London

Stevie Parle is a young chef in London, with a lot of ambition, a busy restaurant, two cookbooks with a third on the way and a recent TV show, Spice Trip, in the can for Britain’s Channel 4. We dropped by recently in the middle of London’s Design Week to spice trip at his Dock Kitchen at the Portobello Dock, out near Kensal Rise — a fashionable neighborhood just beyond Notting Hill, with a touch of the pioneer spirit about it.

Hus Vedat wears chef whites to work instead of a trench coat and dark glasses, but the building in which he cooks everyday was once better known for its furtive spy meetings than its squid ink raviolo. He explains.

As I pointed out to a friend at last night's A Taste Of London party, the notion that British food sucks is totally outdated. Rather, our friends across the pond uphold some very high standards when it comes to food, I told him with a mouth full of fried fish on a potato chip. That said, some habits die hard, and, occasionally, not at all.