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.

Eat 17 restaurant, Brooksbys Walk, Clapton Hackney

A whirlwind few months in the run up to an election leaves this political campaigner/food blogger and over-commiter with little time and energy to write about interesting local restaurants.

There has also been a bit of a lull in new openings in North East London. Cold weather is bad for business, and especially bad for launching a business when cashflow is everything. A couple of recent mid-week, mid-evening cycles up Kingsland Road shows up some pretty empty restaurants. Even a Monday night dinner at Rotorino sees this popular, well-regarded restaurant near empty.

I take the lull as an opportunity to finally try Eat 17's Clapton restaurant, above their supermarket-cum-deli-cum-burger-bar. I have long been meaning to try it, but also not being quite motivated enough. Its lack of visibility from the street put me off - is it a pig in a poke? How can I know if anyone is in there and enjoying it? A few press shots of its swanky interior make me wince a little too – is it a bit too alien to the Clapton I know?

It is terribly plush. Tables are spaciously arranged in four rows, with leather banquettes, marble circular tables, Art Deco style lamps for mood lighting and cripplingly nowish decorative palm tree lamps on the bar. It's so plush. I almost feel a bit scruffy and dirty, and more so for the fact that it's relatively quiet on this wintery Thursday evening - the space between the rows of tables left me feeling quite exposed.



The menu includes a number of dishes from their downstairs burger bar, but served on plates rather than branded greaseproof paper. The maitre'd is wired up to a radio mic, so that he can communicate with both kitchens. The co-ordination is impressive, even if the downside is looking like your in a 90s five-piece.

We share scallops on celariac puree to start. The scallops are plump and perfectly cooked, the puree adds a lovely creamy earthiness. Crispy pancetta is served with it in a classic combination, and crispy sage lifts it to the next level.



The mains menu is a crowd-pleasing whistlestop of classic bistro dishes. There's duck and red cabbage with dauphinoise potatoes, a pork and bean stew, a creamy smoked haddock dish, a steak, and a lamb dish. Something for everyone. But each has a bit of a twist to take us into 2015 – pepper ketchup, crispy cabbage, buttermilk, blue cheese in your mac'n'cheese.

I order lamb rump with cumin spinach, yoghurt sauce, fried aubergine and, yes, pepper ketchup. The lamb is juicy and pink, perfectly cooked and generous in portion size. All the accompaniments are pretty generous too – it's a big, filling plate, and the flavours work well together. My only complaints would be the spinach being slightly over-cooked, and the aubergine slightly under-cooked.



A rib-eye steak is also large, well-cooked and seasoned. It comes with that blue cheese mac'n'cheese, crispy onion rings (there's quite a lot of tempura frying going on in the downstairs burger bar kitchen) and a handful of chanterelle mushrooms. Like my lamb, there's a strong savouriness to the dish, with no shortage of juices sloshing around to make every mouthful count.



Sweets continue the crowd-pleasing theme, with more twists on classics that push the boundaries of sweet, gooiness. We enjoyed a bourbon tinged croissant bread and butter pudding, and a banana and toffee pudding served with chocolate ice cream. which were both on the edge of being too sweet.



The wine list is similarly eclectic and on-trend. There is a selection of English wines, including two Bloomsbury sparkling wines. Vinho Verde also makes it on to the list. Thumbs up.

I enjoy the meal and would heartily recommend the food to others.

But I'm left with a niggling feeling: there's something slightly uncomfortable about realising you are a target market, you are focus-groupable, a concept can be designed to attract you (the plush on-trend interiors, all these modern twists on classic bistro fare) and that it bloody works. Pretty much everyone in the room was a white, middle class professional, trendy-ish but monied and stable enough that at least three couples in the room were discussing home renovation plans.

