“I didn’t want simply to have a shop and sell things. What I enjoyed most about running the shop over the years was the connection with the customers”
At the North end of Stoke Newington High Street, tucked away among the cafes, charity shops and increasingly expensive supermarkets, you’ll find Rouge. Stopping to look into the display window you’re greeted with an array of beautiful East Asian ceramics and other homeware, perfect for giving as gifts or as a treat for yourself. You go inside, but little do you know you have only scratched the surface.
This was my experience discovering Rouge a couple of years ago when I moved to the area. Venturing inside one day, drawn by a desire for new ramen bowls, I struck up a conversation with Lei, the shop’s owner, who told me about the kitchen and event space she had built below the floor of the shop. In the time since, I have found that everyone involved in community cooking in and around Hackney knows Lei, and that the kitchen below Rouge is a key part of the life of Stoke Newington.
I experienced this first hand when attending one of her regular dumpling making classes held in the space. I’ve written about this experience, and what I enjoyed so much about it (beyond now being able to make dumplings by hand) was Lei’s unpretentious, communal approach to cooking. Unlike other culinary classes I’ve attended, this felt different – more like a family meal than an educational exercise. Exactly, in my opinion, how food should be.
Beyond food workshops, Rouge also hosts a variety of other events – ranging from paid classes to free community activities. To give one example, towards the start of this year I had quickly popped in to buy a present for a friend, and half an hour later I found myself still in the shop learning Chinese paper cutting with a group of other people.
The other day, I sat down with Lei to find out more about her journey, how she’s created this space at Rouge and her broader commitment to both community-building and great food.
Finding wellbeing through food
“A guideline for me is the wellbeing of our minds and bodies through food, learning using our hands – and to be able to come to a space where you can just be absorbed in what you’re doing, what you’re hearing, what you’re tasting.” Lei talks about cooking as a creative exercise, and one that grounds people in the moment by interacting with all the senses. It’s driven not just by the need to eat, but also the desire to connect.
This is something I found most engaging about making dumplings from scratch in the Rouge kitchen – the amount of time needed to chop all the vegetables and roll out the dumpling skins afforded a natural environment for having conversations with other people in the room. Then the activity of hand-folding each dumpling felt more like a craft class than a cooking lesson – think making pottery but with the bonus of it being delicious.
Talking more broadly about her passion for food Lei tells me, “the reason I like food is my upbringing. All my family are foodies, it’s ingrained in me. Chinese food is just so versatile. We lived in the North of China, but my family were from the South – so even though we couldn’t travel they grew up with Southern Chinese food and would cook those dishes and I got exposure to those flavours.”
We talked about how a kitchen can be a place of travel in this way – how you can interact with different cultures by buying the correct ingredients and taking care to cook different cuisines in the right way. This is something I’ve loved about my own journey with cooking more East Asian food in the past few years, from Sichuanese fish-fragrant aubergines to finding the specific vinegar to make beni shoga – one of the main benefits of living in London is the accessibility of ingredients from all over the world and the way you can use them to travel while staying still.
Chatting with Lei, one of the things that comes across most strongly is her commitment and care over cooking food correctly. She tells me how “the ingredients are so important to get the right flavour” and of a couple of times she has had “disasters” when cooking dumplings at other people’s houses only to find they’re lacking key ingredients or have stoves that are incompatible with crucial pieces of cookware (does anyone actually like induction stoves?). She says to me, “I think if people don’t know what a dumpling should really taste like, they’re not that fussed, but in my heart I want them to be just perfect and just the right flavour.”
This is not a prescriptive or exclusionary attitude to culinary perfection, but a reflection of a belief that it’s worth taking the time to get recipes right, as that’s what really brings them to life. To give access to such recipes, Rouge has a small shelf of cookbooks nestled among the ceramics. The collection is small because Rouge only stocks books selected by the staff who work in the shop, who regularly cook communal lunches for each other and share stories and recipes. Through this vetting procedure Lei ensures that all the books stocked by Rouge are worth having, and members of the team are able to point customers in the direction of specific recipes if they ask.
I pop into Rouge every time I’m in Stoke Newington, usually leaving with at least one new cookbook to explore (most recently Uyen Luu’s Quick and Easy Vietnamese).
A space where people can gather and explore
Lei has owned and run Rouge for nearly 20 years. For the first few years the shop predominantly sold pieces of furniture from East Asia, which Lei would source on her travels around China. She describes this as a business model based on “finding beautiful things and bringing them back.” Talking with her about how she sees food, I think this is an attitude that could equally be applied to her culinary activities.
The kitchen at Rouge was installed during the coronavirus pandemic, and it seems a fitting extension to how Lei has always approached the shop. “I didn’t want simply to have a shop and sell things” she says, “what I enjoyed most about running the shop over the years was the connection with the customers, and the conversations I had had with them.” She continues, “what I really wanted to do was to create a space where people can gather and explore.”
The events and explorations at Rouge aren’t all to do with food. In addition to the paper cutting I mentioned before, the shop has hosted yoga classes, gong baths and calligraphy lessons, but Lei says now that they have the kitchen “food is becoming more of a focus.”
To bring different cuisines to life in the kitchen, she runs a range of supper clubs in the space. Speaking about these Lei says, “I worked with people who had ideas for supper clubs. Each one was from a different region or different country. They could be working with a sommelier or with a chef to bring something special, with the profits going to Slow Food UK – so for a good cause and also building community.”
For food-themed events in the shop Lei has collaborated with people involved in community eating in Hackney, such as Jenny Lau (founder of Celestial Peach), and authors such as Uyenn Luu (which is why I bought the cookbook). Looking to the future, Lei says she’d “like to have more authors to come and talk about their food journey, and also some tastings” – opening people up to new culinary experiences.
Overall, as Lei says, “we have a nice kitchen, and people love food.”
All photography used with the permission of Lei Yang.
