Perilla

Flavour before ideology

The onion arrives hollowed, dark from the heat, holding its soup like a small piece of service equipment. Ben Marks, Chef at Perilla in Newington Green, works from that kind of decision: a familiar European form, tightened by technique, then returned to appetite. At this corner restaurant, his cooking is shaped by a long kitchen education rather than a single signature pose. He trained through the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts Apprenticeship, then worked in Stockholm, London and Copenhagen before becoming Chef Owner here in 2016. The line runs through pressure and repetition: hotel polish, modern Nordic restraint, the classical discipline of a London pass. Marks has spoken of the food becoming more simple, more confident, more based around flavour and less around ideology. That sentence fits the room. Perilla does not make informality an excuse for loose work. It lets ambition sit close to the diner, in dishes that carry structure without turning ceremonial.

Small plates with a classical memory

The kitchen’s method is modern European in reach, but it often begins with modest ingredients and a classical echo. Panisse becomes nigiri-like, set against salsa verde and raw chickpeas. A hot vichyssoise carries lovage. Cauliflower mushroom carbonara takes a woodland ingredient into the grammar of pasta without needing the pasta to do all the work. Burnt onion soup, cultured cream, seaweed sourdough and whipped brown butter show the same instinct: build depth from charring, fermentation, fat and salt, then stop before the plate feels crowded. The restaurant works between à la carte, tasting menu and small plates, with a menu that changes with the season rather than sitting still as a fixed catalogue. There is a curated wine program beside it, not as theatre, but as part of the same scale of attention. The cooking can move from battering and pureeing to broth, tart, sorbet and doughnut, yet the discipline stays steady. The hand is most visible in the edits.

A corner room with the pass in view

The room gives the food its proper distance. Perilla sits on a corner of Green Lanes, with bright natural light by day and candlelight taking over as the service deepens. Pot plants, terrazzo floors, stripped-back walls and a relaxed counterpoint to the kitchen’s precision keep the place from becoming stiff. It is small enough for the pass to feel near, but not so hushed that the craft turns into display. Conversations stay at table level. Plates cross the room without procession. The restaurant began as a permanent address in November 2016 after pop-ups and residencies, and that earlier mobility still shows in the way dishes are allowed to shift. Nothing feels locked for the sake of being recognised.

The neighbourhood holds the discipline

Perilla’s second chapter has not moved the original away from its first argument. In 2025, the wider team opened another restaurant, yet the Newington Green room still reads as the bench where Marks’s style was fixed into daily practice. The point is not expansion as a claim; it is that the original corner can keep its scale while the method travels. The plate that says it most plainly is burnt onion soup at Perilla.