Tottenham's best restaurants N17 N15

I've spent the last month living in Tottenham, cat-sitting for friends while my flat is a building site. It's been a great opportunity to get in tune with a part of North East London that's often over-looked for its foodie offerings.

At the start of the year I predicted that the foodie scenes in places like Tottenham, Leyton and Forest Gate would hotten up as more people came looking for somewhere reasonably affordable to live. Already small producers are basing themselves in Tottenham - and there's a festival on 3 May showcasing some of their produce.

It turns out that Tottenham has a lot of interesting options already. That's not surprising, considering it's quite possibly the most diverse place in the country, home to people from all over the world who've come to London in search of work and found Tottenham a welcoming, well-connected place, with affordable accommodation.

It's also a pretty huge area, which has quite a few different 'centres' with different identities. In the south there are two separate light industrial area with warehouses and studios that have vibes not dissimilar to Hackney Wick a decade ago, the area around Seven Sisters has a Latin American market, a road of predominantly West African shops and take-aways; Bruce Grove to the north feels more like a high street with chains and small shops each specialising in food from a different country.

Gentrification seems likely. With more streets of Victorian housing than you can imagine, and it still being possible (just) to snap up a terraced house for less than £500,000, people priced out of Hackney and Harringay and even Walthamstow are deciding to settle here. There are also huge regeneration plans for White Hart Lane and Tottenham Hale, where large numbers of new flats will be built, along with lots of shops, restaurants and leisure facilities. Its future could well be a mix of more organic hipster-led change, and big shiny corporate top-down regeneration.

For now there is much to love and try.


Cafe Marina
A small Portuguese cafe-deli-offlicense at 159 Lordship Road N17, just near Bruce Castle Park. I'm half Portuguese and know how the staples are supposed to taste. Everything here is as you'd get in Portugal. Pick up savoury goodies like rissois (crumbed pastries with prawn or beef fillings) or a salt cod croquette. Order a delicious bifana sandwhich, where the thin cut beef is dripping in a moreish paprika butter in soft white bread.



The pasties de nata were good, and there's decent deli selection of cured meats, olive oils, pulses, grains and bacalhao. The selection of wines and spirits is also impressive and fairly priced. We picked up a really decent bottle of red wine from Alentejo for £10, but most options are £6 - £8.



Also worth trying Bom Pecado on West Green Road - a similar set up, but with lots more sweet treats baked in house. Bom Pecado also has a bakery in Leyton, where you'll get pasteis de nata for less than half their hipster price. And fresher too.

Craving Coffee
The first – and possibly only - sign of hipsterfication in Tottenham is Craving Coffee, located on a light industrial site between Tottenham Hale and Markouse Park. It's a bright open space, with a warehousey DIY  interior. The coffee is first rate – expertly brewed espresso based coffees using Climpson & Sons beans, tasty little cakes and loafs bakes locally (absolutely loved the salted caramel brownies).



Brunch is served all day over the weekend, and it's a cut above – with chorizo and potato hash, top quality bacon with rocket and avocado in a bap, and a decent muesli too.





It's open at least a couple of evenings a month for special events – including pop up restaurants and film
nights.


Diyabakir
Ok, so it's not really Tottenham, but it's just a few minutes from where the N15 postcode starts. The middle part of Green Lanes where it hits Harringay is The Place for The Best kebabs in London. I say this as an ex-Dalstonite. There are many options to navigate – from the glossy Antepliler (which has now expanded to Upper Street) to its big rival Gökyüzü, and many others inbetween. My favourite is Diyarbakir, a totally halal, no booze joint, which is heaving on the Sunday evening we visit. Families and groups of friends from more backgrounds than you can imagine are hear, tucking into big heaped plates of grilled meat, generous mezze portions and delicious pide.



We eat so much, take back tonnes, and share two massive rose-tinged rice puddings between four and the bill comes to less than £15 per person. Complimentary teas seal the deal: this is the best kebab I've had in London.


San Marco
San Marco is a proper neighbourhood Italian. It's been on its prominent corner site on Bruce Grove for almost 45 years, and is brimming with locals most nights. It's a classic Italian menu of pizzas, pastas and secondi dishes, a simple selection of starters, desserts and some specials. Prices are very reasonable, with most mains and pizzas below £8. We had grilled, dressed sardines to start, and shared two pizzas baked as a half metre of pizza (same surface area as two 12" wheels) - half topped with smoked cheese and bacon (ohhh yeah), and half as capricciosa, which had really nice ham and artichokes on it along with the olives and mushroom.



