{"id":103688,"date":"2025-05-15T14:08:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T14:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/103688\/"},"modified":"2025-05-15T14:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T14:08:09","slug":"cant-go-to-greece-this-summer-book-a-table-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/103688\/","title":{"rendered":"Can\u2019t Go to Greece This Summer? Book a Table Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good news: the weather in London<\/a> is set to be scorching. Bad news: we still do not have a beach in our city. What\u2019s a holiday-hungry city dweller with limited annual leave supposed to do? Here\u2019s a thought: take yourself down to London Bridge-on-Sea, stroll through the crowds of grey suits, and try to snag a table at Oma, restaurateur David Carter and chef Jorge Paredes\u2019 outpost in Borough Market. It is a little like stumbling onto a secret cove, heading down to its pristine waters and finding a picnic laid out for you. <\/p>\n

We started with laffa (a kind of flatbread), a\u00e7ma verde (a little like a fluffy bagel, shot through with garlic and parsley) and two spreads; the salt cod labneh and a very smoky baba ghanoush. The stand-out among these starters was the gilt head bream with jalape\u00f1o aguachile. With its punchy mix of tang and spice, this dish is very much not like the other crudo plates, which can sometimes be a little shy and retiring and zzz. <\/p>\n

\"oma\"<\/p>\n

OMA<\/p>\n

Anyway, onto hotter stuff: the spanakopita gratin is fairly irresistible. It\u2019s a bubbling mix of spinach, feta, shallots. \u201cAll the good stuff,\u201d our waitress simply told us after our 17th inquiry about Greek cuisine. It was indeed all the good stuff, and served with a moreish flaky flatbread (prepare for flatbreads at Oma!). And then onto our mains, where we opted for surf and turf. The grilled squid is served with confit garlic and za\u2019atar, and transports you to a beach. The dry-aged Cornish lamb meanwhile transported me to an orchard of olive trees at sunset (I was on my third glass of chilled red at this point, I should mention).<\/p>\n

To finish: a pistachio praline and chocolate mousse, a dish you could easily eat by the bucketload. Even though I sensed we might roll out of the place at this point, we could not ignore the blood orange sorbet because what kind of sick person goes on holiday without getting an ice cream?<\/p>\n

\"oma<\/p>\n

Gilles Draps<\/p>\n

There are a lot of Greek restaurants<\/a> in London, where I live in the west anyway, and some of them are perfectly nice. Oma, with its smartish-but-very-fun vibe, intelligent cooking and decent prices, is its own thing entirely. So it is not a huge surprise that it recently became the first Greek restaurant in the UK and Ireland to achieve a Michelin star. And even less of a surprise that there was still a queue as we left the restaurant at 10pm.<\/p>\n

Oma, 3 Bedale Street, London SE1 9AL. Agora, the less formal sister restaurant, right underneath. Find out more at oma.london<\/a> and agora.london<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good news: the weather in London is set to be scorching. Bad news: we still do not have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,1380,47776,1331,393,4884,1330,257,47775,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-103688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-content-type-news","10":"tag-contentid-914e555a-da9d-4ee0-a639-0344817fe11c","11":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","12":"tag-england","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-locale-gb","15":"tag-london","16":"tag-shorttitle-cant-get-to-greece-this-summer-head-to-oma","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114512245797420333","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}