Category Archives: Elephant and Castle

Kachori, Betty & Joan

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Karchori 

It is now established dogma that a place is in trouble when they start to have bingo nights. And they’re in even more trouble if anything they do involves a drag queen. So when our friends over at Kachori, the newish Indian in Elephant Park that we checked out last year, announced they will be having a drag bingo night, we knew that something very dire was happening and here’s how you can help. 

Drag bingo is hosted by Party with Ginger and for £45 a head you have a two course, drag inspired meal (???!!) with free flowing prosecco. On top of a £10 admission this comes up to £110 a couple. Now we would never tell you how to spend your dosh, but for that kind of money we reckon you could get Ginger herself over to your gaff to rustle up a few curries while shouting out numbers. However,  this for a good cause so please support them if you can by popping in for a poppadum or a drink. Drag Bingo at Karchori is on 30 October and tickets can be grabbed on their website. 

Another reason we can’t allow Kachori to fall by the wayside is that its perhaps the only restaurant in London where you can eat the table wear. We kid you not. 

BETTY AND JOAN

Staying in Elephant Park and remaining on drag, a new bar and comedy club is opening and we couldn’t be more excited. The bar is listed as being gay, with cabaret and drag, but if that’s not your handbag the comedy appears to be more mixed. They’re having an opening party on 11 December and if you want to join the waiting list then enter your details over on their website. They fling open their majestic doors later this year, so stick that in the little sparkly diary we’ve been telling you to buy for ages. 

The Runoff Attends a Consultation!

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As Runoff regulars will be aware, we love a good old fashioned public consultation. We especially enjoyed our visits to Oval Village, or as we call it ‘UpTown KenVo’. On these visits we challenged an architect to a game of Jenga using his building blocks, and during an illustration of how the flats inside the remaining gasholder will look, we asked if their design aesthetic was meant to give residents a taste of life behind bars. And last weekend we had the opportunity to subvert authority yet again by attending a consultation on the future of 6-12 Kennington Lane.

Jewsons
Scary Building

6-12 Kennington Lane is currently occupied by Jewson Hardware and the frankly quite scary abandoned building in front of it. The plan put forward by Unite Students is to build 500 (!) high quality and sustainable student rooms with retail space on the ground floor. We were told that this will be realised by erecting three conjoined buildings which are planned to be 18, 16 and 14 stories respectively. The ground floor will be set back from the street, creating a kind of town square open to the public with plantings and retail units at the ground level. It was this retail presence that interested us, and peppy rep from Unite Students excitedly told us that some of these units will be dedicated as a ‘makers spaces’. As they make things at Pizza Hut, we asked if they might be fast food joints. She replied that it would be something ‘more creative’. We assume this is code for ‘Franco Manca’. Lambeth have stipulated that one space needs to be light industrial, and we were told this could be public storage for people to safely store their bikes. Or this could be a mammoth kitchen for ‘Just Eat’. Who knows, but with this kind of optimism anything is possible! 

Building on the Jewson site starts in spring 2026 with a finish by summer 2028. If you want to offer your own feedback you can use the feedback form on the website, or if you’re old school you can just email them on 6-12KenningtonLane@kandaconsulting.co.uk but be nice, as even spolit Uni students need a place to live. The website has some interesting information in their FAQ page, and if pictures of Victorian ghost people walking through buildings is your fetish then you’re in for a treat.

Panuozzo at Theos

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During a recent lunch break we paid a visit to Theos Pizzeria in Elephant. You may be aware that for two years we’ve crowned Theos as having the best pizza due to their creative toppings and sourdough base. However, with metabolisms not being what they used to be, for lunch we dropped the pizza and opted for their signature sandwich, the panuozzo. 

Described as a wood fired sandwich, Theos use the same delicious slow fermented pizza dough but reformat it into a sandwich-like form. Your scribe had the sausage and gorgonzola panuozzo, which was also rammed with creamy and salty gorgonzola, grilled mushrooms, mozzarella chunks, and rocket. On the side was a red chilli which packed a real punch, so it was used sparingly. 

Matilda from the digital subscriptions team sometimes gets overwhelmed with too many options, but with just four handy panuozzos to chose from she had the broccoli with anchovies, mozzarella and pangranatto. Pangranatto being a sort of crunchy garlicky breadcrumb, that might seem odd in a sandwich but was actually a nice crunch to complement the soft broccoli and mozzarella. There was a good but not overpowering flavour of anchovy to round things out and of course the bread itself was sublime.

The panuozzo is £6.50 which when you think about it, is about as much as a fancy sandwich at Pret nowadays. Matilda wanted a glass of wine but when we reminded her what happened the last time she had wine at lunch we had water and the bill was under £15. And with the mounds of cheese and filling kept us filled until dinner. As no one actually pays for this site, as we were leaving we asked Matilda exactly what she does at the office. She smiled and said coyly, ‘you know, I INVOICE’. OK. 