We had a little space for pudding, which was more than filled by a special of banoffee pie - retro classic, and perfectly made.




Restaurant Cornelius
Cornelius is a large Romanian restaurant on an island in the River Lea, just east of Tottenham Hale. Romanian cuisine has some similarities with Turkish, Greek and Hungarian cuisines. Expect judicious use of paprika, stuffed cabbage leaves, and lots of meat.





The food is not delicate or dainty, and the cured meat certainly ain't hand-reared, hand-cured and fed a diet of organic acorns. But the hearty food is homely and authentic and goes great with the Romanian beers and wines. Cornelius is best enjoyed as a window into a culture – enjoy the loud Romanian dancey pop music, the singer crooning over some of the tracks, and multi-generational family parties having a dance over a big celebration.

Others...
A month isn't long enough to get through Tottenham's eating options. I still intend to try some of the canteen-style Latin American caffs down in the Pueblito Paisa market. There's Kata - a pub serving Japanese food on West Green Road, a tapas restaurant on the High Road, and the Beehive pub just off the High Road - a CAMRA winning pub with a barbecue menu. and once you start talking Green Lanes and Wood Green, you have so many more kebab joints to try, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek restaurants. Wood Green even has a bistro now. Coming in September to Tottenham is a "healthy" fried chicken restaurant, which will cross-subsidise meals for school kids from the takings of their evening sales. Back the Kickstarter to make it happen. There's also Chestnuts Market in South Tottenham, which runs 11 - 3 every Sunday, and has a good range of street food and producer stalls.

Bad Egg, City Point, Moorgate

The City of London is a bit of a dead spot for decent eating, especially if you do not have a big corporate expense account. Bad Egg, situated in the semi-mall in the sanitised bowels of City Point, is a bit of an anomaly. With its stripped back industrial look and neon signage, it would be more at home in Soho or Dalston. But it's here, surrounded by Wagamamas and Pitcher and Pianos for the undiscerning City crowd.

Considering the buzz about it, thanks to its delicious sounding menu and the fact that it's owned by the Smokehouse's Neil Rankin, it's surprisingly not heaving on the payday Friday evening we visit. That said, it's only been open a month, it's a freezing cold January night, and they've only just started taking bookings in the evening. That's a good move - I imagine punters prefer the certainty of a table if they're heading to a neighbourhood with few other decent options.

Bad Egg is well worth the trip. It's a fancy, innovative take on the short order diner, with a menu of American, Mexican and Asian flavoured dishes. It's quite simple: there are eggs, burgers, ribs, fries, tacos and side salads, but every dish is a couple of levels above what you'd expect.

The ribs were incredible. The meat was slow cooked and full of deep flavours, then deep fried to give it a crunchy coated bite. One big rib is your portion, and there was lots of meat and not much bone. I ordered the buffalo rib, with a spicy peppery sauce and a blue cheese dip. A classic combination and well done. My friend had the Korean rib which was smothered in a sticky soy, ginger and gochujang sauce.





Korean flavour make a good few appearances on the menu. We order pulled pork and kimchi fries, which have big pulls of moist, smoky, pungent pork, coated in a kimchi dressing rather than discernible bits of kimchi. Very nice.



The selection of side salads was an impressive counter-balance to the salty, meaty dude food. A Korean slaw was a spicy, zingy kimchi-led salad, with a nice combination of textures thanks to the slimy kimchi and crispy cabbage. A kale and shiitake mushroom salad was our highlight of the plate (any 3 salads for £10), it came in a sweet gingery dressing and topped with toasted hazelnuts.



Neil Rankin has been keen to quash talk among pundits that this is some gimmicky egg themed restaurant. I've got this far without mentioning them, but the eggs are great and they make some stunning appearances in the dishes. The Bad Oeuf burger is a thick medium rare beef patty in a brioche bun, mustard and pickles. But a soft egg yolk and a cheese fondue on top of the patty elevate this beyond your wildest dreams. I'd become a bit jaded with gourmet burgers, but this was something special.



