Tiffany’s secret London food tips
Plus 50% off a new cafe until the end of Saturday and some more delicious London suggestions from me AND another book for your wish list.
I was chatting the other day about the need for a word between “friend” and “colleague”, when you’re not normally employed.
Through the work I do, I see some people reasonably often and many of them I would happily have as friends, and some of them have become friends. When I’m telling you about people I know in the industry it feels weird and kind of insulting to call them colleagues, but there are occasions I’ll worry they’ll think I’m being a bit familiar if I call them a friend. (👋 Jay, last week. 😅) I also wonder if it diminishes my relationship with my close friends if I call too many people a friend... 🤔
Does anyone have a better word? Or want to come up with one?
or reply by email, if you prefer!
This week I’m sharing answers to my nosy food questions kindly responded to by
.I’ve only met Tiffany briefly, a couple of times at group events, but we do have mutual friends, and she seems pretty awesome - not just because she took the time to answer my questions. 😅 Her writing is entertaining and everyone I know that’s had food cooked by her at a supper club, pop up or collaboration makes me envious that I haven’t.
Before we get to her interview, four quick things:
a trio au chocolat
a food & beauty discovery pop up in Soho
a new (mostly vegan) cafe in Somerset House offering 50% off food until Sunday (but totally worth it at full price, too - especially the cheesecake
a cookbook I missed from the last few emails!
Trio au Chocolat at The Connaught Patisserie by Nicolas Rouzaud
Brilliant pastry chef Nicolas Rouzaud brought to life
’s vision for a pain au chocolat with three different batons of chocolate: milk, dark & white.
I went to try it (of course I did 😁).
The way the white chocolate caramelises when cooked at the ends is perfection, but the sweetness is counteracted by the dark chocolate it contains too.
It’s a permanent addition and currently £4 but will soon be £5. It usually sells out by 11am. If you go make sure to also get the pistachio or the hazelnut pastry as well. Both are amongst my favourite viennoiserie in London.
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t pay for this but I would have told you about it anyway. I can’t be bought for £4, people. 😜
📌 The Connaught, Carlos Pl, London W1K 2AL
🚆 Green Park / Bond Street
Have you heard of RAYE?
It’s the brainchild of marketer Nicole Compen and since its launch in 2021 they’ve held 10 pop ups in central london to showcase curated food, drink, wellness and beauty brands.
Shining a RAY of light on undiscovered brilliance, get it? 🌞
A place to discover and try without paying shipping or ordering in bulk, where you can pick and up feel before you buy. Plus they’re carefully selected by Nicole and her team as well.
📌 96 Berwick St, London W1F 0PH
🚆 Oxford Circus / Tottenham Court Road / Piccadilly Circus / Leicester Square
A new (mostly) vegan café with 50% off until the end of this Saturday 25th May
It’s called Cafe Petiole and it’s a sibling of Tendril, the vegan restaurant near Oxford Circus.
I popped in on opening day and bought:
spiced lentil roll
potato galette
pineapple galette
cheesecake
plum crumble cake
Absolutely get the galettes and the cheesecake. Do not miss that cheesecake.
📌 Inside Somerset House (at the back of the courtyard, close to the river), Strand, London WC2R 1LA
🚆 Temple
Another book for your shelf/wishlist
I’m not sure if you prefer bulk book recommendations like this one, or if they’re better drip fed like this?
In any case, this one escaped my attention which depresses me because there’s definitely a pattern of black authors not only getting fewer publishing deals but less promotion, too. I appreciate
calling the poor representation out in her stories after the recent set of awards.So here’s this week’s addition to my ever-growing recommendations:
By Marie Mitchell: Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen.
“Accompanied by gorgeous photographs, many of them shot on location in the Caribbean, the book's eighty recipes - which include crispy saltfish fritters, rich and tempting aubergine curry, slow cooked jerk pork, zingy lime and ginger cheesecake and sweet Guinness punch - confound the widespread misconceptions about Caribbean food that abound in the West, which draw on stereotypes of intense heat, pungent smoke and a handful of familiar dishes. But while chilli is certainly a key ingredient and cooking over fire has a long and storied history, Caribbean cookery is also subtle and playful, layering different notes and spices carefully to create delicate, rewarding flavours.”
Find it on Amazon or Bookshop.org.
And now for the London insider interview….
Who is Tiffany Chang and what does she love?
Tiffany is a Taiwanese American who lives in London. It turns out we moved to London around the same time (20 years for me this summer!) and she’s right, in what she says below, the food in London was pretty abysmal back then. At least if you were new to the city and didn’t know the kind of small, well run restaurants that
is now brilliant at highlighting, many of which have been around serving the same excellent food for decades.It felt like it was either Michelin-starred restaurants or chains like Pizza Express, Wagamama and Busaba Eathai. The latter I could afford to eat in but … you knew they were being made by line cooks, which doesn’t have the same magic. Though they were a revelation at the time!
