The recent furore surrounding Turtle Bay’s needless desecration of Jamaican cuisine is a good reminder that great yard food exists all over London, it just isn’t found in overpriced cocktail bars. In Peckham, there is Copeland Jerk Centre next to the station, or the stall inside Rye Lane Market, or Gabby’s, but the best is still JB’s, named for Jennifer and Bill Hawes who run it. There is a baseline of consistency guaranteed with anything at JB’s, from the patties, to the curried goat and tar-black oxtail, even to the slab of mac and cheese that always ensures a balanced meal. But JB’s is still, at heart, a jerk specialist, which is why Bill is often found round the back at all hours billowing smoke signals from a steel drum, ensuring that every bit of jerk chicken is infused with pimento, scotch bonnet and that smoke. Best of all is the jerk pork, only usually available on Fridays and Saturdays, served on the bone with layers of creamy fat and crackling. It’s tempting to petition them to keep it on the menu permanently, but in a pandemic, where the days blend into one, it’s always good to have something to mark the weekend by.

It’s possible to buy the whole world in Peckham, but until General Store starts stocking yams, it’s unlikely that these worlds ever collide. There is one place, however, that has the distinction of being the shop everyone goes to: Filishack. Owned by Peckham boys Jonathan and Justice Cacho, who grew up on the “Yellow Brick” Bells Garden’s Estate, Filishack is the exemplar of a business which knows its audience intimately and is content to do one thing and do that one thing better than it actually needs to be. Although adobo is on the menu, pretty much everyone congregates outside Peckham Library for the chicken inasal, grilled chicken nonpareil, marinated in lemongrass, ginger, vinegar and calamansi, then chopped into pieces to give every available bit of surface area a blackened char. It’s possible to get the inasal in a wrap, with the clever addition of garlic rice to make a burrito, but it’s probably best as a simple rice box. The Cachos will soon move from their van to a permanent site round the corner, where there will hopefully be space for new dishes. If you can’t find them, no worries: just follow the scent of garlic.

There are two easy ways of finding Tiwa ‘n’ Tiwa, a tiny takeaway shop tucked round the back of Peckham Road. One is to go to the Zaha Hadid designed Burger King and simply turn around. Or just look for the smoke. During the day, Tiwa ‘n’ Tiwa barbecues beef suya outside in long strips, which are finished in the evening during the dinner rush, when they are chopped up again, tumbled with yaji, and soothed with the creaminess of raw onion, alternately crunchy and fatty and all spicy, so spicy it’s vital to also order some beers or Nigerian Fanta in preemptive mitigation. Its reputation as a suya spot, elevated since Obalende Suya Express (the only suya spot in London with a Wikipedia page) closed down, does slightly gloss over that it mainly specialises in soups and stews ─ come round on a weekend and find uncles masticating outside in deep debate, and maybe even a step grandson of the Queen.

Everything comes full circle eventually. The first food hall in London was in Oriental City, on the city’s outskirts, where Chinese, Malaysian and Japanese stalls all competed in harmony until it was shut down in 2008. It took another 10 years for the concept to come back, this time in the centre of London, in places that command the highest real estate prices in the city. Now it’s come to the inner city: first an abortive attempt at Nag’s Head last year, then Market Place, the first in what promises/threatens to be a London wide chain. Although partially completed before the pandemic, it is now fully operational with around ten new stalls and a bar. Highlights include Bang Bang Kitchen, a Ghanaian stall expert at protein cooking, with fatty turkey suya, and, best of all, chicken ball suya, a cross between West African barbecue and an Ikea meatball. At Full Bowl Sya Wang Kee, a brother and sister team have brought Hong Kong’s obsession with Hawaiian food to Peckham, with rice bowls, and more vertiginously, rice sandwiches, wrapped in nori and encasing fillings like “spam and egg” or “pork chop, cheese and mystery mustard,” a kind of demented kimbap. At Tianjin Dumplings, the dumplings themselves are fairly skippable, but an egg and chive pie makes a formidable crispy snack, and the owner puts Ruffles crisps in his jianbing, displaying a dedication to hedonism. It’s too soon to say if Market Place is a good thing for the area or not, but once it finds its toes it may offer a more accurate reflection of Peckham than curated spaces usually allow.