The nduja cheese and fried egg fries are a spin on dirty or chilli cheese fries. The yolk was deep orange and runny, and when chopped up and folded into the molten cheese was something special. The cheese was styled like that plastic Kraft cheese, but I suspect the chefs made it themselves from a carefully chosen combination of real cheeses. My only disappointment of the meal was that the nduja - a spicy, spreadable sausage from Calabria - was not more prominent. I love its strong flavour, but I didn't feel there was enough of it in the dish to really taste its unique fiery punch, especially against the strong flavours in other dishes.



On the Mexican side, my friend's chilaquiles - corn tacos loaded with a fried egg and generous quantities of, salsa, guacamole and goat curd, which was a mild offset to spicy peppers. Another friend's "chicken fried" fish tacos were tasty, but more a snack than a main dish.



Cocktails combine top quality spirits and offbeat mixers and result in surprising concoctions. My Argy Bhaji combined curried apricots, ginger beer and Kamms & Sons liqueur. The gin cocktail combined clementine and sage, and the fantastically titled Misplaced American Arrogance arrogantly mixed Illegal Mezcal and smoky liqueurs for an out of this world taste.

Bad Egg didn't plan on doing desserts, but a waiter said they were working on a dessert menu now. Wise, I think, as a salty, meaty gorging is neatly followed by a sweet kick to power you home, and a lack of decent options in the area means you will need to travel a couple of miles for something half decent. We enjoyed their dulce de leche and peanut butter milkshakes. One between two is certainly enough.

Weekend brunches start in mid February, and it will be worth making the trip. We loved pretty much everything about Bad Egg, and I'll be back to try more from the menu. Now that you can book in the evenings, I suspect more people will venture over for a good filling. We ate well and had a couple of drink each, and it came to £31 a head including tip, which seemed a fair price for the quality, quantity and location.

Hash E8, Dalston Lane, Hackney

The brunch backlash has started. The weekend-only in-between meal been singled out as a defining feature of the much-derided urban creative class' self-indulgence, and of the international sameness of the gentrification aesthetic. Brunchers are pulled apart for queuing for tables, drinking bottomless mimosas and caring too much about where's hot and not.

It may not be a real backlash, though; rather, some clickbait from the good folk at the Grauniad to get those much-derided (but desirable for the advertisers!) urban creatives sharing the link all over social media. Because what's not to love about - let's be real - eggs for a late breakfast at the weekend. If you've worked your socks off all week, barely having time to wolf down a piece of toast before going to work each day, why not enjoy the most important meal of the day, slowly, with friends, when you get to the weekend?

Hackney, as I've document, is in the midst of a brunch revolution. There are now so many places to get your fill of eggs at the weekend, that it's very rare to have to wait for a table. There are now high end options, Antipodean twists, classic greasy spoons, Med-influences. But nowhere has really, really specialised in only doing that classic eggy, bacony thing well...until now. 

Hash E8 opened a couple of weeks ago halfway between Dalston and Clapton on Dalston Lane. It's an all day cafe - a 'short order' cafe they say, which is American English for a short menu of diner-style food that can be cooked up quickly, to order. 

So far the the short order menu focuses on all things piggy and breakfasty. These guys source all their pig from a farm in Yorkshire, and you'll find that pig making its way into bacon, sausage, sausage patties, sausages, bacon jam and their signaturee slice of confit pork belly, which appears in many of the dishes and is available on the side. It's a much richer and more punchy option than your standard bacon.

I've been a couple of times already - it's that good - and made my way through some signature dishes and specials.

The Piggy Muffin is their spin on the McDonald's breakfast classic. It's epic: between the two muffin halves you'll find a homemade hash brown (more on that in a minute), confit belly slice, crisp bacon, a slice of regulation processed cheese, a mini omelette (one egg, whipped and fried) and their own bacon jam. It comes with a side of their deeply flavoured chutney and is held together with a skewer, which my piggy friend abandoned as he squeezed the whole thing together to eat as a burger. Bravo, Alistair.



Another signature is their Belly Benedict, which is your classic poached eggs on top of their confit belly, spinach, topped with a silky hollandaise and then some flakes of their umami dust (bento and black sesame, I think). An American short order influence comes in the shape of their home fries, gorgeously crisp and flavoursome. 

On my second visit the special was a Hash Benedict, which was the aforementioned egg combo but on top of a whopping round hash cake. It tasted German style, like reibekuchen, with slithers of potato and a decent amount of sweet onion to give it full flavour. I added confit belly to mine, because it's too good not to have, and it came with a lightly pickled beetroot and cucumber salad, continuing the Mitteleuropaeisch theme.



