Brooksby's Walk, Chatsworth Road, Clapton / Homerton

Just when I thought new openings were getting a bit derivative over in Clapton, I got a very pleasant surprise. The public toilets on Brooksby's Walk, previously home to the social enterprise Nana, got taken on by a crew of bright young things who really know their onions, so to speak.

The art deco public toilets were converted two years ago to provide a bar/café in the original men's loos (urinals in tact), opening the original women's side as unisex public toilets for all the hours the premises is open. It benefits from a stunning roof terrace which catches the sun pretty much all day long. And for the summer - and hopefully beyond (subject to planning permission) - it's open as a restaurant and cocktail bar, with Giorgio Ravelli (ex of Upstairs at the Ten Bells and the Ledbury) in the kitchen, Jarrod Cooke (also ex of Upstairs at the Ten Bells) on front of house, and Jimmy McMahon, an esteemed mixologist, on the cocktails. The whole operation has a pally, family vibe - helped by the fact that the team are all chums, and they're bringing other chums in to help with the odd waiting and cheffing shift.



The food menu is seasonal Northern Italian - Ravelli himself is Swiss Italian - and changes up regularly with a few regular dishes, such as their parmesan pannacotta with broad beans and pea purée. This was an instant highlight - a light, moussey, creamy parmesan custard, which mixes gorgeously with the lush green, the delicate flavours of marjoram and slightly acidic slivers of nectarine.



Nectarine appears again, chargrilled and topped with shavings of princess alicia cheese (a mountain cheese not dissimilar to comté) and a rich balsamic dressing.



Beer battered samphire is generously portioned for its £4.50 price tag, and is almost like a marshy bhaji. We break bits off with our hands and eat it animal style. Every last fleck of sea salt and oil is consumed, fingers out towards the end. It's a theme with the meal.



A unanimous highlight of the meal is the crispy squid. This is among the best squid I've had: fresh, crisp, flavoursome, generous. It's topped with tangy sumac, but it's all about the Kentish tomato salad it sits atop. The tomatoes are lightly macerated so their juice forms a liquor that's fragranced with elderberry capers, lovage, celery, finely diced red onion and a twist of vinegar. It's like the most luxe bloody mary you've had. My friend shamelessly necks the bowl of liquor back once we've done our best.



Pan fried plaice is another highlight. We gush as we cut into the fish with its white, meaty, flesh perfectly intact under a golden crisp crumb. But gushing reaches fever pitch as we spoon up the aubergine caviar that's cut with sweet sultanas and perfectly toasted earthy pine nuts, and served with a Cos-like perfect circle of mustardy-capery agrodolce purée. Again, not a trace remains on the plate.



The thought of veal tartare scares my friends, so we don't order it. But a spare portion from the kitchen winds its way to our table. They savour every mouthful, with its flecks of dried mackerel skin, pickled girolles and parmesan for umami kick.



We literally eat everything on the savoury menu (there's sourdough bread with peppery, fruity olive oil too) and we end with swaledale lamb leg, baby beetroot and sea purslane. Maybe we're overwhelmed by all the flavours of previous courses, but we end up finding this dish a bit underwhelming. The lamb is perfectly pink, with a crisp, almost bacon-like skin (lamb bacon, there's a business idea), but it's a bit tough to cut with our normal knives. The beets are gorgeously earthy, and the sea purslane subtle. It's not a bad dish, but we prefer everything else.



An understated dessert of ricotta beignets, strawberries, marsala reduction and cream hits all the right notes and is a refreshing end to the meal. On a separate trip, I devour plates of brilliant cheese with a chum over wine and cocktails. Taleggio, gouda, a soft unpasturised cheese called Tentation and an ash rolled goats cheese served with complementary jams are utterly delicious.



Oh boy, I haven't even mentioned the drinks. Cocktails are great - very summery. We enjoy their Number One (aperolly aperativo) and Number Two (a cool, almost punch-like infused 'old fashioned' digestivo). The wine list is impressive, well-sourced and well-priced. Over two visits I have all the whites by the (large) glass - the stand outs being a zingy, aromatic Grillo from Puglia and a young, deep straw coloured Monteforche Veneto Cassiara. I need to get a hold of that wine...perfect, just perfect.

