Main attraction: Mushroom broth, vegetable salad, Korean rice and crunchy bean curd skin
You are not always sure of what you are eating in Chriskitch, a new restaurant tucked behind Hoxton Square, but as I learnt, it pays to put your trust in the chef.
Surprising combinations are the order of the day here (BBQ duck ravioli and quinoa popsicle anyone?) all of which inspired by the worldly travels of the restaurant’s chef Chris Honor.
The starter of champagne-poached oyster, truffle oil, caviar and scrambled eggs struck me as something a child would dream up, asked what grown-ups eat.
But there is nothing childish about this starter, which bursts with rich truffle and sea flavours. It is beautifully presented – just like everything else on the menu – in an oyster shell propped up by sorbet, on a bed of ornamental seaweed.
Starter’s orders: champagne poached oyster with truffle and chive scrambled eggs
Other weird and wonderful delights pop up around the starters – cheese popsicles, crisped rye bread… even powdered white truffle on a teaspoon to cleanse the palate.
It is the juicy kale rolls that steal the warm-up show, however, which were much more lively than they sound, bursting with south east Asian flavours of basil seeds and fresh herbs. These complimentary bites are welcome in a menu that veers towards the pricey, with mains averaging at around £19.
And with the mains come flavours of the Middle East: the signature blackened lamb dish is enclosed in succulent aubergine strips, topped with salty feta and with the sweet hint of date chutney.
Moving on to Mediterranean climes is the salmon: crispy skin, succulent and flaking apart underneath. Somehow this dish smacks of the sea even more than expected, perhaps due to deep notes of anchovy. Underneath is bone marrow and a bacon and endive tart – though I’m not sure exactly which part is which. What I can vouch for, though, is its deliciousness.
For dessert we forego the recommended chocolate pudding, opting instead for the picture-pretty crème brûlée. It combines all the great things about a crème brûlée – a rich and smooth vanilla flavour with a crispy top – yet is even more delectable thanks to the fresh fruit flavours of thin candied lemon slices and fresh raspberries.
A poached pear poked through a mysterious round pastry crisp, served with a smear of salted caramel sauce, vanilla cream and ‘activated’ walnuts – which, yes, really did taste nuttier than usual.
At Chriskitch you pay more than your usual Hackney joint, but the menu takes you far beyond this borough.
Through the front door: inside the Frog. Photograph: Tim Green
Adam Handling has come a long way since reaching the finals of Masterchef: The Professionals in 2013.
The young Scot took up residence at St. Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster, earning decent reviews for his modern, technical dishes as head chef of Caxton Grill.
Now 2015’s Scottish Chef of the Year is taking his first leap into the world of entrepreneurship – hence the name of his new Spitalfields eatery, The Frog.
Arriving at the restaurant in Ely’s Yard, around the corner from the Market, you’re struck by the amount of competition surrounding it. Food stalls, popular with locals and tourists, line the square, and signs for next door’s Sunday Upmarket remind you this is an area spoilt for culinary choice.
How do you stand out in such a colourful landscape? Handling’s answer is to blend in with the crowd.
The Frog’s décor is typically Shoreditchian. The tables and chairs are mismatched in a deliberately laissez-faire manner, messages are scrawled on the white walls, which are otherwise filled with empty photo frames (I’m told they’re just placeholders until a showcase of work by local artists is ready).
The kitchen is open too – so open, in fact, that you can see the chefs’ changing room at the back. It’s so perfectly hip that it feels a bit forced, a bit pretend.
The dishes are described with simplicity – a list of ingredients rather than a verbose portrait – and I admire that.
The à la carte has plenty to offer, but the five-course tasting menu, reasonable for its ilk at 45 quid a head, is the most popular choice in the room.
And if you’re still in any doubt that the place is aimed at local hipsters, the inclusion of a £25 beer pairing option should convince you.
The Frog puts far more emphasis on its bountiful selection of craft beer than its wine, and that’s fine by me. But ultimately, it’s the quality of the food by which a restaurant lives or dies, and the tasting menu lets you try much of it. And all ingredients, I’m told, are locally sourced.
There are snacks: a lovely, fatty, pork croquette with lovage; a sweet beetroot fest that’s a little too sugary for my taste; and a delightful cracker dotted with chunks of salt cod and little gems of citrus and pickled cucumber.
