Chapter One: How Lahpet Started. From a market stall in Bermondsey to a warehouse in Hackney

I didn’t grow up wanting to open a restaurant. I grew up surrounded by food.

My mother cooked well and always had me in the kitchen with her. My stepfather was Jewish, of Iraqi descent, and made the most extraordinary lamb stew - bamia, served with burnt onion rice - a dish I still think about. He was a shareholder in a Jewish restaurant up the road and I remember slurping chicken noodle soup and matzo balls there as a kid like it was the most natural thing in the world. Weekends with my dad in South London meant Deans in West Croydon for Punjabi food – keemas with half an inch of oil on top, saag, tandoor breads - or the Szechuan Garden in Coulsdon for smoked chicken. I was eight years old and it all felt completely normal.

My Burmese heritage came from my dad’s side of the family. He’d left Burma as a boy with the rest of the family in the early sixties on a boat, just before the Junta came in. They settled in south London and although he didn’t cook the cuisine himself, Sundays at my grandma’s meant mohinga, chicken or pork curry with rice and balachaung - a spicy dried shrimp relish - or thamin lethohk, a rice salad that had 15 or so components that we’d mix and eat with our hands. I loved all of it but didn’t make any connection with what was to come at the time. I was just a kid obsessed with atlases and weather maps with delusional ambitions of becoming a meteorologist, held back by mediocre maths. But somewhere in all of it, something was being laid down.

 

The Long Way Round

By my mid-twenties I had no academic qualifications worth speaking of and had worked my way through a string of sales jobs - double glazing, Teletext holidays, the full circuit - before landing at a top-tier headhunter. Not a career path I had envisaged but it was a good company and I enjoyed it for the most part. My dad and I were having dinner one evening at Mandalay on the Edgware Road - London’s only Burmese restaurant at the time - and I was talking about a recent holiday to Sicily and how inspired I had been by the pane cunzato sandwich I found there and how I subsequently wanted to open a sandwich place. I’d often rant on about salad places too and how London, at the time, lacked a solid offering. I just wanted to open something food related that I felt passionate about.

And then it hit me. I’m sitting in the only Burmese restaurant in London. A city of nine million people. One place. Serving a cuisine I’d grown up eating, that I knew intimately, that I genuinely believed in. Not a gap in the market - a void. And the place we were sitting in, which was perfectly decent, could be done so much better - we both agreed on that. We didn’t go deep on it that evening. I think the old boy saw my ambition to move into food as more pipedream than plan at that stage. But for me, that was the moment - everything after it had one direction.

Three Years of Waiting

Pipedream or not, my dad was sufficiently behind the idea to offer to fund it. He’d been waiting on a return from an investment in a drug at clinical trials stage and was confident the payout would come. We went to investor conferences together, but each year brought no positive news.

In hindsight, thank god. I was nowhere near ready. I would have opened something half-formed, burned the cash inside a year, and probably never recovered from it. But at the time the frustration was eating me alive - watching an idea I’d fallen in love with sit on a shelf, fully formed in my head, going absolutely nowhere. Still in recruitment. Still waiting. The worst kind of stasis when you know exactly what you want to do and can’t do it.

What I did do during those years was think. Obsessively. Brand, concept, positioning, the whole thing. And in 2013, with or without funding on the horizon, I went to Myanmar for the first time. Two weeks with my brother. I went in with intent - this wasn’t a holiday, it was research. Burma isn’t exactly Google Maps territory so the planning was considerable: domestic travel between regions, eating itineraries, the lot. And with the forethought that I’d eventually need a Burmese chef, I had a letter translated into Burmese - headlining the opening of a new Burmese restaurant in London and inviting applications by email - and handed it out without embarrassment at pretty much every restaurant and hotel we ate at. We got some responses, they just came too soon to act upon.

But the trip gave me something more important than a chef. It gave me the dish.

The Salad Stall in Mandalay

We were walking down a residential backstreet when we came across a woman with a stall outside her garage. Just a stall. A few bowls, some ingredients, nothing much to look at. We ordered two salads - a pickled tea leaf, lahpet thohk, and a ginger salad, gin thohk.

The next ten minutes changed my understanding of what food could be.

