Kurdish cafe in London nominated for Eater Awards 2019 Restaurant of the Year

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A Kurdish restaurant in the British capital which opened just three years ago has been nominated among four finalists for the Eater Awards 2019 Restaurant of the Year.  

Pary Baban, her husband Pola Baban, and their sons Raman and Rang established Nandine cafe and restaurant in London’s Vestry Road in 2016.

Their Kurdish cuisine took south London by storm, with the family opening their third restaurant branch in Camberwell Church Street in July this year. 

Nandine’s nomination was announced on November 18, alongside culinary rivals Flor, Tata Eatery, and Master Wei. 

The restaurant serves dishes, meze, and intricate pastries for brunch and kubba, onion dolma, and qawarma for dinner.  

The awards will be announced on December 10. Other categories include Design of the Year and Dish of the Year. 

“All of these finalists have either opened or come into their own in a new way since we declared the winners last year,” Eater said in a statement. “All of them were key contributors to making 2019 a great year of eating and drinking in London.”  

Last week, Nandine was listed as one of London’s best value restaurants by Eater’s reviewer Jonathan Nunn. 

“If London was New York, then this Kurdish cafe would be the subject of food pilgrimages and glossy weekend magazine features,” Nunn said. 



The Baban family fled Qaladze in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in 1989 having survived the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression of the Kurds. 

“Kurdish food has got lots of different types of cuisine because each tribe has its own cuisine,” Pary told Vice in early 2018. 

“When you think about it, it’s all the same but different because we are all from a different part of Kurdistan, and everyone is putting their own flavor, their own spices, their own thing into it. It makes it really interesting,” she added.