for free on Substack, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , which are now hosting all back-issues of the Vittles podcast. You can buy prints of today’s map , created by the artists Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby exclusively for Vittles. A reminder, too, that we’ve released prints ahead of the publication of issue 1 of Vittles magazine, which you can shop here . Cast of The Lost Food of Soho Hilary Armstrong – writer, worked in Andrew Edmunds Marcus Harris – DJ/promoter Russell Davies – creator of…
30 Dec 2024 · 2 min
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 3
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com Vittles Quarterly: The Peasant Food Remontada Good morning and welcome back to our series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here and the second episode here . On this episode, for our end of year review, we’re joined by Hester van He…
30 Aug 2024 · 1 min
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 2
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com Good morning and welcome to the second in a series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. You can find the first episode here . This month we discuss the biggest story in food media in 2024 - the resignation of Pete Wells from the most powerful job in restaurant criticism for health reasons - and h…
12 Apr 2024 · 1 min
The Vittles Quarterly, episode 1
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.vittlesmagazine.com Good morning and welcome to the first in a new series of quarterly conversations between Vittles Restaurants editors, Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. Every three months or so we’re going to talk about what and where we’ve been eating, the best meals we’ve enjoyed, things that are annoying us, exciting us, and what we’ve observed in the London restaurant…

About Vittles

Vittles is an online magazine based in the UK and India, publishing new food and culture writing. www.vittlesmagazine.com

Vittles is a English arts & books podcast from Vittles. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Vittles
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 54 min
Latest episode: 30 Sep 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1801263549
Rights: Vittles

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