A wobbly start, but there's time for Belly to shape up

London is a city of little villages? Territories seems more on the mark.

- DAVID ELLIS

Folklore says you once could divvy up the streets by the families that ran them — the Krays, Richardsons, Adams. But today’s gangsters have gone to ground and so now the most visible kingdoms are ruled by restaurateurs. There’s Chris D’Sylva in Notting Hill, Samyukta Nair in Mayfair, Richard Caring on Berkeley Square. And then there’s Omar Shah, who seems to have quietly picked up the rights to half of Kentish Town Road. Not the glamour leagues, then, but an empire's an empire.

Shah's background is a gloriously broad one: Filipino, Bangladeshi, Christian, Muslim. He grew up among the noise and clutter of Church Street Market, then known as Little Beirut, but also in his father’s restaurant Bintang, which at the time served food from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Few restaurateurs can have inhaled such a breadth of influence.