So, an epic meal - we are there for 3.5 hours. It's one of the best meals I've had in a long time, and up there with Verden and Shane's as the best restaurants in Greater Clapton. As the bill came I was pleasantly surprised at the cost of our indulgence (£24 inc tip for my non boozing friend, £38 inc tip for those of us who had wine and cocktails), and sad - sad that this brilliant restaurant and bar might only be here for a few more months. A planning application will shortly be going in for this brilliant, less weather-dependent design. I will certainly be registering my support for it - this venture is too good to lose.

Reservations recommended, and it's best to call their mobile: 07555 229870.

The Adam and Eve pub, Homerton High Street

It's easy to overstate how yuppified Clapton and Homerton have become. All you have to do is take a trip down to Angel or Clerkenwell, or even hang around Dalston Junction, and you can see how easy they are for people with little intrigue or wanderlust to discover. It makes me feel at ease about the pace of change in my own neighbourhood, because I know that those most boring professional types who get freaked out looking for Tonkotsu in Haggerston are going to get freaked out on Lower Clapton Road or Homerton High Street, delaying the Borings for a few more years.

Homerton High Street is legitimately hard to love: the thick traffic and crumby crossings make it seem impenetrable; a place nobody wants to spend too long giving it a transient feel. But it's home to a couple of great pubs - the Plough (which does superb Americana-tinged bar food and excellent Sunday roasts, great cocktails and enviable selection of craft beers and ciders on tap), and the Adam and Eve, which is today's subject.

The Adam and Eve is an Edwardian pub, grand with double height ceilings, multiple seating areas, stained glass. It got redid this summer after being taken over by the Field Day crew who own the Shacklewell Arms over in Dalston. There was some nervousness as details emerged - one of the last ungentrified pubs in the area was going to be selling lobsters! A 50% off fortnight saw the place rammed, and I steered clear, as people griped on twitter about £10 lobsters not being available. Best to wait until a new opening settles into its form.

I've been a number of times since, and the Adam and Eve has become one of my favourite pubs in the area.It feels less poncey than some of those up Lower Clapton Road. It attracts a genuinely broad clientèle - on a recent Saturday night there were fashion kids, older couples having a quiet drink, multi-generation Hackney families of wearing their finest garms, old men nursing pints while watching the darts, birthdays, after work doctors and nurses from the Homerton Hospital.

You get the picture. They've made it work for everyone who like going to pubs. And they've also managed to do high quality gastropub food and make it unpretentious and accessible. The food at the The A&E is provided by The Cornwall Project, which is a partnership between producers and fishermen in Cornwall and chefs up in London. This involves bringing beef, mutton, fish and gorgeous heirloom organic veg up from Cornwall, and cooking much of it over a lovely smoky grill.

Sometimes mid week you'll find a shorter menu: burgers, fish and chips, and their regular sides and puddings. Simple is good, when the ingredients are good and well put together. The burger is hefty, proper chuck mince, and full of flavour. Frozen pub burger this ain't; nor is it of the dirty variety. It comes with Cornish yarg cheese, a mulling spice flavoured chutney, cured jowl in the place of bacon - a gamier spin on bacon, little bits of cured beetroot. Sounds fancy, and I'm sure it changes seasonally, but there's no pretension or purple prose, just neat combinations of well sourced ingredients.



On nights with a fuller menu, you'll often find fresh fish, aged mutton, perhaps rib eye or shepherd's pie to share. There's no standard menu, all chalkboard specials on the night, which are sometimes posted on social media. One night I had mutton chop on pearl barley and cracked wheat - the mutton was full of flavour, smoky from the grill and nicely pink inside. Served with a smear of broccoli purée, and some heritage carrots, the dish was an uncomplicated set of flavours that spoke for themselves.



We enjoyed a chicken liver parfait from the daily special's board - served with eggy, sweet brioche, a great big knob of salty butter and a complex, rich persimmon jam, this is *exactly* what I imagine Henry VIII was eating as his gout set in.



But when the more interesting dishes don't seem to be on, their regular sides and snacks will keep you satisfied, You would be foolish not to try their award-winning scotch egg - an oaty crumb on the outside, a soft lightly herby deeply piggy meat layer and a perfectly softly yolked egg inside. Served in a little pool of brown sauce, it's worthy of its prize, and worthy of it's £4.50 price tag.