UnEarthing the Elephant

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The capacity for our community to transform and evolve is sometimes more than us mere humans can absorb. To those who don’t visit Elephant and Castle regularly, it can be unsettling to see how it’s changed over the past 10 years. 

We recently discovered a charming, 22 minute short film called ‘UnEarthing Elephant’ about the people and community that sprung up in Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Shot in 2017, it’s both a celebration and an elegy to a shopping centre that people knew was doomed but not when. The touching and at times funny personal stories of love/hate relationships are mixed with tales of how the shopping centre never really worked until saved by small, independent shopkeepers, many of whom were immigrants to the UK. 

Credits to the amazing Eva Sajovic, who created the piece and narrates most of it. 

And we’ll never forget the erotic massage chairs……

Eulogy to a Lost Shopping Centre

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Our Ten Best Places to Eat in Greater Kennington (+ One Sunday Roast) launches on Thursday and we are currently working assiduously on this highly scientific yet wholly subjective list. Ahead of that, we’ve unearthed a lovely Vimeo video we’d like to share with you 

As Elephant and Castle is now undergoing a full on ‘Vauxhallization’ we’ve been recently waxing nostalgic for the old shopping centre. It was like that kooky great aunt you used to have in Leeds – you visited it only when you absolutely had to, was past its prime, and very fond of pink. And before you know it, they’re gone forever. 

It’s OK to feel a bit conflicted about the shopping centre. On the one hand it harks back to a more innocent form of independent retail in which shopkeepers knew your name and you could be sexually aroused by a massage chair. But it was also a dangerous place rife with drugs. And not the drugs your kooky aunt took.  

This uplifting and artistic video is from 2010 and makes you realise the centre was more like a community meeting for many. 

The Dragon Castle Experience

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Whoever said that dining can’t be fun? If you’re looking for a group Christmas meal or just for two of you, we love Dragon Castle in Elephant because it reminds us of the kind of mega restaurants that you actually see in Beijing. If what you want from a dining experience is Chandeliers! Plastic plants! Sullen staff! Lazy Susans! A water feature! Then Dragon Castle can deliver the immersive fun that might be missing in your life. Its also a nice escape from the impending dreary winter nights in Greater Kennington. 

On the food front, it isn’t better than any other Chinese out there so we haven’t photographed the dishes but  we can recommend their dumplings, which are a speciality. Chinese beers are on offer in addition to wines and spirits and this is a good thing, as it helps to be not entirely sober during your Dragon Castle experience. But with Christmas around the corner that should be rather easy. 

On a weekend expect a chaotic yet endearing mix of Chinese families, people on dates, kids running around, and locals all with a great deal of mirth. A trip to Dragon Castle is as close as you can get to the sights and smells of a Beijing mega restaurant. The only letdown is that when its done you’re face with the sights and smells of Walworth Road. 

用餐愉快！

Theo’s in Elephant

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At the Runoff we take our annual top 10 Best Places to Eat © rundown very seriously. So purely under the guise of quality assurance and not as a flimsy excuse wolf down pizza on a weeknight,  we return to Theo’s in Elephant to see if it still deserves it’s #2 ranking.

Our marketing intern Millicent ordered one of the specials: the Fugazzeta. It was  topped with mozzarella, gorgonzola, onion, olives, garlic and parmesan. Millie is proving to be an intern without a great eye for detail, and had not read that it was in fact a “white” pizza, ie without tomato sauce. Luckily, the well drilled staff at Theo’s heeded her request to throw some sauce on top and probably upset the chef in the process. Moving on, there was no stinting on the gorgonzola, so not for the fainthearted. The result was a super cheesy-oniony topping,  complemented by plump olives and subtle garlic. And of course the usual top-notch, chewy, blistered Neapolitan-style base.

  • The not so white pizza
  • Sausage and Tropea

Your scribe had another special, the sausage and tropea onion pizza. We had frankly never heard of a tropea onion, but it was delicate, sweet, and quite tender.  The yellow tomatoes were a treat as was the inclusion of a cheese not often seen on a pizza, pecorino. But what made this pizza were the sizeable chunks of fennel sausage. And again, the sourdough and slightly scorched base finished it off perfectly. And for £12/13, it seemed pretty fair to us and in our less than humble opinion Theo’s remains the best pizza in Greater Kennington, and that is no mean feat in these parts. 

On the drinks front, Theo’s has a good selection of Italian wines and beers at good prices.  Millie was a bit alarmed that the carafe of wine ordered was solely for the consumption of your author. But if you’re reading this Millie (and if not you really should be) at the end of a day you’re just an intern so content yourself with that Pepsi Max and a made up pizza. 

Pot and Rice

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As a Runoff rule, when we hear the name ‘pan’ added to any restaurant cuisine we run and hide for cover. However, we’ve been hearing favourable things about pan Asian joint Pot and Rice and we recently checked it out for you. Pot and Rice can be found hipster foodie haven Sayer Street (as it turns out sadly not named after the washed up 70’s pop star) in Elephant and Castle. 