Then warm slices of sourdough with chicken butter, which made the bread taste like it’d been dipped in a meaty broth. Very nice.
The menu’s substance was made up of three dishes: two fish, one meat. These were worth the £45 alone, though they weren’t without fault.
The mackerel, cooked to perfection and accompanied by apple, avocado cream and titbits of fresh lime, was overly sweet. The roast hake, again flaky and divine, was ably supported by the smoothest mash I’ve ever had, and that moreish aniseed flavour of tarragon.
But the lamb, described on the menu as ‘Lamb, artichoke, wild garlic’, was so wildly garlicky as to make it unenjoyable.
The only respite came when you dipped into the puddle of cream underneath everything, which made me wonder if drizzling the sauce on top of the meat would have helped the balance of flavours.
The supplementary cheese course at just £4 was a treat. A doughnut filled with gooey fondue, and hints of truffle running through it.
Even the existence of a palate cleanser on such a menu is a pleasant surprise; for it to feel like a bona fide dessert was even better. The crunchy almonds with milk ice cream and dill would make for a delightful finale, but the best was yet to come.
Burnt honey doesn’t sound too appealing on paper, but sweetened with a malty pomade and toffee, the bitter shards of honeycomb were a winner.
If you’re worried about going home hungry – some tasting menus can be stingy with their portions – don’t be. I had to undo the button on my trousers halfway through.
Happy that I’d had plenty of value for my money, I took up the option to ‘Buy the chefs a beer’ for £4 each. Luckily the team is still quite small – I counted – but they definitely deserved a drink.
The menu might be priced to draw in customers – the place is only a few weeks old, after all – so go and try it soon. Such was the quality of the food, I don’t quite know how they’re making a profit. But I hope they do, because I’ll certainly be returning.
With plans for more restaurant openings in the coming months, this is just the start for Brand Handling. And for a first leap into the unknown, The Frog has landed well – not perfect tens, but certainly with a brilliant flourish.
The Frog
Ely’s Yard Old Truman Brewery
2 Hanbury Street
London
E1 6QR
Home cooked: anyone can try their hand at becoming a mini takeaway service
Online food retail is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. Giants like Ocado, recipe box companies, UK farms delivering meat directly to consumers.
All these businesses have identified consumers’ desire, on the one hand, for flexibility and convenience, and on the other, for an alternative to the traditional supply chain.
They combine flexibility and convenience with tech savviness: the Uberification of food, if you will.
DishNextDoor is a web-based start-up, covering some but not all of Hackney’s postcodes, that connects neighbours’ kitchens, so that amateur chefs, matriarchs, bakers and anyone else can try their hand at becoming a mini takeaway service for their community.
It provides home cooks with an ordering and payment platform (their website), free hygiene training, certification and insurance, as well as food packaging and a courier service.
The company presumably takes a commission to cover operational costs.
Well prepared: a Dish Next Door chef. Online reviews were universally positive
Each chef has a bio and picture, and the website is a showcase of Hackney’s multiculturalism.
Although the gender remained predominately female, there were many older people, and different nationalities and faiths, so felt like an avenue for interaction with people one might not naturally get to talk to on the street or in the shop.
User reviews were universally positive, making me suspect that community, not food, was the primary driver of sales. I can’t imagine that selling four portions of lasagne is a great earner, either.
The service has its kinks. I was enthusiastic about both ordering and cooking food for this article, before realising there was no delivery to my postcode in Hackney Wick.
Ordering from a friend’s house in Clapton, we found Clapton was not well covered either. Most dishes had sold out by 4pm.
Chicken tonight: chefs include hand-written notes in their deliveries
With three of us dining, and only five available cooks, we had few options, and not enough food from one cook to cover us all, so also three deliveries.
Our staggered meal consisted of a lamb kebab split three ways, a vegan paella and a haddock cream pasta.
The food was no better or worse than an average, home cooked, weekday meal.
I’ve seen a few similar services for Hackney and London, so it seems the market has yet to consolidate. But when it does, there should be enough cooks and variety that these issues will work themselves out.
User reviews might be more reliable, meaning one might be able to source excellent food. I hope DishNextDoor or a similar venture thrives locally – it may be a modern iteration, but at its core this is all about peeking into the houses we pass every day, and breaking bread with our neighbours.
