Our story

Thirty-five years on the same stretch of Green Lanes

My dad, Andreas, came to London in 1979 with one suitcase and a way of grilling he never needed to write down. He grew up in Kathikas, a village in the Paphos hills where most families kept vines, and he learned to cook the way everyone there did: outside, over charcoal, with an uncle standing behind him saying it was too close to the coals.

His cousin had a taverna in Camden Town, and Dad worked its grill for twelve years. He met my mum, Maria, at a christening in 1982. Her parents ran a grocer's in Wood Green, and she has never once let him forget that she can make pastry and he cannot.

In June 1991 they took the lease on a narrow shop at 347 Green Lanes and opened Andreas Charcoal Grill. It was a takeaway with six stools, one foukou and a Friday queue that went past the bus stop. A foukou is the long charcoal grill you find in Cypriot back gardens, with a small motor that turns the skewers so nobody has to stand there doing it by hand. Ours came from a metalworker in Limassol, in pieces, in Dad's luggage.

Hüseyin joined in 1998. He grew up in Lapta, on the north coast, and he had been grilling since he was fourteen. He calls sheftalia şeftali, Dad calls it sheftalia, and they have been correcting each other, quite happily, for twenty-eight years.

In 2003 the shoe mender next door retired and we took his unit. Knocking through gave us a dining room, a proper kitchen and a longer foukou, built by a metalworker in Edmonton. The takeaway became a taverna. The upstairs room followed in 2011, mostly because the christening parties kept outgrowing the ground floor.

I grew up on a stool at the end of the counter, doing my homework between orders. Then I spent twelve years cooking in other people's kitchens: an Italian place in Islington, a hotel kitchen in Mayfair, and finally sous chef at a restaurant in Clerkenwell. I learned a lot. I also learned that nobody in any of those kitchens made koupepia like my mum.

In the autumn of 2019 Dad had a heart operation, and I came home to run the kitchen while he recovered. He recovered. I stayed.

Then came March 2020. We closed the dining room and sold meze boxes through the takeaway window: dips, salad, halloumi, sheftalia, Mum's galaktoboureko in foil trays. Plenty of our older regulars were shielding, so my cousin drove boxes round Palmers Green and Winchmore Hill every Sunday afternoon. We learned the names of a great many grandchildren.

On 17 May 2021, the first day indoor tables were allowed again, we reopened as Foukou. Dad chose the name. "The grill was here before any of us," he said. That is not true, but it made Mum laugh, so it stuck. The menu kept the old grills and added the dishes I grew up eating at home: kleftiko sealed in paper, tavas in clay pots, kolokasi when the weather turns.

Some things have not changed. Dad still makes the sheftalia every morning at seven, about four hundred of them on a Saturday. Mum still makes every dessert, and she still will not say how much orange blossom goes into the galaktoboureko. Hüseyin still tells us the coals are ready ten minutes before they are.

Come and eat with us. Bring your grandparents if you have them.

Eleni Kyriakou