I'm not naïve enough to doubt the importance of understanding your market and developing your offer accordingly. Too many loving businesses fail at this hurdle. But the magic is in the customer not realising the (legitimately) cynical considerations that any business makes in attracting their custom. I feel that Eat 17 leaves the careful workings, the mechanics, a little too visible; or perhaps there isn't quite enough soul and buzz to distract from them. And it jars a little, even when the food and service is good and generous.

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.

Fan Tong, Kingsland Road, Dalston

Fan Tong describes itself as a "mostly Chinese" restaurant. It opened quietly on Kingsland Road in November. I was very intrigued, mostly because the last "mostly Chinese" meal I had was at the astounding Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco. It was one of the most exciting meals I've had - amazing cuts of good provenance meat, the bolshiest flavours you can imagine, fusions - in the Californian tradition - that just blew me away, like their glutinous rice cakes with thrice fried bacon, sichuan peppers and spring onions. Oh boy.

With stuff hotting up on the Hackney food scene, and some high-concept restaurants opening in Dalston recently, I had high hopes for Fan Tong - not to be all fancy and exclusive, but to push the boundaries a bit and bring some exciting food to the table.

Fan Tong was much more understated than I expected - it's a had a nice fit out, with a bit of the ol' weathered wood look, but nice benches and a neat little bar with stools, which, on the quiet Friday night that we are there, was more used by the waiting staff to perch between serving.

The menu comprises small plates, side dishes and a couple of noodle soup options. Between our group of six we managed to eat most of the menu. Pickled vegetables were fine, and cucumber dressed in sesame was a measly portion for £3.50. The sesame dressing tasted like tahini without much other seasoning, but there wasn't quite enough to go around in the already small portion.



The sichuan spiced pork with cheong fun was markedly better (and better value) - the pork was deeply flavoured, drizzled in lovely sichuan oils, and over nicely al dente cheong fun - a chewy, thick, boiled glutinous rice  the menu describes as like Chinese pasta. Topped with spring onion, coriander and fresh chilli, it was the explosion of fresh, spicy, cold, hot sloppy, hard flavours and textures that I love. We could have, and should have, ordered a couple more of these.



Also popular among the group were the salt and pepper fried green beans. I mean, who doesn't love battered vegetables, but the crispy coating was full of umami, the beans cooked just right, the dark vinegary, spicy dipping sauce. This dish was great, and a snip at £3.50.



Pork and prawn wontons were heavy on the ginger (a good thing), nicely chewy, and nicely dressed.



Bok choy came steamed, and dressed in oyster sauce. Like with the cucumber in sesame, we all felt like the dressings were a bit too 'off the shelf' - a missed opportunity to lift these dishes up to the next level.



Roast potatoes were a nice addition to the menu - done in classic British style, all crisp and shimmering from an oily roasting. They came artfully squirted with a chilli mayo, which we loved, but like the above dressings, felt could have been a bit more generously applied. We order a second nevertheless.



We ordered a couple of portions of their prawn buns, which were mini-sliders of nicely seasoned, juicy prawns in sweet little buns. We enjoyed the taste, but again thought the portion size was small for the price (£7). It became the theme of the meal - some dishes felt like great value, others poor value. It is an expensive business running a restaurant, especially in a prime bit of E8, where rents are high and business rates correspondingly so. But as seasoned eaters in this part of town, we found the pricing a bit off - sometimes in our favour, sometimes not. And that had a niggling effect throughout the meal.



Much more reasonable were the ramen bowls at £8.50 for the porky option. It was generously filled with strong-flavoured 'pulled' (can we just say slow cooked?!) pork and nicely braised belly. The greens were generous too, and though Fan Tong cheekily advertises these as packet noodles, they were perfect for the purpose. Having just eaten at Tonkotsu Mare Street, the broth didn't compare, but the soft boiled, seasoned eggs were a pretty fair match.



We ended the meal on a high with salted caramel (klaxon!) doughnuts, freshly fried, stuffed with the gorgeous sticky stuff and doused in it too. A big scoop of vanilla was a good antidote to the richness of all that caramel. With five little balls in each portion, this was another steal at £4.