Yada’s has suffered from bad pandemic timing. Its new restaurant on Rye Lane, renovated from a distressed wood takeaway which had itself been upgraded from a temporary structure under the railway arches, had to shut for most of the pandemic. But during the small window it’s been open, it’s proven that its quality hasn’t been outflanked by its ambition. The cooking is more meat heavy than at Nandine, with two shawarma spits on the go constantly. A lamb shifta sandwich in pita displays everything that is great about Kurdish food: unexpected aromatics from fresh herbs in the yoghurt sauce, sweetness and acidity from pomegranates, well-spiced, crunchy shifta patties: a symphony of salt, fat, acid and dill.

Every London neighbourhood needs a wrap place that each person who eats there thinks is their secret, but in reality, is known by absolutely everyone. Dalston has Ararat, Finsbury Park has Baban’s Naan, and Peckham has Asian Takeaway, the Ronsil of Asian takeaways. There are very good vegetable curries on the counter─ saag, daal, okra ─ but almost everyone is here for one of two things: either the lamb kebab rolls or the chicken tikka. The tikka, a chubby, turmeric hued sabre of meat, is currently the best option, but either way diners must take a seat as the naan is made fresh to order. With the heat from the naan, the heat of the freshly grilled meat and the heat of the chilli sauce, it’s difficult to quibble with any of the four £1 coins needed to purchase one.

The bedrock of Sierra Leonean cuisine is leafy greens: Cassava leaf, potato leaf, and crain-crain, a leaf whose mucilaginous texture is immediately recognisable as molohiya to those familiar with Levantine food, and ewedu to the Yorùbá. At Izatu’s Kitchen, a small stall in a mini mart next to the station that it shares with a Chinese and Jamaican takeaway, these leaves are cooked down into deep green stews, spicy and nutty, enriched with peanut butter and protected by a layer of fire-red palm oil, so thick it looks like crude. They could be some of London’s best vegetarian dishes if it weren’t for the pieces of turkey, lamb, and fish hidden in the depths. The rest of the menu is helpfully divided into four sections — the grills and snacks speak for themselves, but the jollof is capable of inserting itself as a wildcard option in the perpetual Nigerian vs Ghanaian debate, lush and rich, each grain coated in a smoky slick of oil and good enough to eat by itself.

There’s an online TV series called Bukas and Joints: essentially the Nigerian Diners, Drive Ins and Dives. Olisa Adibua marauds around Nigeria to show off its multiplicity of interlocking cuisines, but he also did a few episodes in London. A segment with a pre-fame Chuku’s points to where Nigerian cuisine in London is going, but the one with Lolak Afrique shows where it’s been. Like the izakaya, the Nigerian buka is a vibe which restaurateurs have tried to import but doesn’t quite translate; not exactly a hole-in-the wall, not precisely street food, but something ineffably demotic and democratic. Lolak on Choumert Road is possibly the closest London has. The thing to order here, among a variety of soups, is the abula. A Yorùbá tricolore of scarlet, gold and forest green, it’s made up of meat stew; gbegiri, a bean porridge, and verdant ewedu, all coming alive as its parts mix together. In the middle, find an island of pebble-brown amala, which pliant hands and pliant minds should fold and scoop into swallowable cutlery, each mouthful different from the last. Trying to find good amala is a source of homesickness, so to experience the correct texture, come during busy weekend afternoons, as soon as the yam is pounded and has the correct amount of draw.

