Olympic Park's new treasure trove - and what to eat there
Plus: Leytonstone's Butt Karahi reviewed, Kokin replaces Allegra in East Village, Phlox interviewed - and Slice & Dough's umami banger
This week, like the rest of London’s media, I was lucky enough to enjoy a preview of the new £65m V&A East Storehouse. And the truth is, it’s as impressive as everyone is saying. But the best thing for locals? It’s free to visit, an easy weekend jaunt over to Here East.
You’ll have spied its unassuming mirrored glass facade already if you’ve had coffee at Clarnico Club, or Saint Espresso, a couple of minutes’ further towards Hackney Bridge. And if so, you’ll know that this park location — the former Olympics media centre — is only a 30-minute walk, or short cycle, from many parts of Leyton and Leytonstone. It’s also the biggest of 2025’s trio of arts arrivals in our part of East London: the other two, lest you’ve forgotten, are Sadler’s Wells East and Soho Theatre Walthamstow.
For the uninitiated, Storehouse (there’s no definite pronoun, I learnt at the launch) is the first half of the new V&A East. While the second part, the Museum proper, opens on Stratford’s East Bank in spring 2026, this vast storage solution — spectacularly designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects behind NYC’s High Line — is bigger than thirty basketball courts and crammed with over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives.
With items spanning every creative discipline, from Roman frescos to the Glastonbury Festival Archive, just 3% of the collection is visible at any one time: a hundred mini curated displays are hacked into the ends and sides of the storage racking. The other 97% can be glimpsed through cracks and gaps. You can follow your nose and find your own path through what is essentially a behind-the-scenes museum experience.
Climbing up the entrance stairs to the central hall, the atrium appears to stretch to infinity — a rush of the sublime that will provoke a gasp. As with Rotterdam’s pioneering Depot (which I covered here), juxtaposition is what gives the collection power: artefacts dizzyingly cheek-to-jowl include oil paintings, posters, busts, musical instruments, statues, clothing, historic fragments, furniture, textiles, pottery, old magazines and so much more. A glass floor allows a vertiginous glimpse of the basement: I found myself treading on it as tentatively as a ballet dancer.
Despite the emphasis on individual experiences, there are key pieces worth discovering, including the late 15th-century ornate carved gilded ceiling from a palace in Torrijos, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufman office, and the imposing installation of Poplar’s defunct Robin Hood Gardens estate. Meanwhile, new works and commissions with young East Londoners from Waltham Forest, Hackney and Newham include chairs created by students who worked with makers from Blackhorse Workshop in Walthamstow.
You’ll undoubtedly now have heard about the “world-first” Order An Object experience, where anyone can book to see any object they like, seven-days a week: apparently, this is already a smash. And should you exhaust this vast repository over the summer, the on-site David Bowie Centre is next to open on September 12th.
But for now, join the queue for a butcher’s at this mind-blowing cultural lab on our doorstep. It opens tomorrow, 10am-6pm, then seven-days-a-week, with late nights every Thursday and Saturday to 10pm. @vam_east
And what do we eat there?
Another fact: the original South Kensington V&A is not only the biggest museum of its kind in the world (housing 2.8 million objects), it was the first to be built with an onsite “refreshment room”. Thus the pressure is on for Storehouse to maintain its pioneering status.
Fortunately it does. Why? Because they’ve roped in E5 Bakehouse, one of London’s first independent sourdough bakeries founded back in 2011, to fill the corner cafe site. A spacious yet simple industrial-style space, with close-knit tables and a sofa or two, there’s even a window counter long enough to perch with coffee and laptop, should you need some arty weekday inspo.
As you’d expect, the menu majors in pastries, chocolate rye cookies, vegan babka, cheddar Marmite buns, carrot cake and lemon drizzle, while beans are roasted at its Poplar Bakehouse. I can also recommend the sandwiches, especially the tangy sourdough with robust Lincolnshire poacher, seasonal leaves and mustard, and a zingy vegan caponata on focaccia. For a sweet-savoury hit, the sourdough pain au chocolat is a substantial thing of beauty: so good, I nearly ordered another.
Other menu highlights? Roast chicken and lemon aioli baguettes, breakfast buns with frittata and cherry tomatoes, and fattoush salad with grilled vegetables, pitta crisps, olive and feta. And yes, there’s one must-try: a regularly changing seasonal tart, which this month is a salted caramel nut creation, filled with pistachios, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts and pecans.
In short, after all those carbs, I was more than thankful for that 30-minute walk home afterwards. @e5bakehouse, @vam_east
Welcome to issue #35. Today I’m launching a new column open to all subscribers keen to shine the spotlight on those independent food and drink businesses I might overlook. Like, for example, the bucolic garden at The Birkbeck, pictured above, which surreally feels more Hampstead than Leytonstone when the sun shines.
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Best restaurant
Best cafe
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Best pub
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Best taproom
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Behind this week’s paywall:
Butt Karahi: Leytonstone High Road’s new Pakistani restaurant reviewed over two visits
Kokin: what you need to know about Allegra’s replacement in The Stratford
Phlox Bookshop’s Aimée Madill on why she opened on Francis — and what’s changed since
Leyton’s Slice & Dough: the fishy pizza you have to order
All this week’s food and drink news, hearsay and gossip
Butt Karahi, Leytonstone: some thoughts after two visits
Down on the lower reaches of Leytonstone High Road, the former pub once known as Cowley Arms — most recently the short-lived Eastern Spoon — last month reopened as Butt Karahi. Specialising in Pakistani cuisine, its six branches, run as franchises, include Hounslow, Southall, Croydon and Tooting, where a post-prandial Sadiq Khan was filmed last month doing a chef’s kiss over the seekh kababs.
This review — as I recently explained — has been a little while coming. Why? Well, I’ve now been twice since it opened, partly because the first visit was rather fraught with teething issues.
So how did the two compare? And what should you order if you’re less familiar with this cuisine?