Update, 7 July, 18.50: This article was first published in print on 1 July. We have since been informed that DishNextDoor is to close down and stop all trading.
In an area of London full of top-notch Turkish Cypriot restaurants and kebabs, the Greek restaurant is a rarity. Indeed I remember committing the faux pas of ordering tzatziki at a Turkish eatery in Newington Green and the cold, terse response I received. Yet I like tzatziki as well as cacik, so when Hungry Donkey opened just off Petticoat Lane by Liverpool Street, I decided to investigate.
An airy, modern restaurant, Hungry Donkey claims to serve ‘Greek street food’. The words ‘street food’ have been bandied about so much as to have utterly lost any meaning, but in this case, it represents a pared down menu, with a range of lights, modern starters, souvlaki wraps and towering sharing plates of meat accompanied by salad.
Immediately notable about Hungry Donkey is the warm service and modern décor. The restaurant may not have had much press, but it has its followers – when we visited on a Tuesday evening, the place was packed and we were happy to have booked.
We sat at a tall white countertop and perused the menu. Hungry Donkey takes its sourcing seriously, from the biodynamic olives to the ethical meat.
Transparency about sourcing is something sorely lacking in the lamb wrap world, and I am often torn between wanting to stick to well-sourced food and the fact that this would mean forgoing some of the best dishes in the borough.
As the meat platters take 40 minutes to prepare, we had some small plates and Greek wine while we waited.
The dip mix had a delicious bright green sauce that I incorrectly identified as broad bean – it was aubergine. The pan fried graviera cheese was a salty but less chewy alternative to halloumi, but the gigantes, white runner beans in tomato sauce, were no more than the sum of their (two) parts.
When the meat plate finally came out it conclusively explained Hungry Donkey’s popularity: large chunks of spit-roast, tender lamb, with a fresh multifaceted taste. For pudding we had what our server explained was a more authentic cheesecake, made with manouri.
It was definitely cheesier and saltier than cream cheese. My dining companion liked it more than I did, but it was well prepared, and I wish that more restaurants would stick to their guns with dishes that find a mixed audience.
Given there isn’t a wealth of Greek restaurants locally and I don’t always fancy a trek up to Wood Green, Hungry Donkey is a welcome addition to the area, especially in Whitechapel, which has some highlights but is not ready to beat Hackney Central at the restaurant game.
‘The Meat Stall’ by Peter Aertsen (circa 1508–1575). Image: Wikimedia Commons
Hackney citizens who love offal can enjoy everything here. There’s the posh stuff, like devilled kidneys or luscious roast bone marrow, available at St John Bread and Wine, or the braised ducks’ tongues at Sichuan Folk. Whilst for home cooks there is Ridley Road Market, where the array of things you might not want to look at twice are in fact a joy to behold.
It all depends on how you define offal: everything that isn’t muscle-meat can be in our line-up, from tail to toe as Fergus Henderson has it. So: tails, trotters, feet, claws and heads, including jaws, tongues, snouts, cheeks, ears, not forgetting brains and eyeballs.
Then swallow hard and go down the throat to the windpipe and oesophagus, to which are attached the ‘pluck’, a gloriously coloured grouping of lungs, heart, liver, spleen and pancreas, so often the eye-catching focus of Dutch still life painting (above right).
Then tangle with stomach, bladder (which blown up makes a nice football), kidneys and into the long and winding road through the intestines, gathering up testicles and bits of backbone on the way. Which is not to mention the gizzards, hearts and livers of poultry, and piles of their blanched and palid feet, like the hands of drowned corpses – and all of this is not just edible but seriously delicious.
Historical delicacies
In the past these were not just the unmentionable bits the poor were glad to get hold of cheaply, but delicacies in their own right.
When Thomas Cromwell, hero of Wolf Hall, was seeking his fortune in commerce and diplomacy in Europe, he must have charmed his way into sumptuous aristocratic banquets which included sophisticated dishes made from various offal parts, and brought these gastronomic delights back to his country house in Hackney.
He would have known Bartolomeo Scappi’s influential cookery book, published in 1570, which had a section on menus served at posh dinners in Rome, and a surprising number of dishes were of offal, and not just the nice items like sweetbreads and brains, but weird bits as well.
A kid’s head, roasted or stewed, then coated in egg and breadcrumbs and deep fried to get a lovely golden yellow, decorated with slices of lemon. Calves’ intestines and pluck get as much care and attention as veal liver and the prestigious roasts.