I also loved their coleslaw - the crisp vegetables have a gorgeous smoky taste from grilling, the dressing is light and dotted with crispy little capers. Just beautiful; I sometimes dream of it, and it's got my googling home-smoking equipment for the garden. Their chips are good - chunky and perfectly fluffy on the inside.



The Adam and Eve is not perfect: while the front rooms with the grand ceilings and stained glass carry a convivial atmosphere, the back room feels a bit unloved and dank. On one visit, bits of food and dirty napkins littered the carpet around a number of tables that had been vacant for some time. You might be disappointed to find only the clipped pub menu available, meaning less choice, even if everything you order is tasty. And on one Saturday we tried ordering their signature scotch egg at 7.30 to find that they'd all been sold.

But when you get a good table and get the full menu, you're in for the best pub food for some miles, and - despite an edible garden, a 'home brew depot' pop-up and charcuterie-making operation on site ticking all the hipster boxes - it doesn't reek of exclusive pretension when you're in there. Which is just what you want in a pub.

Well Street Kitchen, Well Street E9, Hackney

It's amazing how areas so close to each other can have such different feels. Lower Clapton, a purposefully planned and laid out neighbourhood, has two big long shopping streets, and neat grids of well-kept Victorian terraces running off them. The area feels orderly and balanced.

A few hundred metres south and you get to Homerton, bounded and intersected by busy roads, largely re-built with estates from different decades following heavy shelling in the second world war, on top of a street plan that started as a series of ancient lanes. Homerton hasn't seen quite the breakneck 'yummification' that Clapton (North), Hackney Wick (East), Victoria Park Village (South) and London Fields (West) have had in recent years - perhaps helped/hindered (depending on your viewpoint) by its less immediate beauty.

Right in the middle of E9 is Well Street, an ancient market street, that's got pretty much everything you could want: an excellent (cheap) fruit and veg shop, kebabs, curries, jerk chicken, laundrette, a brilliant old school (not gentrified) butcher where I buy much of my meat, a big Mediterranean supermarket, old school charity shops and a Tesco Metro (this is where the founder of Tesco opened their first store). By virtue of the surrounding gyratory of rat-running one way streets, Well Street feels like an island oasis where folk can just get on with their business.

More recently a few new businesses have opened on the street. The Gun pub recently re-opened with a minimal facelift and a major overhaul on the drinks list. It's pretty much the perfect pub - the size of a generous London living room, a saloon vibe, with good seats at the bar, and all simple and original fixtures and features but for a Roald Dahl referencing neon sign reading "secret plans and clever tricks".

The other new business of note is Well Street Kitchen, which I visited last week. It's in the ground floor of a cute terraced cottage, and has a nice mini deli at the front, and running through to the back are tightly backed tables like in an old caff, where you can get breakfast, brunch and lunch through the week and over the weekend.



(image borrowed from Well Street Kitchen)

The menu is excellent - going a notch above the standard brunch fare: there's an antipodean flourish, with lots of avocado, chorizo, slow roast tomatoes, feta, as well as compose-your-own cooked breakfasts, artful granolas. There is also a changing menu of specials, demonstrating their commitment to making brunch awesome.

I had avocado and herbed feta on seeded toast with two poached eggs and slow roast tomatoes. It was epic. The seeded toast was better than sourdough with the flavours, with the seeds adding a nice earthiness, feta and avocado are natural bed fellows, and the tomatoes added something rich and sweet.



I also got to try a bit of one of their specials: a sticky, thick gammon steak, modernised with a pineapple salsa, and served with fried egg, topped with watercress, and with a generous portion of perfectly seasoned and textured thick cut fries.



The virgin mary packed a proper punch - very smoky, paprika flavours and a strong chilli hit. A small selection of local craft beers were also on sale, and of course I could have had a proper bloody mary with booze had I wanted.




Well Street Kitchen joins my Hackney brunch map, and on the esteemed but short list of places to get a proper fancy brunch with proper drinks and stuff. While the offer is pretty brunch, lunch and coffee/cake focused for now, they're starting to do the odd supper club or pop up in the evening - and the menus look interesting and the prices fair.

The place was rammed the Saturday morning we were there, and it will be interesting to see if any other new businesses join Well Street Kitchen and The Gun in opening on Well Street. Keep it slow guys, Well Street works nicely as it is.