What E17 Can Teach The Rest Of London About Independent Dining

London’s E17 neighborhoods offer a broad range of successful, cross-cultural local restaurants

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London’s restaurant culture has always been defined by extremes. On one end: omakase counters, prix-fixe tasting menus, chefs plating herbs with tweezers. On the other: speed-eaten supermarket meal deals and Deliveroo dependence. The middle is where things have started to fall apart. Brutal rents, high staff turnover, and razor-thin margins have pushed ambitious, independent food further out—not just geographically, but ideologically. It’s bleak. Unless, of course, you’re eating in E17.

Stretching from Walthamstow Village to Blackhorse Lane, this corner of east London has built one of the most dynamic and under-rated food scenes in the city. But it didn’t happen overnight.

In fact, much of what’s great about E17 isn’t new—it’s just finally being recognised for what it is. The Blackhorse Beer Mile didn’t stop at simple hops, but it evolved into bottle shops, bakeries, wine bars and wood-fired kitchens. Crate’s shipping container setup launched before Boxpark turned modular dining into a brand. And the area’s chefs—many of them first- or second-generation migrants—have spent years cooking for their communities, not for clout.

What makes E17 exceptional now is how all of this has been allowed to grow. There’s space here—literal and otherwise—for things to flourish.

Crate, Burnt Faith, Slowburn, and the Blueprint for a New Kind of Dining

Nowhere represents this better than Crate St James Street, a shipping container collective that opened in 2019 with a focus on small business incubation, street food, and low-cost creative tenancies. While the Boxpark comparisons are inevitable, Crate feels different: scrappier, more local, and still genuinely experimental.

It’s home to small operators like Hot N Juicy Shrimp LDN (the best seafood boils this side of the Atlantic) and Afrobbean Kitchen (love on a plate, with a particular shout-out demanded for their curried mutton and plantain), plus a rotating cast of pop-up kitchens (see: those with ‘day jobs’, testing their concepts out in the evenings and weekends) that keep the courtyard fresh.

The real star, as far as I’m concerned, is Long & Short Coffee, a skinny little roastery-cum-coffee shop squeezed into one of the containers, offering some of the best single origin specialty coffees in the world, in-house. The pour-overs here are genuinely excellent, but there are a number of wildly high-end lots (including Eugeniodes, Panama Geisha, and Sidra) available for aficionados, too.

Back towards Blackhorse’s industrial units, things get…well, much bigger. You have Burnt Faith, building one of the most interesting spirit brands in the UK. In addition to being the first brandy distillery in London—as you may remember—the space doubles as a cocktail bar, event venue, and home of Black Cactus BBQ, a residency-turned-restaurant where slow-smoked meats are served with sensational sauces and sides. Put simply, these are teams with real skills, operating on their own terms, and I think about Black Cactus’ brisket more than any human should think of any brisket.

A short walk away, you’ll find Slowburn tucked into the Blackhorse Lane Ateliers complex—the same space that houses a working denim factory. It’s not another slow-cooked meat spot, despite the name’s suggestions, but a brilliantly unique estaurant with a soft spot for vegetables and Michelin-worthy processes. Founder Chavdar Todorov has built something that resists trend-chasing entirely; there’s no aesthetic branding, no neon sign promising vibes, just precise, thoughtful plates served around sewing machines and piles of hand-crafted jeans. A proper triumph of a place.

Everyday Icons (Without the Ego)

Of course, like most London neighbourhoods, E17 has its share of chains. You’ll still find a Nando’s, a Greggs, a Starbucks, a pub that may very well be pouring pints from cans. But what’s different here is how easy they are to avoid. Especially with young families (which the area appears to have in spades). Almost anywhere you could go for a flat white or a quick lunch, there’s something ten times better—and independent—within a five-minute walk.

At Curious Goat, wedged into a new development behind St James Street station, the okonomiyaki is genuinely excellent, pancakes cooked to perfection, and a unique selection of brunch-to-linner dishes as generous as possible. Not flashy, just good.

Then there’s Weirdough Bakery, a little temple to laminated pastry and fermentation, where croissants get the same obsessive treatment as fine-dining mains. The queues speak for themselves, and many of their daily treats sell out fast enough to justify the hype. Hence having to move into a space 10 times the size (yet, graciously, just across the street) last week.

Global Eats With Local Roots

You could eat out in E17 for a month without ever repeating a cuisine. And not in a “street food concept” kind of way. The postcode boasts proper, often family-run, deeply rooted kitchens doing serious food with next to no fanfare.

I’d tell anyone to start with Etles, London’s first Uyghur restaurant. It opened back in 2017 and still serves some of the most unctuous hand-pulled Leghmen noodles, cumin-heavy lamb skewers, and chewy naans that arrive piping hot. The decor is simple, the service warm, and the prices unbeatable, with the delightful bonus of being BYOB (I’ve been known to take a bottle of England’s best sparkling to cause celebratory cultural chaos).

Koli’s, tucked into 42 St James’s Street, is a Greek/Mediterranean bolthole with serious local love. The space is warm and familiar with wood tables, soft lighting, and friendly service that feels neighbourly. Much like Etles, there’s nothing fanciful or overdone, just food that leans into what those with the cravings demand—fantastic grilled meats, gyros, dips, pitas, and plates meant for sharing. It isn’t trying to be avant-garde. It just does what it does very well, in a corner of London that needs it.

And if you know where to look, there’s more: Hiba Taboun’s Palestinian flatbreads at Wood Street; Taro, in a restored pie‑and‑mash shell at 76 High Street, serving serious Japanese ramen and sushi; Don Francisco y La Luna, the tapas spot at 18 High Street, that’s become Walthamstow’s go-to for Spanish small plates. All an everyday reality of how people cook, migrate, and live here, at its best.

All of which is to say, the DNA of E17’s food scene has already proved itself: to succeed as an independent in London today, you need to start small, build local, and do it well.