Service was friendly and helpful, but the place wasn't quite buzzing. It had a feel of people just happening to be there, rather than people purposefully seeking it out or being established locals checking out their new neighbourhood restaurant. We saw passers-by examining the menu in the window, weighing up whether to come in or try somewhere else on the strip - some taking a seat, dwelling a sec, and then leaving again to try their luck elsewhere.

It struck me that when a road becomes a destination, restaurants pull in a number of different ways - they become over-the-top conceptual experiences, stalwarts that do their thing well and locals and incomers keep coming back, or the kind of place that soaks up the newbie passing trade when people don't know about or can't get a table at the former two types. As it stands, Fan Tong is clearly too good to be a generic tourist trap, but not quite consistently impressive to become a stalwart or a destination. It's still worth a visit if your order wisely, and I hope it finds its potential over the coming months.

Tonkotsu, Mare Street, Hackney

The pace of change in Hackney doesn't fail to astound even the hardiest of observers. And the opening of Tonkotsu on Narrow Way is a case in point.

Little more than a year ago pretty much every bus in North East London passed through that single lane road with a narrow pavement either side. Sometimes they'd be queued up the length of the road, with cyclists scraping along the sides, shoppers squeezing between the buses to cross the road, everyone inhaling the noxious diesel fumes. 

Hackney Council pedestrianised the road in the face of resistance from business owners, concerned that nobody would come to visit the street without all these buses chugging down it. On a Saturday afternoon, Narrow Way is now bustling - more so than before. It's now a pleasant place to be. The shops down Narrow Way are not fancy by Hackney's standards: there are big chains like Primark, McDonalds, Greggs and a sad Marks and Spencer, alongside betting shops, newsagents, bakeries, gold shops, pawnbrokers. It works just fine without vintage denim boutiques and organic wooden spoon shops.

Tonkotsu is the first fancy new business to open up on Narrow Way. The shop used to be a dingy, beige Post Office - and before you get your gentrifier-skewering pitchforks out, it's only moved up the road to a shiny new shop. The unit has been opened all the way back, with just an unobtrusive, plain glass front revealing to the passerby its new purpose. At the front is a long bar, which leads you to a loungey section with semi-circular leather banquettes around tables, before you get to a more canteen-y space with a glass boxed noodle-making room and an open kitchen alongside it it. Ropes are strung across the ceiling like noodles being pulled. It's pretty neat actually.



Ramen is booming in London, and Tonkotsu was one of the first of this spurt. As with most hypey booms, ramen has become aficionado territory, and some people will give you chapter and verse on different restaurants' broths and noodles. I'm no expert, but when I tasted the Tonkotsu broth I knew it was something special. So rich with meatiness that it's almost creamy, Tonkotsu's broth is velvety, luxurious, pungent. The noodles -made on site in the aforementioned glass boxed noodle room - were al dente, which I liked, but my fellow diners would have preferred a slightly softer noodle.

There is a concise menu of ramen - the Tonkotsu is the classic pork ramen with a pork broth, with generous sheeths of delicious pork belly, with deep flavoured bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and THE MOST INCREDIBLE seasoned slow boiled egg.



My friends each had the seafood ramen - a special for this branch of Tonkotsu. It had a couple of juicy prawns, a handful of fresh clams, some squid, as well as bean sprouts and bamboo shoots. The broth was a mixture of sea food and chicken, and was less thick and creamy than the pork broth, but delicious nonetheless.



A further two ramen dishes are available: chilli chicken, and miso and shitake mushroom. Prices range from £9 - £11, and they will pretty much fill you up.

