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A triumphant Jamie Demetriou has just successfully lobbied Time Out to include his favourite vegetarian curry house in our definitive rundown of the 50 Best Restaurants in London. ‘I’m surprised it’s not already in the list of faves!’ exclaims the Friern Barnet-born Demetriou. He’s talking about Rasa, which you’ll know if you’ve ever strolled down Stoke Newington Church Street, not least because it’s painted a luminous shade of pink. This local landmark has been serving sublime south Indian food – creamy aubergine and cashew stews, sweet battered banana boli and exceptional dosas – since the mid-1990s, and Demetriou, who lives locally, counts himself as a regular. ‘What I love about it, is that it’s one of those places that hasn’t had to change in order to appeal to the market. And it’s rammed, always,’ he says. I’ve been eating there with my mum since I was in my teens, and don’t need much convincing to place it alongside the likes of Noble Rot, Mangal 2 and Café Cecilia in the latest incarnation of the capital’s most important food list. ‘Please put this in the article,’ he adds, with a hint of casual desperation. ‘I need Rasa to know how much I love them.’
These are the Top 50 Restaurants in London
For anyone now thinking that we bend to the whim of any celebrity, know this: the 35-year-old Demetriou is way more clued-up than your average comedian, first showcasing his encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s restaurant scene in a 2019 episode of the popular foodie podcast ‘Off Menu’. Aside from all the showbiz stuff – the two acting BAFTAs for his phenomenally successful, phenomenally hilarious sitcom ‘Stath Lets Flats’, memorable turns in ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Paddington Two’, an upcoming appearance in Greta Gerwig’s much-hyped Barbie movie and his new Netflix special ‘A Whole Lifetime’ – Demetriou is a dedicated eater.
His command of London’s restaurant scene is second to none, and he’s got pretty decent global knowledge too. He recently spent a month eating his way around Mexico, where he drew pictures of his meals so he’d be less likely to forget them. When I tell him explain that one of his beloved LA restaurants, Night Market, has just opened up its first London location, Chet’s in Shepherd’s Bush, he immediately pulls out his phone and looks it up on Instagram. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this!’ he trills, the sound of his rumbling stomach almost audible.
There needs to be someone in my life who isn’t a chef
It’s his hometown that’s his true obsession, though. In the hour-and-a-bit I spend with the affable Demetriou over coffee in Soho, he sings the praises of everywhere from neighbourhood noodle hotspots Xi’an Biang Biang and Silk Road, to his love of pasta nights at Pophams in London Fields, as well as the pretty Vietnamese plates at Clapton’s Hai Café, and fake-meat masterpieces at Tofu Vegan in Angel. Demetriou, who has experimented with vegetarianism at various points in his life, is currently only eating meat ‘about one in every 15 meals’. A few years ago he wound up in a Parisian steakhouse, and decided to get stuck into the house speciality or face not being fed at all. ‘I remember Grace Dent saying that certain meats taste like death,’ he recalls, ‘and her words were ringing in my ears when I was eating it. I could really taste the end of a life in my mouth, and I hated it.’
An early incarnation of this interview was supposed to take place at his favourite Dalston bakery, The Dusty Knuckle, and steam almost spurts from his ears as he enthuses about the greatness of Tsiakkos & Charcoal off the Edgware Road. ‘They are doing some of God’s work when it comes to Greek cooking,’ he says. ‘We’ve been there for a couple of “Stath” wrap dinners, and for my dad’s birthday too.’
Like father, like son
It was Demetriou’s father who first got stuck into the world of London restaurants, though his start wasn’t too auspicious – in fact, it sounds downright brutal. Arriving alone in the UK from Cyprus at just 12, and experiencing stints of homelessness, he survived by working in kitchens. ‘I don’t want it to sound too traumatic, but he basically didn’t have a choice to be anything but an abused potwash when he first arrived,’ explains Demetriou. ‘He’d be scrubbing potatoes for 15 hours a day, until he was rescued by the police or whoever, and eventually ended up in a kitchen that wasn’t horrible.’ Soon, his employers cottoned on to the fact he really knew his stuff and he shared the secrets of his mother’s Cypriot cooking, then wound up working for one of the very first celebrity chefs. The American Robert Carrier owned the popular 1970s restaurant Carrier’s in Islington’s Camden Passage, as well as hosting proto-Jamie Oliver-style spots on television, for which Demetriou’s father assisted. ‘He was very much a little young Greek man in the background,’ says Demetriou. ‘Sort of hiding.’
Later down the line, his dad would have his own restaurants: a bistro in Crouch End, and French-style joints Pippins and Piafs. A review by legendary Evening Standard critic Fay Maschler still hangs in the family home, proclaiming that ‘the best French food in London is currently being cooked by a Greek man’. A future star was tucked away in the kitchen, too. ‘We were watching TV one day and a George Michael music video came on and dad tutted and said “Oh, he was always singing when he was washing dishes too,”’ says Demetriou. ‘In his mind, he was still the boy who washed dishes for him, rather than someone who went on to be an incredibly famous singer.’ By the time Jamie was on the scene, his dad had moved on to Queen’s Park to run a greasy spoon (‘he would hate it being called that’), where a young Jamie would pull very occasional shifts as a child waiter, buttering toast and serving tea.