The chefs who lived to cook only seemed to be at the mega-expensive places. There wasn’t really an in-between. The first interesting middle ground was gastro pubs of the mid-late 2000’s. I had just joined M&S in ready meals food development when the Gastro Pub range launched in 2008 (or the end of 2007? 🤔).
I can tell you from guiding chocolate tours since 2005 that I was still introducing people to their very first salted caramel as late as 2010. Yep, that flavour that feels like it’s been here forever and is a ticket to profits for any retailer or small business, I still remember people asking “why would I want salt in my caramel?”.
I digress.
You’re still reading to hear Tiffany’s recommendations! 😁
How should I describe you?
I'm always stuck on this one...because I feel like I don't really have any accolade...I'm not an award winning writer, I don't have any cookbooks out, I don't have a restaurant so why would anyone want to read about me? Trust me, I ask myself the same questions almost everyday!
NOTE FROM JEN: I want Tiffany’s recommendations because vicariously I know she knows flavour. I care far more about that than whether the stars aligned to give her a book deal (but I also foresee this in her future!).
Also, she was on Netflix’s Crazy Delicious so I think that counts for quite a bit!
I am a self-taught freelance cook, I have worked in restaurants since I was 14 years old and have always worked in hospitality. I am Taiwanese American who's lived in the UK for just under 20 years and I am a single mom to two very adorable but annoying children. I also really like fried chicken, noodles and tacos.
What brought you to working in food?
My family opened a Japanese restaurant in a small town in northern California when I was 13 years old. I wasn't really given a choice whether or not to work in the restaurant, I just had to. It was the first time I worked front of house and it turned out, I was really good with customers, anticipating their needs and I knew how to sell.
My uncle used to set me a challenge whenever there was an ordering mistake. Instead of just giving the mistake to staff (cuz that would've been the nice thing to do...), he would challenge me to promote it to a different table and sell it. And it's sushi so it can't sit so I'd have a time limit on it, too! So I would see which table is more likely to buy my bullshit...and then I would sell the shit out of whatever it was. "We have a special tonight, really delicious spicy salmon roll with homemade chilli sauce! The salmon is super fresh and it's mixed with my uncle's signature sauce, wrapped in Japapense rice with fresh cucumber and avocado slices, it's so popular, we only have limited supplies! I think you should definitely order it!'
Seriously, what 15 year old do you know that talked like that?! I didn't even know that was marketing, I was just making shit up...they don't always buy it but 4/5 times I manage to sell it.
But I was always deterred from working in the kitchen. My uncle never taught me how to make sushi because 'you're a girl, girls don't make sushi'...and my mom never wanted me in the kitchen. Like any good Asian kids, I needed to study, to get into a good university, get a good job then find a good husband. Don't do menial jobs like working in the kitchen...and honestly, had I not moved to London, I don't think I would've wanted to learn how to cook.
Honestly, food options were so abysmal when I moved here plus I didn't have any money, I had to learn to cook some dishes just to feed myself. I ate a lot of Japanese curry when I first moved to the UK.
What food memories from growing up have shaped you or stuck with you?
I have so many...gosh I have so so many...but what shaped me...my mom is a phenomenal cook, she learned from her mother, my Ah-Ma. My mom has 3 sisters and a brother and she was the only one interested in cooking so my Ah-Ma taught her everything she knew. When she moved to the US, our town was 3 hours from the nearest Asian market, I could tell she was sad because she couldn't speak English, she couldn't read the labels or anything when she went to the regular supermarket so she couldn't cook the way she cooked back in Taiwan...
I was young then so I didn't understand the impact but as someone who's moved from continent to continent, little things like recognizing pantry staples in a supermarket mean more than you think...it brings you a little bit of comfort when you're in a foreign land...so I could tell she was struggling. But this was the amazing thing about her, she learned to adapt. She couldn't find Asian noodles, she bought pasta like linguini and spaghetti because the shape of them reminded her of Asian noodles. She'd come home with some strange jars that had 'Asiansque' writings on it and she said she thought it looked Asian so she'd buy it.
I remember once she made this 'warm noodle salad' with fuscilli (except I didn't know it was fuscilli at the time, neither did she) with grilled chicken, cubed carrots, celery, courgette, onion and a jar of I guess teriyaki or some variation of it...it tasted amazing! She was so proud...She would buy peanut butter to make a savoury noodle based sauce...and pour it over cold spaghetti and called it Taiwanese cold noodle salad...'liang mien". It makes me laugh when I see content creators now creating peanut butter dressing like it's some new thing when my mom has been doing that since 1994! Stuff like that stuck with me...the ability to adapt to your environment...the willingness to assimilate in the best way but not leaving your root behind...it really shaped me the way I am today...
What’s the most delicious thing (or things!) you ate recently that you’re still dreaming about?
It's not recent but the one dessert that blew my mind to this day was a dessert from
 | A guest post by
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