It is Friday at noon and Crystal Palace is stifling in the June sunshine. Outside a bakery, a queue stretches for almost half a mile towards Anerley. But that’s nothing here: one customer drove down from Leicester to try it; another couple took a flight in from New York. Welcome to Chatsworth Bakehouse.
In real life, Chatsworth is a diminutive hub of focaccia-based creativity, almost unassuming, but online it is a giant. It operates a weekly changing menu, serving sandwiches between Wednesdays and Fridays, and each Monday, as soon as a new £10 sandwich is announced on Instagram, the bakery sells out in under a minute — more than 150 every day. Competition is fierce: TikTok foodie @overfilteredovereaten set five alarms, took a day off work, delayed her house move and travelled three hours on six trains to grab one.