I could really taste the end of a life in my mouth, and I hated it
Aside from a stint working in the veg aisle of East Finchley Waitrose – ‘I was stacking shelves. I was very bad at my job’ – that’s the closest Demetriou has ever got to a career in food. ‘I feel like my dad having his knees replaced after being bent over in kitchens for such a long time has put me off,’ he says. The fact that Demetriou’s girlfriend is also a cook and food stylist has made him keenly aware that there’s not really any room for another food professional in the family. ‘There needs to be someone in my life who isn’t a chef,’ he says.
That said, Demetriou has played a chef – one in the laddy, twat-of-a-man mould – alongside his comedy hero Steve Coogan on ‘This Time with Alan Partridge’, who he thanked in his 2022 BAFTA speech for Best Male Comedy Performance in ‘Stath Lets Flats’. ‘He’s the best British comedy character there is,’ he says of Partridge. ‘I think I stumbled over that on stage, but I stand by it! His confidence is part of the reason his character feels so truthful.’
Demetriou shares that same unerring commitment to character, whether he’s playing Fleabag’s peculiar bus shag or a marmalade-munching crim in Paddington. It’s also part of what makes the incompetent Stath so strangely endearing. The show’s indelible depiction of the semi-suburban north London in which Demetriou was raised is also key to its success. Though set somewhere in the Zone 3 and 4 hinterlands that run through Palmers Green up to Manor House (also home to The Salisbury pub, which Demetriou confidently brands as ‘one of the top five pubs in London for me’) ‘Stath Lets Flats’ was actually filmed around the Edgware Road. ‘It’s set on Green Lanes, but we couldn’t shoot there because all the letting agencies were too proud to be seen as, like, shit,’ he explains. There was one place, however, that was up for it, but on one condition. ‘The owner said in order for us to shoot there, he’d have to play the lead part.’ Demetriou was so taken with the spot that even that didn’t put him off entirely. They arranged another meeting and went back two weeks later to potentially offer the owner a walk-on part. ‘Since the last time we’d been there he’d dyed his hair purple to try and get the lead role,’ he recalls. ‘A 60-year-old man. With no acting training. With purple hair.’ Demetriou cut his losses and looked elsewhere.
The pasta-pesto indie-kid years
Jamie Demetriou’s latest television outing arrived last week on Netflix. An hour of surrealist slapstick comedy loosely linked by a cradle-to-the-grave concept, it features sketches covering everything from the banal furore of royal weddings to the enforced blokeishness of stags and ‘Kiss Villa’, a riotous – and actually quite depressing – lampoon of ‘Love Island’. Demetriou excels at positioning low self-esteem as an artform, and a skit of him as a grumpy teen who is so lazy he can’t even be bothered to have sex and orders his mum to cook him pasta-pesto with sweet-chilli sauce – a meal the real Demetriou survived on at university in Bristol – is one of many highlights.
I must have eaten there a thousand times, and I’ve never had the same thing twice
The actual teenage Demetriou seems to have been slightly cooler than his Netflix avatar. He speaks fondly of the time his older sister, fellow comedian and ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ star Natasia, dragged him out to central London indie disco After Skool Klub for her eighteenth birthday. ‘I remember that night so clearly,’ he says. ‘I was hoping people would think I was cool because I was wearing Etnies.’ Proudly sporting vintage clothing from Starship in Camden Stables Market, (‘the Rockit outlet where everything was £2’), you’d also find a young Demetriou at £1-a-drink Soho clubs like Candybox, where he’d share a dancefloor with the likes of Lightspeed Champion, aka future Beyoncé collaborator Dev Hynes.
With his first proper paycheck from early ‘Stath’ scripts he penned after successful uni revue shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, Demetriou booked himself into The Ledbury in Notting Hill. ‘I wanted to celebrate by going to a Michelin-star restaurant,’ he recalls, ‘which I actually think is insane now, because I really don’t think that that’s where the best food is. The pudding wasn’t nice.’ In ‘Off Menu’, he praised Pidgin on Wilton Way as the best spot in town, but these days struggles to pick just one restaurant as his favourite.
Instead, he comes up with his ideal day of London eating: ‘For dinner, Xi’an Biang Biang and for lunch, E5 Bakehouse, because the variety on a daily basis there is extraordinary,’ he says. ‘I must have eaten there a thousand times, and I’ve never had the same thing twice.’ Breakfast would probably be one of the many north-east London greasy spoons that Demetriou is currently working his way through in search of the perfect fry-up. This mission was inspired by the extremely aesthetically pleasing Instagram account for Tufnell Park cafe Normans, which, funnily enough, Demetriou still hasn’t actually been to for breakfast. ‘But looking at it has made me want to eat that kind of food more,’ he explains. ‘Me and my girlfriend have been doing an explore of Stoke Newington’s fry-up caffs, and reaching some conclusions. I very much enjoyed the New River Café, and there was a great place we went to in Leytonstone,’ he says, remembering another favourite restaurant that might usurp Xi’an Biang Biang when it comes to dinner. ‘Speaking of Leytonstone,’ he says, ‘...is Singburi on your list?’
Jamie Demetriou was shot at Quo Vadis, Soho