Local offal offerings
So we can go back to Ridley Road and look with fresh eyes at its offerings of offal – wholesome and delicious, and above all honest; what you see is what you get, whilst heaven knows what awful slaughterhouse slurry and unwanted body parts go into the cheap sausages and burgers on offer.
Kingsland Butchers explained to me how to cook their calves’ feet, chopped up and simmered long and slowly in water with your preferred spice mixture to achieve an unctuous broth to which vegetables and herbs can be added to make an invigorating and restorative soup.
Renaissance banquets offered lambs and kids’ heads cooked with care and served up as delicacies, decorated with a golden sauce and blue borage flowers or bright red pomegranate seeds.
Ridley Road has plenty of heads, and customers for them. The Turkish supermarket at the far end of Ridley Road has a fascinating meat counter, with everything from lambs’ trotters to sweetbreads and intestines.
Dietary restictions keep pork away from Ridley Road, but it’s not far to the Ginger Pig in Lauriston Road for a whole new world of offal and pig parts.
Home made pies and faggots can include offal, and the delicious brawn depends on all the unctuous parts of a pig’s head and trotters.
The Ginger Pig website has some delicous recipes for pig’s head, ears and tail, easy to follow and well worth a try.
Maybe our ubiquitous legionary stopped off to get a trotter or two to munch on as he trudged up Stamford Hill, remembering an early tour of duty in Tunisia where he admired a mosaic pavement with a plate of trotters decorated with bay leaves?
The English tradition of ‘keeping a pig’ lasted well until World War Two, fattened on household scraps and its own rations.
Back then it seemed we had all reverted to medieval habits, salting and curing hams and bacon, melting down the fat to make lard, enjoying the lovely crunchy bits left in the pan and eating up the liver and kidneys with relish, whilst cutting up the rest into joints for family and friends.
This was when a jar of home-made lard was a true mark of friendship.
Inspiration: Magic Breakfast founder Carmen McConnell MBE. Photograph: Lucy Young
Hackney foodies were honoured at this year’s Guild of Food Writers Awards ceremony, held in Holland Park on Wednesday evening (22 June).
Carmel McConnell MBE, the founder of the charity Magic Breakfast, received an Inspiration Award.
The charity, which was founded in Hackney 15 years ago, provides free breakfasts to schoolchildren who would otherwise go hungry.
Accepting a trophy and prize of £500, Ms McConnell said: “It’s on behalf of the amazing Magic Breakfast team and the 23,500 hungry children we reach every school day.”
At home: Hackney Citizen food writer Gillian Riley. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Meanwhile Hackney Citizen contributor Gillian Riley was narrowly pipped to the title of Food Writer of the Year.
Mrs Riley, 82, of Stoke Newington, was named one of the top three food writers in the country for her monthly articles in the Hackney Citizen about food history.
Up against Felicity Cloake of the Guardian and the eventual winner, Bee Wilson of the Telegraph, Mrs Riley described the experience of being nominated for a major award as “a hoot”.
“How exciting it has been to explore the history of our food here in Hackney, how it’s cooked and eaten,” Mrs Riley said.
“And what fun it is to share and enjoy not just the vast array of ingredients, but the different cultures that make and have made Hackney such an agreeable place to live.”
Gunpowder, an upscale modern Indian eatery in Spitalfields, emphatically does not take reservations, and even at 6.30 pm on a Wednesday, the small restaurant has a queue forming outside.
Thankfully, we miss the rush, and the real challenge now is making space for our glasses and plates, elbow-to-elbow with City folk fresh from work, tearing into lamb chops they’re eating with their shirtsleeves rolled up.
Given its proximity to Whitechapel, famed for authentic curries and home to the legendary Tayyabs and Needoo, I would normally opt for the neighbourhood joints over expensive, trendy small plates at a self-described ‘home style Indian Kitchen’.
Only, Gunpowder’s food is inventive, funny, and mostly excellent, and beats its peers like Dishoom when it comes to serving up posh Indian street food.
We start with the Rasam ke bomb, an amuse-bouche meant to resemble a deconstructed masala dosa – a sphere of fried dough resting atop a shot glass of classic dosa dipping sauce. In other hands, this would seem gimmicky and twee, but here it is a delight. Following that, we devour the outstanding okra fries. Dusted in a tangy powder, they are a crispy triumph, bereft of the characteristic sliminess of bhindi.