There’s a phrase in Igbo that characterises Yoruba tastes as “ofe manu” ─ palm, not soup. To understand the preference for soups laden with a finger thick layer of palm oil, look no further than Yakoyo Spot on Peckham High Street, also known as Ewenla Lounge. An egusi soup from Yakoyo Spot isn’t what Chishuru’s Joké Bakare would devastatingly dismiss with the par of ‘restaurant egusi’, but a proper buka egusi, with a 50-50 oil to egusi ratio. Only the most elegant of eaters would not leave their hands incarnadine, and only the most puritan wouldn’t spend a few minutes licking them clean. Aside from soups and starches, there is also ayamase. A bad ayamase, made carelessly with seeds or poor quality green peppers, can have a bitterness that mars the whole dish. Yakoyo Spot’s ayamase, though, is a joy forever: A showcase for the many qualities of iru, the fermented locust beans which give the stew a dark chocolate and tobacco muskiness; a fleeting impression of sweetness before the aftertaste of petrichor kicks in. It is served with beef and tripe, all swimming in oil the same luminosity of a good finishing olive oil, but mainline the sauce alone with some white rice.

Some of the most thrilling cooking in London right now is coming out of Pashtun and Afghan kitchens, two cuisines that share chromosomes even if on opposite sides of a national border. At Taste of Afghan, it’s possible to get the classics: kabli pilau, sweet with carrots and sultanas, or karahi by the kilo, or even ─ and it’s worth trying this to see what happens ─ a whole lamb sajji for £170 which is somehow available on Uber Eats (just make sure to tip the poor driver.) But the very best thing of all is the chapal (chapli) kebab, not stacked on top of each other as usual like beer mats, but in a wrap, the fried crust of the meat providing textural contrast, with the spritely note of coriander seed cutting through the chilli and garlic sauces. Its name deserves to ring out in SE15.

Kolawole Ajayi — aka Nigeriacuisine — is a YouTuber with over 90,000 subscribers, all of whom tune in for his charismatic and opinionated takes on everything related to Nigerian food. Sample title: AGEGE BREAD EXPOSED. He also has a street food stall on Choumert Road in Peckham where he patiently slings out excellent suya on a small grill, portion by portion. The beef suya — the most popular option — is pre-cooked at home and finished on the grill with two yajis, one cinnabar and hot, a blend made by Ajayi himself that is heavy with kuli kuli (roasted peanut cake) and sprinkled generously from trays resembling red sand dunes. The other is lighter, complex and gingery, and used more sparingly because it is flown in from one of his favourite spots in Lagos. Much of the joy of Suuyar is in the back and forth with Ajayi himself (“How is it?” “Eight out of ten, if my wife likes it you can get the other two”) and he always offers a taster to newcomers to make sure no portion is knowingly underspiced. The asun (peppered goat usually, but this is London, so mutton), however, is non-negotiable. Chock full with the heat of circa. 1 million scotch bonnets, it takes absolutely no prisoners.

Manze’s is never going to change anyone’s opinion on pie and mash; it’s other places like Goddards in Greenwich which are innovating with various degrees of success, adding different pies —welcome — extra spicy chilli vinegar — extremely welcome — and baked beans — an atrocity. Manze’s sticks to the two “indigenous” London foods that it’s been serving since Italian Michele Manze came over from Ravello and opened up shop in 1902: pie, mash and liquor, and eels. Pie and mash has two genders: those brought up on this food who buy into its lore — the fork and spoons, the gummy pies and pappy mash, smeared round the edge of the plate, a bulwark to keep out the seepage of mucilaginous Kermit-green liquor — and those who regard it as the culinary equivalent of Brexit. Manze’s is nostalgia, it’s baby food, it’s lineage and tradition, it’s London, or at least a London that was. The fact of whether it’s good or not is almost immaterial.

That Rye Lane’s most visible Nigerian restaurant isn’t Nigerian-owned, just like it’s fishmongers and butchers, is a thorny issue far more complex and interesting than the ‘cultural appropriation vs appreciation’ argument normally served up as circular foodie discourse on Twitter. Indeed, it would be forgivable to walk past the ‘Asian and African’ sign on Cafe Spice’s awnings and mistake it for a South Asian restaurant, although the meat pies and moin moin in the window would soon correct this. The best thing at Cafe Spice isn’t actually anything made in house, but the bags of kilishi it sells from the now resurgent Alhaji Suya, which is on Peckham Park Road but not, for this guide’s purpose, in Peckham. Kilishi is a type of jerky made from dried, flattened muscle, the bright purple colour of a bruise, which packs a sweet, honeyed heat that builds and builds and builds. The only way you’ll get any better in London is through a connect not declaring it in their suitcase and a customs officer turning the other way.

