The Battle of Comfort Carbs: Senza Fondo vs Breadstall

This issue: London’s carb fever reaches new heights, Tate Britain redefines British Surrealism, Paris turns couture into chocolate, and Ronda proves Spain’s drama extends far beyond flamenco.

Author

Shakira Taylor
November 24, 2025

In partnership with

Hey Culture Clubbies!

In this edition, we’re pitting Senza Fondo, Shoreditch’s bottomless lasagna sensation, against Breadstall, Soho’s slice-slinging New York transplant. Two very different moods. Two temples of temptation. And one city suddenly obsessed with dough, cheese, and everything in between. Then we’ll drift into dream logic at Tate Britain’s Edward Burra & Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism Reimagined, explore Paris’s sweetest spectacle at Salon du Chocolat, and finish cliffside in Ronda, Spain.

In under 10 minutes we’ll cover:

  1. Senza Fondo vs Breadstall: The Battle of Comfort Carbs

  2. Edward Burra & Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism Reimagined

  3. Salon du Chocolat: Paris’s Sweetest Cultural Gathering

  4. Spotlight on Ronda: Spain’s Cliffside Gem

Let’s get started.

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The Battle of Comfort Carbs: Senza Fondo vs Breadstall 

London is living through a carb renaissance.

Forget refinement for a moment and step into warmth, cheese, and unapologetic comfort. At one end of town, in rhythmic, neon-lit Shoreditch, Senza Fondo is dishing out bottomless lasagna with a wink and a wink again. Across town in Soho, Breadstall serves hot slabs of New York-style pizza by the slice, thin but mighty, quick yet indulgent. Both have become institutions almost overnight, each promising escapism through richness and familiarity. The question now lingering over London’s food scene isn’t whether carbs are back, it’s where to get your fix first.

Senza Fondo: the home of bottomless lasagna

Senza Fondo, perched at 1 Rufus Street, looks more like a house party than a restaurant. The interior hums with Shoreditch cool—open kitchen, glowing pizza oven at one end, the faint flicker of TikTok videos replaying on diners’ phones as plates of lasagna sail past. It’s Italian-American comfort food done with British boldness and a splash of chaos. 

The menu reads simple enough: pick your lasagna (traditional beef shin or artichoke), settle in, and prepare for endless refills for around £20. The signature “bottomless lasagna” deal - two cocktails and two glasses of wine for £49 a head - has become a viral talking point. Every few minutes, a fresh square emerges from the kitchen: bubbling béchamel, slow-cooked beef ragù collapsing into its pasta layers. It’s tactile, heavy, and heartwarming. Diners come for the novelty but stay for the vibe: a communal roar of laughter, serve-after-serve indulgence, the satisfying scrape of fork against earthenware.

The vegetarian artichoke version is almost unexpectedly elegant, silky with cream and kissed by parmesan. And if you’re getting started or pacing yourself, there are pizzette and mozzarella sticks, the latter crisply fried and gloriously molten when hit at their peak.

But Senza Fondo isn’t just a gimmick. Its success lies in turning a simple staple into theatre. Plates arrive steaming, service is brisk but joyous, and servers glide between tables echoing the tempo of the music.

Reviewers at Time Out praised its layered density and the deep beef shin ragù; The Standard’s David Ellis called it “perhaps no better night” for the price. The Infatuation admitted the dish can border on “sloppy,” but insisted that the fun outweighs any flaw - a reminder that sometimes the perfect dining experience isn’t polished but communal.

The décor, warm wood, red accents, and an open energy that invites both selfies and seconds, cements Senza Fondo’s reputation as a restaurant to be felt as much as tasted. You’re not really eating; you’re participating in a ritual of abundance.

Senza Fondo is full-service and performative with servers urging “one more round?” while your fork dives again into béchamel and beef.

Breadstall: serving happiness one slice at a time

Breadstall, on the other hand, is a masterclass in immediacy. Having graduated from its Battersea roots to Soho’s Berwick Street (numbers 92–93 if you’re hungry right now), it’s all about New York-style speed meeting London craft.

The gleam of the glass counter, stacks of pizza trays, the constant rotation of staff slicing, sliding, and boxing up portions—it evokes the kinetic hum of a downtown slice shop. Here, dining happens standing, perched, or mid-conversation. The queue is part of the pulse. By the time you reach the front, you know exactly what you want, even if the toppings have rotated since your last visit.