We went all out gluttony, and chased our sizeable savoury brunch with their sweet special: a French toast sandwich of peanut butter, Nutella and banana. My arteries may not have thanked me for it, but it was worth the extra clogging. Hash E8 brings out the piggy side of me, and I thought I may as well go the whole hog.



They keep it diner style on the drinks. No pretending that a kale and flaxseed smoothie will save your soul here: just orange juice (from concentrate), filter coffee (by the Clapton based Roasting Shed) and cups of tea. For breakfast booze fans, there is a small selection of craft beer and a Bloody Mary. 

There are plans to open in the evenings too, but the owners say they are mastering the daytime service first. Based on my two early visits, I'd say they've mastered it already: friendly, efficient service, fair prices for the size and quality, and already doing a very steady trade. I know that Hash E8 is going to be a regular haunt, and I'm already dreaming of my next slice of confit pork belly.

Hackney brunch map

When I moved back from Berlin eight years ago, brunching wasn't such a big deal in London. There were pockets of it - a bit of independent cafe culture in Swains Lane in Highgate, Stoke Newington Church Street  - here and there. Maybe they did poached eggs, maybe it was just a fry up.

Fast forward to 2014, and I'm now slap-bang in the middle of the brunching capital of London. A colleague recently asked for brunch tips for Hackney - as I jotted them down into an email I realised we have something of a brunching revolution happening on our doorstep. I decided to start mapping out my favourite brunch spots in the hope that people searching for good brunch options will see what there is out there.

View Top Hackney brunches in a larger map

Since I started this map, the brunch offering has expanded more. Clapton, where I live, and nearby Hackney Central, seem to have seen some of the better options opening. Rita's, Raw Duck, Well Street Kitchen and Verden E5 all do a particularly classy brunch.

If there's anything you think I'm missing, do just leave a comment and I'll check it out and add it.

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.

Aizle, Salt Cafe Morningside, Ting Thai Caravan: three exciting new Edinburgh restaurants

A fleeting visit to my hometown of Edinburgh for my best friend's wedding was just enough time to squeeze in visits to three of Edinburgh's notable new restaurant openings. As I said when I blogged my visit to the Gardener's Cottage last year, things are notching up a bit in Edinburgh's restaurant scene - which has always done a good Scottish-French bistro and some amazingly long-standing neighbourhood favourites, but I've sometimes found the buzzy, young, factor missing. 

That's why I liked the Gardener's Cottage so much - young, energised, sparky things, committed and passionate about local food and ingredients, doing great things. And the three restaurants I checked out all offered some buzzy promise to hungry Edinburgers: Aizle on St Leonard Street, Ting Thai Caravan on Teviot Row, and Salt Cafe on Morningside Road.

Aizle is a goodie. Tucked away on anonymous drag between South Clerk Street and Arthur's Seat, it is anything but inside - a simple, but warm interior of greys and whites, with big windows, views of the hills and crags just down the road. The joint is run by a Scottish-American couple who've toured the world cooking fancy food for fancy people, and now want to apply their bistronomical skills to local, seasonal fare in relaxed, homely environs.

The menu is not a conventional list of courses, but a list of ingredients they're working with that day - foraged, from their suppliers, from the market. Ours had unusual ingredients such as bee pollen, summer truffle, Inverurie hogget, sea astor, as well as more traditional ingredients: 'apples', 'blood orange', 'jersey royals'. The dishes are announced as they are brought to the table - and sometimes it's just a glimmer of one of those unusual ingredients you get - but each combination hit gold.

A trio of amuse bouche came first, which included an oyster, a mini stack of beetroot, steak tartare and saffron aioli, and a rice crisp with apple. This was followed by salt baked celariac, with celariac puree, a piece of fried chicken skin, then topped with apple. The combination of flavours was perfect - the salty, fatty skin, balanced by the earthy, deep flavours of the celariac, and the crisp freshness of the apple.

A fish course followed: mackerel, cooked simply, with thin slices of jersey royal potatoes, spring garlic, and various purees, drizzles and scatters that have left my memory. The final course was hogget (which I now know is an age of lamb -between lamb and mutton, with the tenderness of lamb and the flavour of mutton - no brainer really!), with a risotto like bulgur, pink radish, pink wildflowers and more unidentifiable gems of flavour.