The textures, the layers, the depth of flavour and umami, particularly from the pickled tea, from something that looked so utterly simple - it was unlike anything I had ever put in my mouth. We were literally fighting over the last morsels and should have ordered two more portions but we were so embarrassed by how flagrantly we’d been scrapping over a salad that we upped sticks and left, still bickering, slightly mortified.

Walking away, processing what we’d just eaten, the pickled tea leaf stood out above everything. Lahpet. A unique ingredient. Great name. A potential signature dish unlike anything London had seen. I was certain that if I could make it the way that woman had just made it, it would fly.

It did. It remains our top selling dish to this day.

Doing It Without the Money

By 2015 I was stagnant and frustrated. Still waiting. Still in recruitment. The family funding wasn’t coming and I had to make a decision - keep waiting or push on alone.

I pushed on. I wrote a business plan - not the modern one-pager, a proper 40-page document that took a few months alongside the day job. I got in front of two investors and they both said the same thing: good idea, clear gap, but you’ve done nothing but write a plan. Come back when you have evidence people actually want this.

So I went and got the evidence.

I taught myself to cook Burmese food. My grandma was no longer with us so I started from scratch - recipe research from family heirloom cookbooks plus as many more that I could procure with further recipes found online. I was already a fairly confident cook and through trial and error, cooking for friends, my dad, who would undoubtedly always say ‘more fish sauce and chilli’, and anyone who would sit still long enough to give me honest feedback, I built up a solid base of dishes I trusted. They tasted punchy and authentic but not so full of fermented fish paste that they would make the average westerner run a mile - and with that, I started looking for a market pitch.

I needed a Sunday slot - the day job wasn’t going anywhere yet - which meant prep on Saturday and trade Sunday. Chatsworth Road would have had us. Borough Market felt like too much bureaucracy for where we were. Kerb and Whitecross Street were weekday operations. One Saturday I made some coconut noodle samples at home and headed for Druid Street market with hot flasks of the broth, pre-cooked noodles and all the toppings prepped. I gave the organisers a taste. They loved it. But on the way home I stumbled across Maltby Street Market - I’d heard of it but never been. It was buzzing, the right crowd, the right energy. I was determined.

A few emails later - almost too straightforward a process to believe and we had a Sunday pitch.

Saturdays in My Kitchen, Sundays at the Market

We started in January 2016. I had three weeks to get everything ready - logo finalised, branded gazebo, cooking equipment, food hygiene certificates, storage, ingredients, the lot. I clearly remember the first Saturday of prep: my younger brother mucking-in, goggle-clad, slicing mountains of shallots. Me with a 31-litre pan of coconut noodle broth spread across all four gas burners on my domestic cooker. By no means a professional setting but we had a right laugh together and formed a closer bond over that period than we had for some time. This schedule of prep repeated almost every Saturday for the next ten months.

We’d finish prep around six. Quick pint. Pick up the car club Toyota Yaris - god knows how we got everything in there - and leave it loaded outside my flat ready for the morning. Saturday nights stayed relatively civilised that year. Sunday mornings I’d wake up buzzing, finish loading the car, and head off market bound to Bermondsey via Maida Vale to pick up my brother.

The market received us well. A new Asian cuisine - ‘what’s Burmese’, we’d hear constantly. The curiosity was real with the unmistakable aroma of garlic and fish sauce laden curry wafting down the market. As long as it wasn’t chucking it down we came away with a humble profit each week. I rotated the menu - always a hot dish, coconut noodles or a pork or prawn curry with rice and balachaung were mainstays - alongside four rotating salads: tea leaf, ginger, aubergine and chicken. Over the months I built up enough of a repertoire that regulars never felt any repetition, whilst still being able to come back every other week for their favourite dish.

We would see the same faces, market traders looking for swaps or just locals, coming back week after week asking why they couldn’t get these flavours anywhere else in London. It was humbling. We built up a strong workflow as the weekends went on with my brother as meet and greet cashier and often on salads when we got really busy whilst I’d be focused on the hot food. Queues would be a regular occurrence and almost all dry weekends we would sell out. Regulars on two occasions booked us for private catering events - one birthday party and another wellness event, both on Saturdays, which meant prep had to start and go on late into the Friday night.