We’re big believers in sticking to what a restaurant does best, and in the case of Pot and Rice it has to be their traditional clay pot rice dishes. These bowls of goodness are a staple in south China and adjoining countries such as Laos and Vietnam. If rice isn’t your thing they also offer a selection of Udon dishes, Cheung fun, and Bao buns. But you’re on your own with those. 

Your scribe and dining partner Karen from Finance started with four beef dumplings, which were well grilled and heartily stuffed. I continued by ordering the chicken and shitake mushroom pot, filled with a ginger and soy marianated chicken thigh, and a combination of dry and fresh mushrooms with a topping of spring onion. The pots come with an ample side of soy sauce, which boiled and sizzled when poured into the aforementioned pot.  

For her mains, Karen opted for the Chinese sausage and chicken pot, with the chicken also marinated in soy sauce. The sausage was made from duck, and the deep flavour of the fat bled into the rice mixture. It was topped with some broccoli which pleasingly created the illusion that you were eating something healthy. The pot is actually hot in the very literal sense, resulting in lovely, chewy burned rice at the edges, so a bit like a Chinese paella. Karen so eagerly consumed her clay pot dish that she then had a go at mine. This resulted in an unsightly yet very entertaining sword fight involving chop sticks and flying soy sauce. Wine may or may not have been consumed. 

Pot and Rice has a casual and informal atmosphere with ambient music and well drilled, informed wait staff. There were also a number of patrons speaking Cantonese/Mandarin which is an accolade in itself, with a smattering of East Asian students.  Best of all, it’s a family run business. 

Strike! At Southwark Playhouse

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We recently popped into our much loved Southwark Playhouse to review their latest offering ‘Strike’ and we’re here to tell you rebellious souls all about it. Those of you lucky enough to be Runoff regulars will be aware that the Playhouse now has two locations. Strike is staged at the original-but-soon-to-be-extinct venue in Newington Causeway. The new, more flashy venue is much closer to Kennington in Newington Butts at the base of curiously named high rise Uncle. 

Strike is a true story set in Dunne’s department store in Dublin circa 1984. When a worker follows through with directives from her union and refuses to sell an item made in South Africa, she is suspended from her role. However, she takes 10 like minded colleagues with her and the story evolves into life on the picket line. As their movement grows the group learn lessons from South African exile Nimrod, who had been incarcerated at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela and gives insight into daily life under Apartheid.  

In spite of opposition from Dunnes, the Catholic Church, the government and even union bosses themselves, the strikers persevere and their profile grows and they begin to spread their message as far as the United Nations and beyond. After 2 ½ years Ireland becomes the first western nation to ban South African agricultural goods, contributing to the fall of Apartheid two years later. Although the subject matter is bleak and serious, the play is at times funny, touching, and even has a few musical numbers thrown in. 

Strike is about justice, rebellion, and the right to stand up for what you believe in, which more or less sums up most Greater Kenningtonians. The only thing we could fault about this play was that it didn’t celebrate the fact that almost all of the strikers were female and had to make great sacrifices to pursue what they felt passionately about. However, with all of the strong ensemble female roles this will become evident to everyone in the audience. 

Strike is on now and runs until 6 May at the old venue. For some strange reason there are still tickets available and they can be purchased here. 

The Walworth Farce @ Southwark Playhouse

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If you’re a committed Runoff reader (and when you think about it, why not?), you’ll be aware that we’ve been closely monitoring the opening of the new Kennington facing Southwark Theatre and we toured the place last summer. It’s now open for business with the geographically appropriate dark comedy ‘The Walworth Farce’ and we’ve just checked it out for you. 

Set in three claustrophobic rooms in a council block in Walworth Road, Irish brothers Blake and Sean live with their father Dinny and spend their day recreating a script of their previous life in Cork. In some scenes Blake and Sean play younger versions of themselves. In other scenes they depict older members of their family in various scenarios primarily centred on murder and inheritance, to an audience of no one. As the older sibling, Sean vaguely remembers what actually happened to his family in Cork and presents this to Dinny, who has an vested interest in reinterpreting the narrative. 

Sean is the only member of the household allowed to leave the flat, and in his daily visit to Walworth Tesco he befriends Hayley, who turns up to drop off some shopping. Seemingly obvious to her presence, the trio continue to depict their series of tragic events and struggle to bring Hayley into the narrative. We won’t tell you if the arrival of Hayley becomes an existential threat to their endless play or if she can liberate Sean to safety. The play’s theme of physically and emotionally trapped characters, compelled to act out narratives in an endless loop, certainly reminded us our lives in 2020 and 2021. 

The Walworth Farce is on now until 18 March and £15 tickets can be purchased here. Or you could just sit at home and watch a programme about Katie Price doing her house up. The choice is yours. 

And only five days to go until we unveil our Ten Best Places to Eat in Greater Kennington (+ One Sunday Roast)!