I always worry that desserts in these kind of restaurants are going to be a bit austere, but not here. A rich chocolate terrine, with lemon curd and sweet cicely at the side, bee pollen and delicious sweet crispy shortbread-like wafers left us with the luxurious, sweet finale we wanted from such a special meal.

The good reviews have been pouring in, and the place was fully booked with a good mix of Edinburgers on the rainy Friday evening we were there. A sure sign that there's a healthy local appetite for exciting cooking. At £35 a head, it is also remarkably good value for a very special, inventive meal.

****

A mile away in Morningside, my old manor, and one famed for its pernickety older ladies, manners, tea shops and a bonanza of well stocked charity shops, Salt Cafe has just opened looking like an East London transplant - all gastropub grey exterior, bare bulbs, brunch and small plates. The area was clearly excited about it - tables were hard to come by at peak brunch hour on Sunday. 

The menu included some nice flourishes: Smoked bacon and poached egg on sourdough with a bit of truffle in the hollandaise, welsh rarebit with smoky tomato chutney, french toast with summer fruits, and some bigger dishes like moules frites and burger.

With most dishes priced at £3.50 we enquired whether one would be enough. They assured us it would, but the dishes (all served in oversized, steep edged bowls) were definitely £3.50's worth of brunch, and therefore not really big enough for hungry brunchers. We ended up ordering seconds - no bad thing, because each item was delicious, and it's nice to have a selection - maybe brunch tapas could be a selling point, rather than something to iron out? Unlike serving toast based food in a bowl - not big or clever, just impractical.

Despite these issues, Salt Yard's proprietors have created a buzzy, young spot in an area crying out for fun, relaxed neighbourhood eating. There's clearly a market for more, and will be interesting to see if any pubs or bars tap into this market too.

****

Finally, we tried Ting Thai Caravan - a bustling Thai street food cafe just opposite the university. Also painted in gastropub grey and with bare bulbs, it's a fast paced, communal tables, loud music and brusk affair, with a big menu that includes meat/rice dishes, soups, noodles, curries and an interesting selection of snack/side dishes.

Another rainy lunchtime and the place was hoaching. We got the last table, and queues formed quickly and were seated quickly too. We ordered a big selection of mains, sides and a carafe of wine - and the bill came to less than £60 between six.

Dishes went well beyond the anglicised 'classics' - pungent, spicy marinades adorned pork, pickles and salsa-like condiments brought extra flavours to the plates, and dishes were heavy on vegetables too. Each dish is designed as a meal in itself, and students, lecturers and other local workers pop in to take away paper boxes full of this goodness. 

The sides were inspired - and (all less than £2) meant you could quickly and cheaply sample lots of different flavours. We had an aromatic sausage chopped up with chilli and salad, tempura fried sweet potato chips (excellent texture), almost honeycomb like fried tofu with a sweet chilli dressing, and tempura fried juicy prawn skewers.

It was a fun experience, maybe a bit noisy for some, but an excellent antidote to central Edinburgh's mostly tourist-focused fare.

Raw Duck, Richmond Road, Hackney

Raw Duck opened summer 2013 right next to Hackney Central station. It was the first of its kind in this part of Hackney - a properly grown up place, with small plates, well-chosen and frequently rotating wines, amidst a stylish interior of moulded concrete, neon signs, chalk boards and interestingly obtuse menu lingo: "smashed" egg, cheeses filed under "milk", charcuterie under "pig".

Slowly building a loyal following, the business literally crashed into an abyss when a crack in the foundations appeared in the next door Travelodge building site. The restaurant and flats above were vacated immediately, people lost their homes and successful business were put on ice, and still work goes on to preserve the facade of those buildings on Amhurst Road.

The good news is that Raw Duck lives. It has had its second coming, opening at the end of April on a site about three times the size on Richmond Road, between Hackney Central and London Fields. A lot of the original charming features remain - all that beautiful concrete, nice desert plants, humongous chalkboards and that cute little neon duck doodle. But bigger.



The menu is bigger too - the raw in duck was a nod to the fact they only had a panini grill for cooking with on the old site. Now it's a whopping great kitchen in view of the big communal tables.

I've been a couple of times since it opened, and I get the feeling the bigger, better Raw Duck will be a big part of my foodie life. The place to take visiting friends when I want to show them what good food is on offer in Hackney, a spot for mid-week drinks and snacks after work, and the spot for a treat meal.

