St James’ Street, Walthamstow is predominately Turkish.  It made me laugh to hear a local estate agent refer to this as the ‘Coppermill Village’ recently!

There are a couple of restaurants, Urfa and Delight Cafe, a bakery and the International Supermarket and several all-night off licences.  We particularly like Yildirim Bakery; we often stand and watch the skills of the Turkish lady who sits at a low wooden table in the shop window rolling out fresh dough into paper-thin pancakes, adds spicy spinach, meat or cheese fillings and then cooks the gozleme (pancake) on a large hot plate just to her side.  She is a truly admirable one woman show. Today I bought a minced meat and onion gozleme (£1.50 each); freshly cooked, warm and spicy – perfect for naughty Sunday breakfast skippers! The range of flavours include a rather plain potato, a spicy spinach one, white feta-type cheese and chilli pepper, and the minced meat and onion one that I wolfed down on my way back from the farmer’s market.  We often buy these pancakes from the boats and street stalls when we are in Turkey, so we feel truly spoilt to have a place selling such fresh gozleme so local to us in E17.