Daily Fresh Foods, 1463 London Road, Norbury

This is a blog about the interesting shops around South London, and I wanted to start with Daily Fresh Foods as it's particularly close to my heart. The Daily Fresh Foods in Streatham Hill was a special place - bang opposite the station, it was pretty much the first thing that anyone saw when they arrived back in Streatham Hill. And in a whole number of ways it represented most things that are good about South London - an independent, slightly scrappy shop that sold food from around the world (with a heavy Indian and Pakistani angle, but much wider than that). It was cheap and it was always interesting - without fail you could find something there that you'd not eaten before and wanted to try. It served a huge mix of people, from kids buying sweets after school, to middle aged foodies (I hate that word, but you know what I mean) buying exotic ingredients, to local chefs buying huge sacks of rice.

Then, a couple of years ago, Daily Fresh Foods in Streatham Hill closed suddenly - yet another victim of Network Rail's rent hikes (the shop was on the railway bridge by the station). The building is now, with grim inevitability, an estate agents. It has left a huge hole.

But happily, there is still a Daily Fresh Foods in Norbury, just down the road from Streatham Hill. In many ways Norbury is like what Streatham was 10 years ago - essentially a very diverse and down to earth area, where it's easy and cheap to buy delicious food from a load of small shops that aren't found outside South London

Even more happily, the Norbury Daily Fresh Foods is even better than the Streatham Hill one was. It's bigger, busier, more bustling. The photo above shows their huge display of fruit and veg at the front of the shop, with the halal butcher counter just visible to the right. The cash tills, and the piles of  freshly baked Afghan naan bread are just to the left as you walk in. I always like shops with big fruit and veg displays out front, partly because it looks so inviting, but also shopping for fresh produce is somehow a bit more communal, a bit friendlier, than shopping for anything else - reaching over each other, patiently waiting for someone to finish prodding the fruit etc. It's a good vibe to enter the shop.

The fruit and veg selection at Norbury Daily Fresh foods is a triumph of human achievement.There's a load of staples for cooking South Asian food (fresh curry leaves, fenugreek leaves, bitter gourd); a load of things that I love but hardly see anywhere else (cucamelons, massive orange Colombian passion fruits); and some things that I have no idea at all what they are (the purple and grey tendrils of some cactus?).

I could spend hours in here. It's not a big shop - perhaps a little smaller than a standard Tesco Metro - but you could happily live on just buying all your groceries in just this one shop. Which is even more impressive when you consider that of the 8 or so rows of shelves one is taken up entirely with daal, and another is largely given over to getting deep into the minutiae of chilli sauces (which is to say, basically my subconscious made made manifest in the material world).

And, as I said at the top, you're pretty much guaranteed to come away with something you've never had before, or which you had been looking for ages. On my last trip to Daily Fresh Foods I picked up some shito...

...despite this brand being made in Streatham, it's not always easy to find it in shops round here, so I was delighted to find it. Working as a condiment, a marinade, and an ingredient for stews, it makes anything more delicious. To be honest you could probably just eat it on its own straight from the jar and ascend to new realms of pleasure. Its flavour is deep, dark, and really, properly hot. I always think that very spicy and flavoursome things seem somehow decadent and luxurious, and Liebe brand shito - get the "hot" version, don't fuck about - is right at the far end of that particular spectrum.


I also picked up some shredded betel nuts, largely because because the woman on the cash till didn't know what they were but warned me "I wouldn't put it in food". So I couldn't resist that step into the unknown and picked up a packet for a few quid. It turns out it's a stimulant, to be chewed rather than eaten (so her suspicions were spot - on), and much like tobacco is the subject of much public health worrying. Probably won't be buying it again, but still I learnt something and had a very small adventure.

And what more can you ask for from a shop?