There are a number of sides on the menu. As we were there during soft launch, a few that we were particularly keen to try were sold out. Namely the okonomiyaki, the Japanese cabbage and kelp pancake, which is a special for the Mare Street restaurant, but has been an E5 delicacy for some time thanks to the ace Sho Foo Doh, who has a Thursday - Saturday okonomiyaki residency 100 metres away at Pacific Social Club. I love it there, so I was keen to see how Tonkotsu's compared.

Edamame beans were hard to fault, and I enjoyed the Shimeji mushroom korokke - creamy croquette balls, with shitake mushroom inside, on a bed of tart mayo. Yum. We were less impressed by the pork gyoza, which were quite lightly filled and under-seasoned.



The kara-age chicken - the Japanese spin on fried chicken, whereby the chicken is brined in soy suace, ginger and garlic before getting crisply fried - was perfectly juicy inside, and had a crunchy coating without any clagginess. I thought the kara-age chicken from the Paddy Field stall on Chatsworth Road's Sunday market had the slight edge on flavour, but Tonkotsu's are perfectly good.



The dessert menu consists of one excellent dish: a selection of mochi-encased ice cream balls. Mochi is a squidgy, slightly aromatic glutinous rice based sweet. Sometimes it's fashioned into fruit shapes, but here it contained salted caramel (natch), vanilla and yuzu - an Asian citrus fruit. My favourite was the yuzu, which was almost champagne-y in taste with a tart citrus-y freshness to it.



Tonkotsu Mare Street does last orders at 11, so good for a quick supper before going out, a proper meal, and a post pub filler-upper. Prices are  reasonable, including for cocktails, where many are around the £7 mark, and the menu is extensive. We particularly enjoyed their twist on a whiskey sour with sake.

I expect Tonkotsu will be busy if the level of interest generated by the soft launch was anything to go by. Despite okonomiyaki being available up the road, everything else about it is fairly unique for the surrounding area. Whether or not Narrow Way becomes a foodie/boozy destination remains to be seen; I expect many restaurateurs will watch Tonkotsu's trade closely, but of course part of the appeal is being one of a small number of such businesses, rather than a street flooded with generic restaurants. In any case I hope Narrow Way continues to be a street that serves everyone.

Hackney's best new restaurants 2014

I started off 2014 predicting that the Mare Street and Lower Clapton Road axis in Hackney would flourish with exciting new restaurants, becoming more of a destination for eating and drinking out. And lo it came to pass: the area saw an unprecedented amount of new openings, not just on the main axes, but in the surrounding areas of Homerton, Hackney Downs, and around Dalston Lane.

Lower Clapton Road has changed the most - and going through the list of new (food) openings in the last year, let alone all the other shops that have opened, makes me feel exhausted. New restaurants have been distinctly classy and grown up, with Verden, Little Ivy's, the Bonneville, Yard Sale and Pie Franco opening within a few months of each other and attracting praise, custom and occasionally controversy from across London, and even in national press. Meanwhile supper clubs upstairs at Palm 2 seem to do a roaring trade, and Candela has come and gone. Over on Chatsworth Road, the big news was the opening of the luxury Spar supermarket, with a fancy (and actually very good) burger bar and a luxury restaurant upstairs.



Down Mare Street way, Raw Duck's opening at a bigger premises on Richmond Road was met with widespread acclaim, while Broadway Market has seen new openings from sourdough pizza kings Franco Manca, snazzy butchers Hill and Szrok, the revamped Cat and Mutton, and fancy Thai  residency Som Saa.



Further south, Paradise Row in Bethnal Green is newly home to a handful of new restaurants and bars located under its arches, most notably Mission E2 - a wine bar and restaurant, with a giant palm tree inside and impressive selection of well-priced Californian wines.



Towards Hackney Downs, Lardo have opened up a petite pizza restaurant off Amhurst Road, Hash E8 on Dalston Lane has become my favourite spot for a porky brunch, and Hand of Glory is a gorgeous pub with great beers on tap and high quality kitchen residencies. You'd never know it was 5 mins from Kingsland High Street.



