Janda Diner · Peckham
Our Work in the Community
Small, real ways of taking care of the place that's taken care of Ady.
Invisible rice
Janda is a neighbourhood restaurant, which means the neighbourhood feeds it as much as it feeds the neighbourhood. Ady wanted to give something back, so he visited Peckham Pantry, the local social supermarket run by the Southwark charity Pecan, and asked how Janda could help.
He settled on something that sits quietly on the menu, under sides: Invisible Rice, £3.50. Order it, and nothing arrives at the table. Every penny goes straight to the Pantry instead.
“We're a neighbourhood restaurant. There are people around here who eat our food, and we want to give back to them too.”
Good neighbours, shared table
Once a year, Janda joins the other independent restaurants along Rye Lane for the Peckham Weekender, a tradition started by neighbouring restaurant Mr Bao, where every kitchen creates one special dish, priced at ten pounds, with proceeds going straight to Peckham Pantry. It isn't one large gesture from any single restaurant; it adds up, dish by dish, restaurant by restaurant, into something that matters.
A community four thousand miles away
Community, it turns out, isn't only a matter of geography.
A trapper working with the team at Real Ice – an Arctic restoration and research start-up – tried Ady's food one evening at Janda, and said, half-jokingly, that he wished his own people back home could taste it. A few weeks later, an off-the-cuff remark turned into something concrete. Ady flew to Cambridge Bay, deep in the Canadian Arctic, with a colleague and a suitcase of pandan leaf and lemongrass bought in a Vancouver Chinatown.
At minus sixty degrees, with the cooking oil frozen solid, he built a menu around caribou, muskox and Arctic char, and served it to a community for whom Malaysian flavours were totally new. He's going back in January, this time at the town mayor’s invitation.
Come and eat with us