Taberna do Mercado, Spitalfields, Commercial Street

I recently turned thirty, which is the perfect excuse for a slap up meal. I've been cutting back recently due to an enormous building project at home. It's also the reason that I haven't been blogging much recently. I've been without proper facilities for three months now, and the extra effort required to do everyday tasks, on top of the constant decision-making, has just sapped so much of my energy for anything fun, like writing about food.

But I'm coming out of my slumber to write about Taberna do Mercado, Nuno Mendes' new restaurant. Yes, he of Chiltern Firehouse fame. Chiltern Firehouse may be what he's now best known for, but its prices and glitz seem out of character for Mendes, whose building block gigs at Viajante and the Loft Project were more low key and allowed the food to do the talking.

Ironically perhaps, Mendes' new joint Taberna do Mercado is his most down to earth yet. It's a Portuguese market canteen, on the edge of Spitalfields Market. Simple little restaurants in produce markets are the real deal in Portugal (where I'm half from) - it's where you'll see local nanas having a snack of seafood, or a friendly business meeting over a sandwich (prego), along with a crisp white wine or small glass of beer. The situation and menu of Taberna do Mercado are a big nod to that tradition.

The menu has cheese and cured meats, "tinned" fish, snacks, a couple of sandwiches, a reasonable selection of small plates, and a handful of eggy desserts. It's a whistlestop tour of Portuguese cuisine, which is warm and familiar to me, but not to many in London. Every dish has an extra twist of cheffy sophistication, an extra complexity or layer of flavour, than you'd expect from a classic Lisbon restaurant.

We ordered our food bit by bit, as it can come relatively quickly after you order. We started with lightly battered green beans (a dish my mum loves to make), which were perfectly crisp and came on top of a little bowl of a cool broth, which tasted of toasted onions. The rissois - crisp triangles stuffed with prawn and prawn flavoured roux - are another Portuguese classic, and the darker, crisper coating, the juicy prawns and richer seafoody roux inside made these the best I'd had.



The "tinned" fish menu has a number of delicious sounding options, but we went for cod cheeks with a sweet, paprika sauce. The fish is cooked, marinaded and served in a tin - in homage to the tinned seafood shacks of Portugal. Served with crunchy thins of cauliflower and toasted thick Portuguese bread, we devoured every last speck of this dish, spooning the sweet flavoured oil onto the bread when it would not soak up any more.



A fennel and asparagus migas had a great contrast between the crunchy textures and zingy, fresh flavours of the vegetables, and the rich, lardy, moist migas - breadcrumbs fried up with any number of ingredients and flavours with stock and oil, ending up tasting somewhere between dumplings and a hash.



A pig trotter and cuttlefish coentrada is a rich broth is creamy and full of porky flavour - almost like a ramen. The pig trotter meat is pungent, and the cuttle fish is perfectly cooked - just chewy enough, but till fresh tasting and not the least bit rubbery. Generous scatterings of micro coriander make this taste very Portuguese - that delicious mixture of pork, seafood and the fragrant aromas of fresh greens. The sauce is so perfect we order more bread to soak it up.



We finish our savoury voyage with a prego roll, with steak, watercress-like crunchy greens and a spicy, fragrant peppery sauce. The roll is incredibly authentic, slightly sour, crispy and lathered in butter. The steak is perfectly cooked, and the red peppery sauce mixes with the butter and echoes the taste of the classic bifana sandwich.



Portion are not too big, and the prices are just on the pricey side of keen. Ordering an extra bread was key to keeping my other half assured that he wasn't going to spend all that money and leave hungry.

On the plus side it means you certainly have time for dessert. Sweets are a big deal in Portugal, especially when they're made of egg yolk and dusted with cinnamon. As with everything else, the desserts at Taberna do Mercado manage to be both convincingly homely and next level. We shared a warm olive oil and egg cake, half cooked in parchment paper, so that it's crisp on top, gooey in the middle, wallowing with grade A olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. The fruitiness and the acidity of the olive oil stand out, and are gently balanced by the sugar in the cake. It's impeccable.



However, we're still not full and our waitress informs us that there's a dish that's proving a hit on instagram. We order it and 'gram it, naturally. Egg yolk is mixed with pork fat to make a particularly rich congealed custard slabs. It holds solidly, cuts easily, and is complemented with a thin, lightly sweet Port sauce with drops of fruity olive oil and flecks of sea salt.




The winelist is entirely Portuguese, and it's well priced with bottles starting in the early twenties. There's a good spread of regions covered, and with much available by the glass, so it offers a great chance to sample lots of interesting wines from across this not yet fully appreciated country.

The waiting staff are well briefed on the dishes and wines and were incredibly friendly, if not fully attentive - there were a few too many times where we all but disappeared from their consciousness, and it took minutes of craning and embarrassing signally. On the plus side, their 'no reservations' policy works well in practice - we waltzed to an outside table at 6.30 on a Tuesday, and were brought inside when a table became available. For later arrivals, punters' numbers were taken and they were called back when it was free.

Taberna do Mercado works well. The dishes are homely and unpretentious, while being painstakingly conceived and refined. The feel is informal and welcoming, and yet this is a chef who's best known for a restaurant in a flash hotel that has paparazzi stationed outside every evening. The cost may ratchet up (we ate and drank well and it came to just shy of £50 a head including service), but this is all top provenance cooking where every detail counts. The five star reviews are rolling in, so make sure you're early if you want to snap up a table without a wait.