Their brunch menu is extensive, refreshing regularly, with fancy renditions of pastries, granolas, brioche with salted dulce de leche, crumpets, egg dishes, and their delicious sandwiches - including the Reuben, and their longstanding 'dirty bird', with chilli roast chicken, jalapeno mayo and iceberg. There are some interesting juices too: I had a tasty and very healthy seeming spinach, apple, celery and parsley juice.

I had curried potatoes with salt beef hash and two fried eggs, which is sadly not on the current menu. The salt beef was very moist, and the spice on the potatoes was subtle, but brought to life with a generous scattering of curry leaves.



I went back this weekend with a gaggle of friends to make a dent on their dinner menu. The menu is big, and covers off house-fermented and pickled goodies, cheeses, charcuterie, fried and salted snacks and a range of sizes (and prices) of dishes designed for sharing.

We had a couple of fermented red cabbage and caraway seeds, pickled cavolo (nero) ribs and some whipped butter with bread to kick things off. The bread was exceptional, and the ferments were nice - but I regret not trying their sprout kimchi.



A lot of the more specialist produce is sourced from local suppliers. I was particularly pleased to see Chatsworth Road Smokehouse feature a few times on the menu - smoked salmon, bacon and hot smoked trout. The hot smoked trout was a particular highlight - the fish was utterly melt in your mouth, and softly smoked. It came with a salted coconut yoghurt, generous lashings of dill, and lovely, earthy freekeh.



Buttermilk and yoghurts featured throughout as dressings and accompaniments. We shared a wedge of lettuce smothered in creamy buttermilk, with lots of bottarga (roe of tuna or mullet) scattered on top. It was a bit like a fancy, de-constructed ceasar salad - fresh, rich and mildly fishy. Also in theme was a yoghurt dressed slaw of hipsi cabbage and watermelon radish, which was equally fresh, but light and crisp.





A roast quail came with a thick labneh yoghurt, broad beans and zatar, and with a spicy sauce tasted like a fancy version of the smoky charcoal grilled meats you get at the Turkish ocakbasi joints around Hackney.



The menu is great for vegetarians too, even those who don't turn eye to a bit of fish every now and then. Seasonal green veg led the way in many of the dishes. We enjoyed a fiddlehead fern (yes, fern) risotto with wild garlic and hazelnuts. Fern tasted just like you might imagine - green and fresh despite its shadiness, and the risotto was perfectly creamy.



Asparagus appeared twice: battered in tempura and served with a yoghurt (again!), cucumber and curry leaves - offsetting the fried tempura perfectly. And again, chargrilled and topped with shaved ricotta.





That's just some of what we ate - I could have mentioned the buttermilk chicken, or the king oyster mushrooms with spatzle and miso, the shaved fennel and salted ricotta salad, or the lemon marmalade pies with clotted cream - but we'd be here all day.

The wines were excellent too - Raw Duck used to sell itself pretty much on its winelist alone - and bottles start at about £24 upwards. Almost entirely from France and Italy, the list is relatively trim but with excellent selections and some more unusual variations on familiar types. We particularly enjoyed some orange muscat.

So what's the catch? Surely the service must be really snooty? Nope, not at all - very relaxed, efficient - all the people serving our table had the full picture of what we'd ordered, what they'd run out of etc - ad we held our table for a good three hours. Is it expensive? A couple of bottles of (nice) wine and all that food came to £36 per person between five - so it's not cheap, but it's good value for the quality and inventiveness of the food. If there is a catch I've yet to spot it.

The Mare Street axis in Hackney was already the most exciting part of the borough for eating out, and with Raw Duck it's just got even better. Get in there before it starts getting the big reviews and it's hassle getting a table.

Esters, Stoke Newington

Stoke Newington was at the vanguard of the second wave of middle class bohemianism in Hackney. Back when London was a bit more grey and staid, when people still went out in the West End, and when the Overground was called the Silverlink and was disgusting and unreliable, Stoke Newington was an enclave of farmers' markets, Mediterranean cafes, vegetarian Indian restaurants, and slightly smug earthy types who knew about life beyond the tube.

When I lived over in Tufnell Park, we'd take the 393 bus up to Church Street to snaffle a table for brunch at Blue Legume, grinning at our luck as twee indie types would gather round tables, waiting to pounce as soon as people put down their tip. In those dark days, the quiet bohemianism of N16 was a breath of fresh air for those of us who had a taste for the brunching life - mine developed while living in Berlin.

