Taste Tibet

19/06/2026

There’s a lot we don’t usually talk about, so many reasons we work as hard as we do. This is one of them.

19/06/2026

This week’s menu is up and we’ll be open again from 5pm tonight 🤩 Come and see us for dine in or take away, hot food or freezer food. We have some fabulous sun spots for outdoor dining - let’s make the most of them☀️

16/06/2026

You’re a great cook, just so that you know. Everyone can cook. It’s just a question of practice and confidence – much like everything else.

When Yeshi first first arrived in the UK, he was surprised at how timid we all were in the kitchen, always apologising for our efforts, often taking whatever short-cuts the supermarkets provided.

Pre-prepared sauces and pastes, microwavable instant mash! That was a stand-out.

Now part of this behaviour is down to our Britishness – we are apt to downplay our efforts and abilities. But there’s something else going on too, and it starts in the baby aisle.

When our kids were little, Yeshi loved the weening phase. He worked hard to mince up the almost unmincable. He did it all by hand, like his parents had done for him.

But everyone else had special contraptions, he noticed, machines that reduced the time involved, special little trays for freezing tiny portions so that the job only had to be done once a week.

And then there were the pouches. When he was brave enough to attend the local baby groups (he was always a rare dad in the room, and certainly the only Tibetan) he found himself blindsided by those brightly-coloured squeezy packets. The “organic” ones.

The supermarkets have got us in a stranglehold. They’ve tapped into our busyness and gone to town with products that help us to skip the foundations, or to avoid cooking altogether. Often, like the baby pouches, they promise something healthy, while delivering something highly processed instead.

The result is a chipping away at our confidence. We’ve stopped enjoying and even believing in our own ability to turn out tasty, nutritious meals.

It’s clever. If they can convince us that we don’t have the time and that they can do it better anyway, so they can keep us in an endless cycle of buying and accumulating.

Think about it: food with a long shelf life is easier for them to keep and stock than fresh produce.

When we wrote the Taste Tibet cookbook, one of our biggest motivations was to show just how easy it is to cook up delicious food from everyday ingredients using straightforward methods that don’t require any machinery or lots of time.

Happily this is the feedback that we receive about the book, that far from being exotic, Tibetan cuisine turns out to be practical and easy for anyone to produce. Wonderful. This is exactly what the experience of food should be.

If you’ve lost your mojo, our cookbook is currently on sale here or come and grab a copy at the restaurant. Our freezer food is also a reliable alternative to less scrupulous supermarket offerings, and a solution to food waste, making it an ethical as well as delicious choice.

We’re open again from this Friday. Our full opening hours are as follows:

Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 21-3/ 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm

This week’s menu is up on the website – check it. Come for dine in, take away and freezer food. Sepen chill oil is now back in stock at the restaurant – enjoy!

Newsletter subscribers enjoy a free chai – hot or iced – on us this week. Have you signed up yet? Click the link in our comments to subscribe to our weekly Substack.

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

Julie and Yeshi

13/06/2026

Restaurants are so much more than places we can rely on for good food and drink. When they close, neighbourhoods lose valuable parts of their support network. Who knew that your local eatery did so much for their community? Who’s going to tell the government? Please sign the petition https://www.vatstheproblem.co.uk

12/06/2026

The restaurant is open this evening through until Sunday night. Come for this lip-smacking hot food menu or for dishes from the freezer. You guys almost cleaned us out of freezer food last week but you’ll be pleased to hear that there’s been a restock! Open from 5pm.

11/06/2026

It took us ages to understand what VAT was and how it works. I’m not embarrassed to admit it as I realise that there’s a lot of other people out there who haven’t got a clue either. So here goes. Hopefully this will help you understand one of the reasons that hospitality is in such a tight spot.

10/06/2026

We are frequent visitors to the Oxford colleges, which have become places of work for us. Never gets boring.

09/06/2026

Just 18 months ago, Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to make Britain the best place in the world for entrepreneurs to “scale up and stay.”

But hikes to business rates and employer’s National Insurance contributions, measures that were introduced alongside, hit small businesses hard.

Hospitality has taken a particular knock. Inflation has led to massive increases in our operating costs, most of which we’re unable to pass on as there are limits to what our customers are able and willing to pay.

If you wonder why Taste Tibet is still catering festivals all these years after opening the restaurant, the truth is that events have become integral to our survival.

Today, few festivals are hugely profitable, but get the gigs right and quick cash can be a life-saver for a small business.

But why must we close the shop while we’re off at Glastonbury? Well, our team is tiny, and far from being able to scale up right now, we’ve actually reduced our headcount over the last year.

Part of this is down to cost. We’ve always been super proud to provide employment opportunities, but we have to consider our staffing more carefully these days.

And there’s another reason we’ve stopped growing our team: recently the government removed chefs from the list of occupations eligible for sponsorship. We’ve made some brilliant hires using this route, but can now no longer recruit from overseas.

In the U.K., three hospitality businesses are closing every day. In this climate, expansion is not an option. Until recently, Yeshi always talked about running multiple Taste Tibets. The dream was to get people talking about his homeland, one momo at a time.

But the key to survival appears to be staying small. Our business remains viable because everyone in the team is willing to spin plates. One day we’re your local neighbourhood restaurant. The next we’re cooking outdoors in a field.

Wherever we pitch up, 20% of what you pay for your meal goes directly to HMRC.

Our industry is actively lobbying government to reduce VAT rates down to 10%. If you’d welcome price easing and share our concern for hospitality as a whole, please sign this petition https://www.vatstheproblem.co.uk. There’s a reason that so many wonderful spots are shutting doors, but it’s not too late to do something for the places still trying to serve you.

A reminder that our June/July opening hours are as follows:

Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 21-3/ 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm

This week’s menu is up on the website – check it. Come for dine in, take away and a restock of your freezer. A heads up that we’re currently out of sepen chill oil – bear with us!

If you haven’t already, sign up to the newsletter - link in comments - so that you can keep track of our movements during the nomadic summer months. Every Postcard From Tibet also contains a discount or freebie.

Looking forward to seeing you soon,

Julie and Yeshi

03/06/2026

Behind the scenes we have a huge, heaving unit full of all our festival gear. I have no idea how our chef finds his way around it, what the system is, or how he manages to remember everything we need. There is no such thing as a list.

03/06/2026