Omar Shah opens Filipino bakery-pizzeria Bunso in London
Bunso trades laminated Filipino pastries by day for crudo and pizza by night, the latest opening from Belly founder Omar Shah in Kentish Town.
Bunso opens this month at 1A Hawley Road in Kentish Town, turning a former hair and beauty academy into a Filipino bakery by day and a pizzeria by night.
The site is the latest from Omar Shah, who built his Maginhawa Group around Filipino-rooted cooking after opening the bistro Belly. Bunso is his most split-personality venue yet: one counter, two services, two different crowds.
Mornings and afternoons belong to the bakery. The counter runs on laminated pastries and savoury bakes worked through with Filipino flavours, alongside a dedicated coffee programme meant to hold its own against the neighbourhood's existing cafés.
One counter, two services: pastries and coffee by day, pizza and kinilaw once the ovens turn over.
When the ovens switch over in the evening, Bunso becomes a pizzeria. The wider dinner menu adds crudo, kinilaw and pasta alongside the pizzas, a lineup that reads more like a bar-restaurant than a straight pizzeria.
A name built on family
Bunso means “youngest child” in Filipino, a nod to its place as the newest addition to Shah's restaurant family. The branding leans into that idea rather than explaining the cuisine upfront, betting that regulars will come to know the name before they know the menu.
Kentish Town has absorbed a run of small-format openings this year, and Bunso's day-night split is designed to keep the single site working two shifts instead of chasing one long dinner service.
Betting on a bakery counter
Bakery-by-day, restaurant-by-night models have spread through London as operators try to make daytime trade cover rent that dinner alone cannot. Shah's version adds a specific cuisine angle that most of those hybrids skip.
Kinilaw, the Filipino raw-fish dish cured in vinegar and citrus, gives the pizzeria side a hook beyond the pizza itself. London's growing taste for Filipino cooking already runs through desserts such as ube halaya, and Shah has not said whether Bunso's format will expand to other Maginhawa sites if it works in Kentish Town. If the split-shift arithmetic does not work, Kentish Town will have gained a decent bakery for a few months and nothing more.
