THE JOURNAL
“The greatest restaurants,” Dom Hamdy reports, are “the ones that make you feel something. They are places that really facilitate human connection. You go into a restaurant, you go through the curtain. It might be an actual curtain or a figurative one, but you should feel like you’re transported away from your world.”
Hamdy should know a great restaurant when he sees one. As the founder of a growing number of celebrated London spots, he spends much of his life on the other side of the curtain.
After cutting his teeth selling Scotch eggs across a couple of the capital’s foodie markets, he set up Crispin in 2018. Named for the street in which it is housed by Spitalfields Market, Crispin is noted for championing seasonal small plates and natural wines. It has become the flagship site of a small portfolio across the city that includes Bistro Freddie, Canal and Bar Crispin.
“It’s a nice thing if I’m able to give something with longevity”
Shoreditch’s Bistro Freddie in particular nods to Hamdy’s love of French cuisine, if showcased in a thoroughly British way. So, it’s no surprise that he lists another Francophile London institution, The French House in Soho, as one of his own favourite places to eat.
“The history that exists in those places,” he says of it and the city’s similarly storied restaurants. “The walls have seen many things and many decades of two services a day. There’s something magical about [them].”
Speaking of magical places, feeling something and human connection, Hamdy is in the process of building his own set of festive traditions with his family – his wife and their two-year-old child. “I’m not sure we have any rituals when it comes to gift giving,” he says. “It’s a nice thing if I’m able to give something with longevity.” He suggests jewellery meets this brief.
As for him? “I’ve been told I’m difficult to buy for, but I find buying things very easy.”
And with the holiday season itself, perhaps we should approach it this year just as Hamdy does a restaurant: “When you leave, you should feel nourished and well-fed, returning back to your world, restored.”