Balkan restaurant Mystic Burek announces closure

Second-generation Balkan restaurant Mystic Burek will be closing at the end of the month after a year of trading in London’s Sydenham.

In an honest post on Instagram, founder and chef Spasia Pandora Dinkovski said: “Since day one with this business, I have been fighting against a system that’s just not built for people like me, a system that has little interest in nurturing independents but instead, forcing the food industry into pure consumerism and capitalist ideals, clashing with the values I’ve always stuck to.

“Sure it’s busy but a lot has changed in a year, I’m a different person with different priorities and if I’m not tending to them, then what’s the point?”

Dinkovski, who is of Macedonian-British heritage, started Mystic Burek during the pandemic as a delivery business serving different versions of her grandmother’s layered cheese and egg phyllo pie, which later grew into supper clubs and a bricks-and-mortar site.

Writing in her cookbook Doma, which was published last year, she said: “It might sound corny to say that ‘I found myself through food’, but it’s true that I was lost for a very long time, and cooking for others, in a way that is inherently natural to me, has brought me a stronger sense of self.” 

However, four years in, she believed the project is “going absolutely nowhere” and hinted at “a whole new plan”.  

She added: “On the last weekend of the month we are going out with a proper bang and throwing a party! Rumours are we are bringing out the grill. I am hugely grateful for everyone that has come in and I hope to see you again over the coming weeks.”

Image: Verity Quirk