But Church Street developed in a funny kind of way. Loads of cafes and restaurants opened, but few of them exceptional or even half decent. High rents pushed margins to the max, and so high margin products such as pizza, low grade cakes and coffee are sold at premium price to endless willing punters keen to embrace the cutesy cafe culture of Church Street. It's a timely reminder of what happens when word catches on, landlords realise what rents they can charge, and businessfolk open restaurants because they can, not because they love.

So I was very pleased to check out Esters, located amidst a sleepy warren of N16 backstreets, and discover top notch, top value coffee, cakes and seasonal food - and love.

Esters took over from Fred and Fran, which was a similarly anomalously excellent cafe, and has kept much of the light, spacious interior intact, but with some nice rustic tables, hanging pendants with brightly coloured wires, and a nice line in plants.

The menu changes regularly with the seasons, and has an eclectic mix of influences - from a Levantine labneh to Caribbean jerk chicken, all pressed between proper bread and good British produce.

We enjoyed roast rhubarb on sourdough cardamom french toast - a revelatory take on the classic of plain ol' white bread. The rhubarb was delicate and fragrant, and worked beautifully with pistachios and labneh, for a bit of pungency.



My jerk chicken sandwich was also delicious. More sourdough, stuffed with aromatic, spicy chicken, hot and dripping with its cooking sauce. Also stuffed in this mammoth sandwich was a coconut, fennel and lime slaw, giving a crunchy, fresh counterbalance to the chicken. At £8 it's not cheap - but it was gigantic and bloody tasty - and enough to power me on for an afternoon of traipsing around in the cold.



The menu features some more open sandwiches (my friend had a butternut squash caponata and minted creme fraiche beauty), some tasty sounding baked and poached egg dishes, and some spectacular looking cakes and tray bakes, which unfortunately we had no space for.



Esters is a refreshing break from the bland Church Street norms, with chummy service, high quality innovative food at reasonable prices. Once you've been here you won't be back at any of those derivative cafes serving up dishwater coffee for £2.40.

119 Lower Clapton

While Lower Clapton's Chatsworth Road has been described as the 'frontline of gentrification', little note has been made of the independent businesses cropping up on Lower Clapton Road - Riley of Clapton Social Club, the Clapton Hart, Blue Tit, Hunt and Darton, Dreyfus Cafe have all joined longer timers like Il Guscio, Biddle Bros and Palm 2 in the last year.

It's a pretty busy road, and it sometimes feels like every bus serving North East London passes through.  You get the feeling that most people in the hood traverse Lower Clapton Road and so you see all walks of life going about their business. The people watching is excellent.

Despite the traffic, I love Lower Clapton Road. It has amazingly preserved grand Victorian and Georgian buildings designed for a proper shopping street. I've seen some lovely old photos recently, and when I squint now I can imagine the road back in the early 19th century.

So it's really awesome that 119 Lower Clapton, a big windowed cafe has opened in the epicentre of it all. You can sit there for hours, drinking great coffee and watching the world go by. It's a beautiful big open bright space - shades of white and grey, utilitarian simple furniture, nice plants.And lots and lots of light.



119 Lower Clapton are keeping things simple: they really specialise in coffee, and you can tell. I think this is some of the best in Clapton (and that's saying something). They use Workshop for their espressos, and happy to chat coffee paraphernalia and technique with my partner (phew!).



They do nice cakes, croissants and sandwiches, and this weekend they moved in the Clapton Brunch Market. It's a simple but effective offer: coddled eggs. Somewhere between boiled, steamed and baked, the eggs are served in a tumbler, topped with lots of fresh herbs, with crusty, herby, salty toasted sourdough - effectively a crouton.

I opted for a red pepper and prosciutto coddled egg, and Pete ordered one with spinach, chestnut mushrooms and comte. The egg was nice and runny, but neatly contained within the beaker  - it was almost like a warm, flavoursome egg sauce, with lovely bits of salty, sweet prosciutto, crunchy pepper and toasted seeds. It was nice breaking up the crouton-like bread and immersing it in the egg, soaking up all the eggy flavours.





It was just their first day doing brunch, but I hope they stick to it - a tasty and different take on eggy brunch. There were a few other options too - granola with poaches pear, toasts, etc.

I've called Hackney the Brunch Capital of London elsewhere, and it's just got an interesting new addition. Check it out folks!