The SpiceShop

Birgit Erath started with a Portobello market stall in 1995 and built the corner of Blenheim Crescent every serious London cook eventually visits: more than two and a half thousand spices, chillies and blends, many still mixed to her own recipes. Her son Philip runs the London shop now while Birgit works the operation's German end — a family split across two countries, disclosed here, with the flagship exactly where the stall grew up. The blue shopfront opposite the cookbook shop makes Blenheim Crescent the most useful twenty metres in west London cooking; between them they cover theory and practice.