At Oula Café Fitzrovia, a pink-hued room on Mortimer Street, the food arrives as though someone’s grandmother decided London had waited long enough for proper Tunisian cooking. The café was created by French-Tunisian chef Boutheina Ben Salem specifically to celebrate matriarchal culinary traditions, and everything from the womb-like interior to the warmth of the service makes that intention felt the moment you walk in.
Oula occupies the Ibraaz space in central London, according to Hyphen, which has been tracking the growth of Tunisian food culture across British cities. It is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm, with lunch service running from noon to 3pm.
What to order at Oula Café Fitzrovia
Arrive before the lunch rush and you may find Ben Salem behind the counter, willing to make you a brik: a half-moon of golden filo pastry, fried to a crisp, stuffed with tuna, potato, capers and a whole egg, finished with a generous squeeze of lemon. It is the kind of thing that recalibrates your expectations of brunch. The coffee is good; so is the traditional mint tea, poured over pine nuts in the old style.
The wider menu moves across the register of Tunisian home cooking with confidence. Kastrout (a beloved Tunisian street food) takes the form of stuffed baguette sandwiches, the bread sourced from Quince bakery. At the other end of the menu sits drô gourmand, a sorghum porridge dressed with pumpkin seeds, coconut chips and pomegranate: earthy, sweet and quietly filling.
Among the dishes Hyphen highlights from Oula’s menu is lablabi, a hearty chickpea soup traditionally served on cold days, priced at £7. It is the sort of dish that belongs to the colder months, thick and restorative, the kind of thing Tunisian families have eaten through winter for generations. Alongside it sits ojja, eggs scrambled into a rich sauce of tomato, onion and red pepper, spiked with harissa, also £7. Both dishes carry that essential quality of Tunisian home cooking: heat that builds slowly, and flavour that lingers.
The story behind the café
Ben Salem founded Oula as an act of culinary remembrance as much as a restaurant project. The name, the design and the menu all point back to the women who shaped Tunisian food culture across generations, cooks whose techniques and recipes rarely made it into cookbooks or restaurant reviews, but who fed entire communities nonetheless. The womb-like interior is not an accident; it is a deliberate architectural statement about where this food comes from and who made it.
That sensibility reaches even into the smallest details. The capers in the brik. The pine nuts in the tea. The sourcing of bread from a specific bakery. None of it is incidental. Ben Salem has thought carefully about what it means to bring Tunisian cooking to Fitzrovia in a way that respects its origins rather than flattening them for a London audience.
For anyone curious about where to eat in central London beyond the familiar North African canon, Oula is making a persuasive case that Tunisian cuisine deserves its own space on the capital’s table. Time Out has named it among London’s best cafés, and Visit London continues to track the capital’s evolving food scene as new voices like Ben Salem’s reshape it.
Oula Café: 93 Mortimer Street, Fitzrovia, W1W 7SS. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. Lunch served noon to 3pm. Closed Monday and Tuesday.