The vodka sauce slice is the standout: sweet, tangy, rich, a blush-colored sauce over a blistered base that curls at the edges. At £4 to £6 a slice, it’s casual luxury with none of the guilt. Dips are given a reverent place in the proceedings—ranch, garlic, and a spicy tomato often running out before closing. Breadstall’s menu changes regularly, but the one constant is quality dough: fermented, chewy, and crisp at once.

The dough is a twice-baked, slow-fermented biga base: light, crisp, with serious “tip integrity” (i.e., the slice doesn’t flop) yet retains a satisfying crust puff reminiscent of Neapolitan edges. On the topping front, expect classics like the Margherita layered with San Marzano tomato and fresh basil, or the Pepperoni with thick slices and just-right heat. Then there’s the cult favourite “New York Style Vodka Sauce” pie with cream and tomato with a cheeky splash of vodka, and a version with candied jalapeños, burrata, and hot honey for when the appetite decides to leap. 

But the real show-stopper? The crust dippers: tubs of garlic mayo, spicy ’nduja mayo and even black-garlic & truffle mayo to drag that last edge of crust through. The Infatuation calls them “what the crust is calling out for.” If you fancy a sweet end to your meal they even offer a chocolate ganache dip for your final bites.

Quarter-slices start around £7, with half and whole 20” pies rounding out the options, making it one of the rare Soho spots where convenience and indulgence march hand-in-hand.

The Verdict

Beyond individual bites, the real story is how they’ve redefined comfort dining post-2020. Both represent a return to food as pleasure without pretense. There’s no scarcity mindset here, no talk of wellness or restraint. Instead, both remind Londoners of communal indulgence with the clink of plates, the scent of cheese, the tactile pleasure of tearing bread or cutting through soft pasta. Senza Fondo gives you the laughter. Breadstall gives you the rhythm. Together they mark a cultural shift from austerity to appetite.

Breadstall will hand you satisfaction in minutes: hot, crispy, and perfectly foldable. In truth, they complete each other’s story. In a city addicted to complexity, they’ve made simple comfort feel revolutionary.

Senza Fondo is how you celebrate; Breadstall is how you survive the next day.

Edward Burra & Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism Reimagined 

Step into a vision where dreams sharpen into focus and the ordinary world begins to dissolve.

Tate Britain’s Edward Burra & Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism Reimagined opens on 13 June and ran until 19 October 2025, and one of the gallery’s most ambitious double acts in years. It is both a reunion and a revelation: the first time in forty years that London audiences can experience so many of Edward Burra’s electrifying watercolours, and simultaneously the most extensive retrospective ever devoted to the enigmatic Ithell Colquhoun. Together, they invite visitors to look at British Surrealism not as a minor tributary of European art, but as an art form alive with defiance, mysticism, and a kind of humour that cuts like glass.

Burra’s rooms glow with heat and irony. Over eighty works chart the restless imagination of a man who found beauty and satire among the cabarets, shipyards, and city streets of the 1920s and beyond. His vibrant watercolours hum with the energy of queer urban life but also expose its fragility. Figures ripple across bar counters and dance floors, caught between joy and menace. Later landscapes turn macabre, charged by the shadow of war and illness. Burra’s approach to paper makes it feel alive; each stroke of gouache and ink stretches the medium’s possibilities. For visitors, the rarity is not only scale but intimacy. Many of these pieces have been hidden in private collections for decades, now gathered for what the Tate Britain calls a once-in-a-generation reunion of colour and satire. 

Colquhoun’s exhibition unfolds like a separate, parallel world. More than 140 pieces trace the artist’s eccentric and powerful trajectory from her earliest Surrealist experiments to her later, deeply esoteric works. Known equally as a painter, writer, and occult thinker, Colquhoun moved outside any easy definition. Here, visitors can follow her balancing act between artistic precision and mystical excess. One highlight is a dedicated room for her Tarot deck, a suite of designs that merges alchemy, ecology, and psychology into a single visual spell. The result is a portrait of imagination guided by both scholarship and trance.

Tate Britain has taken care to prevent the two artists from collapsing into one narrative. Each has a self-contained exhibition, connected by method rather than metaphor. Both, however, share an extraordinary command of paper and pigment, a theme that curators stress as the exhibition’s heart. The delicacy of Burra’s washes and Colquhoun’s tinted geometries remind visitors of how the smallest medium can carry the largest ideas. As one industry feature described it, their work collectively redefines the expressive power of watercolour and collage.