There are two types of sandwich lovers: those willing to try anything, and those who might love everything but who will, when given the choice, always order the escalope sandwich. It is something of a fading art in London ─ brought over by the Italians but gone out of fashion, and often disrespected. Crossroads, a caff on the otherwise bougie Bellenden Road in Peckham, gets it. The bread is, crucially, soft and untoasted, a thick, doorstop white that traverses that liminal space between “terrible” and “not terrible.” The escalope is fried fresh, to a deep copper rather than a lazy tan. There is shredded lettuce, lemon, mayo and a little bit of hot sauce. That’s it. Bite into the bread, meeting resistance only at the barrier of escalope of its juices hotter than the sun, and gulp for fresh air.

The smallest differences lead to the most profound disagreements; just see the history of schisms in the Christian church, or ask a north and south Londoner their opinion on Morleys vs Sam’s. The West African jollof rice debate has always been slightly tongue in cheek, but the towers of meat pies on the counter and egusi and efo riro soups on the menu at the Ghanaian takeaway Agrobeso on Peckham High Street show that parts of Nigerian and Ghanaian cuisines can be mapped over each other without friction. Plus, it’s just good business. But, it’s odds on that diners are really here for kenkey, that fermented maize staple wrapped in husks of corn, sourer than sourdough, ready to be thumbed into ground pepper sauce, sardines, and fried fish with chewy jerkified edges. Because there are newborns smaller than the portion, it’s worth saving some for a peanut soup, creamy and soothing and hiding on the bone mutton, or getting a portion of pliable banku, roughly the size of Joshua Buatsi’s clenched glove. 

It’s not exactly a secret that Mexican Mama ─ one of the UK’s best wholesalers of Mexican produce ─ has a warehouse on the Philip Walk industrial estate. What’s less known is that it’s possible to just rock up and buy tomatillos, tortillas and the entire Jarritos range. What’s even less known than that though, is that every Tuesday or Wednesday brings a fresh delivery of tamales, either vegan (lentils, or spinach and green salsa) or chicken (both red salsa and green salsa). These are not tamales on the level of anything in Oaxaca, but they make good counterparts to the plain corn tamales more readily available at Colombian and Bolivian bakeries, and are excellent with a bit of salsa macha from ... Mexican Mama.

Peckham is full of opportunistic and peripatetic vendors, particularly in the more bronzed months when the heat lures barbecuers from their gardens to the street. Jerk chicken tends to be the usual currency ─ on weekends it’s possible to find blink-and-miss-them set-ups on Rye Lane and Bleinheim Grove. More recently, a stall called Jerk Up has taken a more permanent spot on Rye Lane, opposite Choumert Road, only selling jerk chicken with various sides (rice and peas, coleslaw, festival) or curry goat. The chicken is the best in the area outside of JB’s, tender with just the right amount of pink blush, spicy enough to leave a prickle on the lips, but not enough that you’ll turn down the dollop of pepper sauce.

Fish and chip shops and hairdressers are the only shops allowed to have puns in their names (an exception can be made for the shop selling blinds on the A10 whose tagline is ‘without us it would be curtains for everyone’). Cod Fellas eschews the usual Godfather route, and instead plumps for a lesser seen mafioso-fish pun, but in truth, the best thing isn’t even fish related. Good chippies know that to survive they have to change, which is why Cod Fellas has a whole board of vegan options, the best of which is the tofish. It uses layers of tofu that coagulate into something approximating fish flakes, and is consequently bland when poorly done, but here it comes as a whole battered monolith, around the size and thickness of a good novella, with a crackly layer of nori on the bottom that both mimics fish skin and fools the tastebuds into registering marine notes. It’s every bit as good as the cod, and the chips are great too.