Homerton's new openings have been mostly pubs - the Adam and Eve and the Jackdaw and Star joining The Plough on Homerton High Street, while the Gun on Well Street is a lovely little saloon bar.

Dalston continues to see lots of new openings, including mid-market chains like The Diner, Premier Inn and Costa Coffee. The more interesting restaurants open off the main drag of Kingsland High Street. Steve Parle's Rotorino has brought fancy Italian cooking further down Kingsland Road near the intriguing-sounding Fan Tong, Lucky Chip have got a permanent space in a disused car park just off Dalston Lane, and the Pond has brought the tortuous concept of modern Hawaiian cuisine to a fully decked out warehouse off Gillet Square.

But with all the hype and excitement comes a new band of generic, half-arsed restaurants ready to ape an aesthetic to blend in to New Hipster Hackney. Chatsworth Road in Clapton now has three such restaurants and cafes, Lower Clapton Road a couple too - with exposed brick, industrial fittings, ramshackle furniture and slightly too loud music all there to distract you from the average quality, average price food you're getting. It's old hat for Stoke Newington and Dalston, which have housed generic 'trendy' restaurants for some time, as investors piggy back on the coattails of more interesting new businesses.

It's been the year of the backlash too. In 2013 and 2014 house prices in Hackney grew by almost 50%, rents by a similar amount. The number of restaurants and cafes opened could well represent a doubling or tripling of what was there in 2012 in some parts of the borough, as Hackney firmly becomes, and feels like, a more expensive kind of place. In one of the poorest areas in the country, basic living costs are increasing as benefits are cut and low wages stagnant - and the streets and faces are changing dramatically. Combined with suburban disdain for l'hipster, restaurants and cafes in East London quickly feel the heat of the spotlight when they respond insensitively.

I don't believe that this pace of change can continue. I see the last two years as a mega adjustment, and I expect to see a lower number of new restaurants opening in 2015, but with a few trends...

The Mare Street axis will continue to gentrify apace. The kind of snazzy restaurants opening in Dalston, Haggerston and Shoreditch will make their way to the arch spaces around London Fields station, such as the fancy-sounding Il Cudega, which will specialise in the cuisine of the Lombardia region. Further up, the fancy ramen joint Tonkotsu is set to open on Narrow Way in January. It will be the first of its kind to open on this stretch, and could pave the way for other restaurateurs drawn to the road's scruffy, slightly down-at-heal charm. New openings in the Mare Street area will be fuelled by the impending arrival of the Hackney Fashion Hub, which will seem a lot more tangible as 2015 trucks on.

Asian and fusion flavours will have a greater influence. You can't move for modern British, pizza, burgers and dude food, and there's plenty of French and Turkish cuisine to be had. Despite a long tradition of Vietnamese restaurants opening on Kingsland Road and Mare Street, we're only starting to see the influence of Asian flavours in a small number of newer openings, such as Rita's and Raw Duck. Dalston newbie Fan Tong appears to be fusing eclectic Asian flavours with British ingredients, and I'd expect to see a bit more of this in some of 2015's more interesting new openings. Bring on the kimchi!

More interesting openings outside of Hackney. Areas like Walthamstow and Leytonstone have both old and new interesting restaurants, but places like Tottenham, Leyton and Forest Gate have seen less of the new. As more people are priced out of Hackney AND Walthamstow AND Leytonstone, I'd expect a sourdough pizza restaurant or two to open in these parts of town.

More chains and more generics. As business rents increase, it will be harder for small businesses to afford to offer quality, interesting food at a price people are willing to pay. This means more low quality generic restaurants will open, skimping on ingredient quality to meet demand. Not necessarily overlappingly, mid-market chains will find their model at an advantage in the area. Nando's, Costa and The Diner are already in the area, and I wouldn't be surprised if a Pizza Express or similar opens on Stoke Newington Church Street or on the ground floor of a Dalston new build development.

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.