Critics have greeted the pairing with delighted surprise. Artlyst called it “two radical visions for the price of one ticket,” and early visitors describe the show as a study in joy, difference, and resilience. The timing feels right: after years of reappraising Surrealism through a broader global lens, these British artists finally stand on their own ground. It is also a chance to reconsider how Surrealism was never just an escape from reality but a fierce encounter with it.

Edward Burra & Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism Reimagined offers an experience that feels both scholarly and sensuous. A journey of contrast: smoky cityscapes and lunar temples, queer laughter and silent meditation, pigment and paper.

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Salon du Chocolat: Paris’s Sweetest Cultural Gathering

Every autumn, Paris melts a little. The city that already breathes pâtisserie and perfume becomes entirely devoted to cacao during the Salon du Chocolat. In 2025, the festival celebrates its 30th anniversary at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, transforming five days, from October 29 to November 2, into a feast of taste, scent, and spectacle. It is not simply a trade show but a ritual of indulgence that stitches together art, craftsmanship, and the pleasure of sharing something universally adored.

Since its first edition, the Salon has turned chocolate into a cultural language. Over 500 exhibitors from sixty countries arrived with rare single-origin bars, ornate pralines, and majestic sculptures that look too perfect to taste. Visitors wandered through aisles lined with cocoa pods and crystal bonbons, moving from the Amazon to Madagascar, from Japanese matcha fillings to Venezuelan truffles, all without leaving the vast halls of Porte de Versailles. The essence was celebration and discovery, proving that chocolate is both a craft and a conversation across continents.

The unwritten secret of the Salon is that it is as visual as it is edible. The legendary fashion show returns each evening with dresses made entirely from chocolate, a collaboration between designers and chocolatiers who engineer couture that must endure heat, light, and applause.

The 2025 edition introduced a festive musical performance alongside these edible ensembles, giving the runway an almost theatrical pulse. Look closer and you will notice the details: molded cocoa-paste necklaces that shimmer like bronze, satin ribbons lined with dark couverture, and models carefully adjusting to the scent cloud that follows their every step.

Beyond the catwalk, the festival hums with learning and play. Masterclasses led by world-renowned pastry chefs invite guests of all ages to whip ganache, temper chocolate, and decorate desserts inspired by palace pâtisseries. Children are ushered into cacao-themed games and workshops that gently explain how beans become bars, while adults linger in tasting zones to compare flavor notes shaped by soil, fermentation, and roasting. These intimate moments convert visitors into participants.

The global reach of the event is what makes it more than a local tradition. Producers, artisans, and innovators from every continent gathered to exchange insight and build networks rooted in taste but driven by ethics. Panels and talks examine sustainable and fair cocoa sourcing, reinforcing the idea that true indulgence now includes responsibility. This moment feels especially pertinent on the 30th anniversary: a reminder that celebration can coexist with awareness.

For those eager for early immersion, the opening night on October 28 offered exclusive tastings and behind-the-scenes access to chocolate couture in progress. It was a quieter experience before the crowds gathered, where one can smell the first melted batches and glimpse artisans polishing molds under warm lights.

Ultimately, the Salon du Chocolat remains Paris’s most delicious mirror. It reflects a city that loves to transform the ordinary into art and the ephemeral into memory. Whether you come for the runway or the pralines, the true luxury lies in witnessing creativity sweetened by community.

Spotlight on Ronda, Spain

  1. Eat

    Begin your Andalusian adventure at Tragatá, where tradition gets a modern twist. Michelin-starred chef‑crafted tapas like oxtail croquettes and tuna tartare turn the usual bar bites into pure art.

Tragata

  1. Explore

    The heart of Ronda beats strongest at Puente Nuevo and El Tajo Gorge. Standing 120 meters above the chasm, the stone bridge connects two halves of the city and centuries of history. Time your visit for late afternoon, when sunlight spills into the ravine and the Sierra de Grazalema mountains burn gold.

    Ronda

  2. Unwind

    Seek quiet away from the crowds at Jardines de Cuenca. These terraced gardens hug the edge of El Tajo, leading you through cactus-dotted paths and small stone lookouts that frame the Puente Nuevo from new angles.

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