Oma in Borough Market is Greek, but not as you may know it. If you don’t know your “wildfarmed laffa” from your spanakopita gratin with malawach, or your giouvetsi beef-fat pangrattato from your mussel saganaki with tsalafouti, then this will be, literally, all Greek to you. At Oma, the server’s “Do you want any help with the menu?” is greeted with an emphatic “Yes!”
How is the laffa wild, but also farmed, and why is it in the bread section? I’ll tell you how: the flour for the laffa is farmed, but without pesticides, and it’s then turned into a salty, pillowy, buttery flatbread to swoosh through Oma’s showstopping bowls of hummus, babaghanoush and labneh. Yes, I did just call hummus showstopping there, but that’s what happens when David Carter of Smokestak and Manteca and Ecuadorian chef Jorge Paredes, formerly of Sabor in Mayfair, spend 18 months tinkering with the recipe before serving their hummus masabacha-style – that is, much smoother and runnier than you may be used to. Crunchy chickpeas swim in this silky custard, which is topped with a spicy, bright green coriander zhoug.
To the untrained eye, Oma is just another chic, semi-industrial space with an artisan cake kiosk and a cocktail bar on the outskirts of Borough Market; yes, the very market that I’ve already described as a Harry Potter Diagon Alley-esque theme park with extra venison sausage. But Oma is different from most other places round these parts. It is a nerdish, painstakingly thought-out, relaxed but high-end Greek-ish space-age taverna up a flight of stairs, and overlooking the melee outside. You enter Oma through its downstairs bar, Agora, which is noisier, less structured and has a slightly different but equally complex menu at slightly smaller prices. It’s not a restaurant, but it isn’t really a bar, either. The whole vibe down here is “bedlam plus charcoal pork souvlaki skewers”.
Upstairs at Oma feels much more like an elegant night out, where you can sit at a proper table, sip a clementine gimlet, eat raw fish crudo and feast on the glossy, otherworldly bagel-like acma verde and scoop it through labneh topped with salt cod XO. Oma’s menu seems pretty straightforward – there are breads, dips, that raw fish, a few small plates, some skewers and a few larger dishes cooked in clay pots – but then an innocuous-sounding dip such as the “ajvar with mizithra and hazelnuts” turns out to be a compellingly intoxicating goo of red bell pepper and aubergine with crunchy, salty nuts, which you eat with a bowl of hot, fresh potato crisps.
Oma doesn’t stand on ceremony – it’s not a place for ballgowns, cummerbunds or even high heels, especially if you keep in mind the trek to the bathrooms, which are underneath Agora and through a part of the kitchen (I managed to stroll through staff supper on my way back from spending a penny). Carter and his co-conspirators, however, have a knack of creating incredibly laid-back but gastronomically highfalutin joints. There’s a reason customers queue and squabble for seats at Smokestak, an equally industrial space over in Shoreditch that serves brisket buns and old fashioneds in a postcode saturated by draughty joints selling “dirty food” to “hip kids”. At Oma, however, gilt-head bream, sea bass, yellowfin tuna and chalk stream trout are served fresh, raw and dressed, but the devil is in the details – in the dressings of datterini tomato, apple aguachile, Todoli citrus, jalapeño granita and clementine ponzu.
Anyone who finds it hard to pace themselves will find the breads, sauces and citrussy fishy loveliness very hard to resist, but you simply must leave room for the deconstructed spanakopita, which, frankly, is obscene. The traditional cheesy spinach filling is baked separately in an earthenware bowl, and the whole holy mess comes with light strips of moist, hot malawach bread to dredge through it. From the clay pot offerings, the dish already causing a stir is the wild red prawn giouvetsi, a sort of Greek risotto made with orzo that’s finished with a wildly decadent deep-fried prawn butter. The result is a glossy, set, incredibly fishy puddle that teeters on the brink of too much.
Then again, nothing ever feels like too much at dinner, does it? It’s only the next day, as you step into a pair of suddenly snug pants, that you think, “Did my chargrilled squid skewers really need that extra splash of delicious za’atar oil?” and “When I was that full already, did I need those two large scoops of gorgeous olive oil ice-cream dusted with fennel pollen? And in what way was that any different from eating an entire cold rice pudding?” No difference, is the answer.
Oma is one of the restaurant openings of the year, not least because literally no one was crying out for a fresh spin on babaghanoush. We were all very, very stupid.
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Oma 2-4 Bedale Street, London SE1, 020-8129 6760. Open Tues-Sun, lunch noon-3pm, dinner 5.30-11pm. From about £50 a head, plus drinks and service