Chick'n'Sours Kingsland Road, Dalston, Hackney

Fancy fried chicken is now a *thing*. Since the opening of fancy fried chicken joint Wishbone a few years ago, the techniques for brining, marinating and coating chicken wings, thighs, drumsticks and breasts have become legitimate subjects for geeky discussion. I love the buttermilk brined chicken in a bun with Korean hot sauce at Spit and Roast, or the schmaltzed chicken with gravy at Rita's, but my all time favourite is Dante Fried Chicken in Los Angeles, who blows my mind with his approach to brining and crunch. His book is well worth hunting down.

For all the wonderful fried chicken, I've had some pretty bland stuff too and some claggy coatings that soak up all the oil. Jackson and Rye was one of the worst I've ever had, but even Foxlow's left me a little underwhelmed. 

When I heard about Chick'n'Sours opening on Kingsland Road, and that Carl Clarke was behind it, I knew to expect interesting things. I once made it to Disco Bistro and was blown away by the exciting flavours he incorporated into 'luxe' junk food. His reputation meant that Chick'n;Sours' soft launch was booked up in minutes, but I made it along in the restaurant's second week. 

It's a neat little restaurant, with no more than 40 covers, and views out onto Kingsland Road. Inside and outside is low key stylish. The menu is very concise: a selection of sour cocktails, a few beers, a few wines and a nice selection of soft drinks. The food menu consists of a house fry and a guest fry, a fried chicken burger, some interesting sides and starters, and a single dessert.

We kick off with a sour cocktail. My house sour has raspberry and chilli vinegar in it, giving it an extra aciditc kick. The flavours are complex and it has some interesting notes, but I find that the sweetness overwhelms the sourness, and it's a bit too gluggable. My friend's basil and strawberry is adorned with big, luscious basil leaves and black pepper. It's delicious.



Getting into the chicken swing of things, we start with a plate of wings, which can come in naked, sweet or hot. We go for hot and get six juicy, meaty wings covered in a red sticky sauce similar to buffalo sauce but with a bit more spicy bitterness. The sauce has real depth and a big kick, and yards above the gloopy sugary buffalo sauce you'll find in many other joints.



On to the main thing: the chicken. The house fry is a pretty classic take on fried chicken. You get a thigh and a drumstick, both super moist and full of strong meaty flavour, with a crispy, crunchy but not-too-thick coating. It's not oily in the slightest. The signature covering is a "seaweed crack" - a light dust of dehydrated (I guess) seaweed and other umami flavours, which makes this incredibly moreish. There are a number of other dipping sauces for £1.50, but we stuck to the house chilli oil on the table - and it's excellent lightly spread on the chicken.  The house fry comes with pickled watermelon, which provides a juicy, tangy balance to the salty, meaty, crunchy chicken.



My friend orders the guest fry, which, on our visit, is Thai style - topped with crispy shallots, spring onions, fresh chilli, thai basil and mint, and served with a chilli jam dipping sauce. It's great.

The sides are a big deal. You could even see the fried chicken as merely an excuse to tuck in to some tasty sides. I'd even encourage vegetarian (well, those tolerant of by-products) friends to come and pile up some tasty side and starter dishes. The fries are cooked in a rich beef dripping, and the generous serving is a steal at £2.50. We could eat them endlessly. We also enjoy a yam-bean slaw. Yam beans are a South East Asian member of the yam family, and here it's julienned along with red onion and something green, coated in a light miso mayo and topped with black and white sesame. It's fresh and crunchy and savoury and wonderful.



We also order a pickled apple and chicken skin salad, which is basically a super pimped caesar salad. Leaves of gem lettuce are loaded with creamy blue cheese dressing, crisp flakes of smoked bacon and the crispy chicken skin. Shards of pickled apple cut through the salty umami, giving a much needed freshness. My dining companion found the dish overwhelming, and I think a little less of the blue cheese dressing and a bit more of the apple might have reached a better balance.



Another highlight was the pickled water melon, coriander and peanut side. A perfectly balanced fish sauce dressing is sweet and savoury and just delicious with the roasted peanuts. If we'd had the space we'd have tried the Szechuan aubergine, which I've heard is great.

There is just one dessert: a Weetabix soft service ice cream. The ice cream tastes like malty Weetabix milk, and it's topped with crunchy bits of Weetabix. I like it; my friend does not. It's not very sweet, the maltiness has a slightly bitter edge. It tastes nostalgic, and I like the texture of the crunch with the cold ice cream.



We have a thoroughly good meal and feel well looked after by the team. I'm already planning trips back to try some of the other sides and also their brunch menu. It's certainly a cut above much of its Dalston competition, where new openings are mostly either contrived  and pretentious or generic and half-arsed. It's also refreshing to taste masterful fusions of Asian and Western flavours and techniques - there are too many David Chang pretenders who lack the care and know-how to pull it off. Clarke's team at Chick'n'Sours know how to develop stunning and dishes and price them well - you can eat well here for less than £20 per head.

Chick'n'Sours is likely to be popular - it was buzzing on a Tuesday evening in week two. Thankfully, it takes reservations through the week, but is likely to be walk-ins only on Friday and Saturday evenings. Get there soon, because most other fried chicken is a waste of calories.

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.