It was hard work. Genuinely hard - but I couldn’t have done it without my brother and enjoyed it immensely.

That summer I started dating Kate - a German photographer finishing her degree in London with no plans to go back. She must have wondered what she’d let herself in for - me scooting around London between the day job and the market with bags full of pickled tea and fermented fish paste, with limited time to devote to getting to know her properly. Her patience and good humour outlasted all of it though, and before long it wasn’t only my brother and I on prep - Kate was there too.

Beyond the hard labour she quietly endured in those early months, what she taught me very quickly was the power of good imagery and how to use it. I wasn’t adept at either. One afternoon before my next trip to Myanmar she slung a passport, a pair of sunglasses, a wad of dollars and a map of the country onto the table and took a quick photo - no real thought behind it, just instinct. Suffice to say it got far more attention than anything I had posted previously and started to open my eyes to something I hadn’t fully understood: how much brand perception could be shaped through a camera and a phone, and how important our digital channels were going to be to building something people actually wanted to follow.

She later became my wife. The support and the photography never stopped.

Finding Zaw

By summer it was becoming clear I couldn’t take Lahpet where I wanted to from a market stall alone. The physical grind without proper infrastructure was getting to me but more importantly - I needed a chef.

Not just any chef - they had to be Burmese. A cuisine this new to the Western market would live or die on authenticity in the kitchen. I deployed every headhunting skill I had and came up largely empty. Burmese chefs in the UK are a finite pool, let alone those willing to enter high-risk start-ups.

Then a friend, off the cuff, mentioned an Asian takeaway in Herne Hill that had closed. It had been serving Burmese dishes and I immediately wanted to know who was behind it. The Cooks House in South East London and the owner was Burmese.

His name was Zaw. A trained chef with indefinite leave to remain, his first venture with his wife Tin hadn’t gone quite to plan. I found him on LinkedIn, Facebook, dug out a dodgy email address somewhere online and spammed him from all angles with a punchy overview of what I was building. He came back quickly. We met for beers.

Since the Cooks House he’d found a very well-paid job at an upmarket seafood restaurant in St James. I knew he’d be hard to prize away. We started meeting more regularly - he’d come down to the market with Tin to eat and critique my food, which improved with their input. He was settled where he was but over the weeks, something started to shift.

The Evening Standard and the Edge of Something

In November 2016 I went back to Myanmar for nearly a month, solo, going deeper into the country than I’d been before - eating my way through every region I could get to. Towards the end of the trip, sitting on the waterfront in Mawlamyine, I checked the Lahpet Instagram account and saw we’d been tagged in an Evening Standard piece: ‘Why Burmese cuisine is set to be London’s hottest foodie trend.’ Photos of the market stall. Our dishes.

It was exactly what we needed. It helped get Zaw over the line too.

When I got back, winter was setting in and I started looking for somewhere more permanent - a pop-up at minimum, somewhere with a kitchen, some infrastructure, a step up from gazebos and car boots. I was looking for spaces where a more established business would take a food concept in for a share of revenue. One cold, wet evening Zaw and I went to look at a warehouse in London Fields. Helmsley Place - an industrial street, railway arches on one side, newer warehouse buildings on the other. Dark, freezing and wet it was. To Zaw, who didn’t know the area’s food pop-up history, it felt like the arse end of nowhere. We decided it was too much to take on straight from the market - too much work needed, rent wasn’t cheap, and the idea of signing a sub-lease with limited cash felt reckless.

A few days later, disappointed, the leaseholder called back. She’d also shown the space to a coffee shop owner from Islington who wanted to turn the warehouse into a communal workspace and was looking for a weekday evening and weekend food operator to partner with. A revenue share arrangement. No sub-lease.

It sounded perfect.

Her name was Sally. I couldn’t sleep for two nights building up to the pitch. The magnitude of what this could mean was sitting right in front of me - market to pop-up to restaurant, the exact trajectory I’d always planned. Get this right and Lahpet had a real home.

The pitch went well, very informal. She’d have us.

It was the end of November 2016. Planning to open in mid-January began.