Willesden Lane, NW6
Cusina Ko means my kitchen.
Three of us, one kitchen, and the food we grew up eating. The short version is on the front page. This is the long one.
Nanay’s recipes, written down
Nothing here was ever written down. Nanay cooked adobo by smell — vinegar in, lid off, left on the stove until it turned sweet — and when we asked how much soy sauce, she said enough. Sinigang happened when it rained. Pancit happened when someone had a birthday, and someone always had a birthday.
Opening a restaurant meant finally measuring it all. We cooked each dish over and over with scales on the counter until the numbers matched what we remembered, then argued about whether the numbers were right. The recipes on our menu are the ones that survived those arguments.
They are not tidied up or made polite. Sinigang is still sour enough to make you sit up. That is the point of it.
Why Kilburn
Because we live here. We have shopped on Kilburn High Road for years, carried rice home from the same place every Saturday, and cooked for friends in a flat too small for the number of people who kept turning up. Willesden Lane is ten minutes from that kitchen.
London has fed us well and it has rarely fed us this. We wanted somewhere you could eat kare-kare on a Tuesday without planning it a week ahead.
How we cook
Two of us cook and one of us runs the room. Everything comes out to be shared — dishes land in the middle of the table and you reach across each other, which is how we have always eaten and how we would like you to.
The kitchen cooks without pork, including in the stock and the sauce, not only in the obvious places. Dishes we cook that way are marked on the menu.
Our kitchen handles fish, shellfish, soy, gluten, peanuts, sesame and egg. Tell us about allergies before you order and we will tell you honestly what we can cook for you, and what we cannot.
Put it in the middle of the table.
We are not open yet, and we are not taking bookings. Leave your email and we will tell you the day we are.