Unfortunately the chutney grilled cheese sandwich that follows doesn’t meet the standard set by its predecessors: it’s wan, on floppy white bread, and the cheese inhabits an unhappy limbo between melted and solid.
Thankfully the dishes that follow perk us up again: I have a spicy venison and vermicelli donut, an indulgent mess of carbs and meat, then flavourful whole grilled prawns in a spicy sauce.
Appetite fully sated, I struggle with my Kashmiri lamb chop, which is good but does not rival those of the aforementioned curry houses.
My vegetarian companion praises the saag with tandoori paneer and grilled mustard broccoli. We finish with a molten chocolate cake and masala chai custard, dense in chocolate but not in sugar, striking the perfect note on which to end our rich meal.
In retrospect, much of this meal is eaten with our hands – from the fries, donut and chop to the prawns, that come heads and shells on and that I have to pull apart myself, a messy and ungenteel undertaking but viscerally satisfying.
This feels intrinsic to the mood at Gunpowder – it may be upscale, but it’s fun and unpretentious, and the menu is an open invitation for diners to get thoroughly involved. Recommended.
Hackney Road is a far cry from the Mediterranean. Lined with electrical shops and building sites, it seems a world away from its nearby upmarket cousins, Columbia Road and Broadway Market, with their boutique eateries and fancy delicatessens.
But step inside Morito, which opened last month, and you are hit by the smell of za’atar wafting from the kitchen, sherry swilling in stout glasses, and bright lights beaming down on shell-shaped tiles.
Like its famous big brother on Exmouth Market, Morito on Hackney Road serves up tapas with a North African twist.
The menu is peppered with ingredients typical in Spain but hard to come by in London. For example the bonito – a meaty, dark, tuna-like fish, served with oloroso sherry and caramelised onion – which was rare, juicy and fell apart in the mouth in such a way that it had to be fresh.
Sherry, from the Jerez region of Spain, flows freely throughout the menu, cutting through the richness here or adding a sprinkling of sweetness there.
Grilled lamb chops were another standout dish – encased in a smoky anchovy and paprika marinade and succulent as you like.
Hunks of fatty rabbit – which is also common in Spain but has fallen out of fashion here – were served deep fried with an intense infusion of rosemary, and came with the welcome contrast of a vinegar dressing.
To accompany the meat we nibbled on delicate aubergine strips, fried and drizzled with feta and date molasses, the sweet, rich and tangy flavours working in harmony.
Slices of octopus burst with flavour, but were cooked a little long for our liking and served with a fava bean puree, which didn’t add much to the dish.
We regretted not ordering the dried fig, sesame brittle and bitter leaf salad, which looked vibrant and light and would have complemented the rich meat well (well done to the table next to us).
We rounded off with zamorano, a hard Spanish sheep’s cheese reminiscent of parmesan, with quince jelly – both delicious. But the deconstructed rhubarb tart left you wanting more of everything – the flakes of filo, the dollop of rhubarb puree and dusting of pistachio.
In true tapas style dishes are made for sharing and appear as they are ready. Although two plates promptly disappeared again before we’d had a chance to mop up the juices with the smoky, oily flatbread. But apart from feeling a little rushed – perhaps more a nod to authentic tapas style than a shortcoming – eating at Morito is a treat for all the tastes and senses.
Watercolour of Kingsland Road in 1852, by C.H Matthews, showing market gardens on the right. Published in The Gardens of the British Working Class by Margaret Willes
What was Sarah Chandler doing in Edward Dixon’s garden at six in the morning of Thursday 4 September 1740?
Scrumping, claimed Dixon, but she said the apples and pears in her apron were windfalls, and the judge let her off with a caution.
Luckier than Eliza Ingram and Jean Kidd who were caught red-handed stealing cabbages from William Stevens’s market garden in the parish of Bow and sent to Bridewell prison.
The Hackney Petty Sessions book revealed a lot of this sort of thing in the profitable market gardens of East London, where quality fruit and vegetables were grown in intensely cultivated plots for comfortably off clients in the City.
Ugly sisters
According to historian Malcolm Thick, market gardens were the ugly sisters of garden history, which until recently was all about pleasure grounds for posh people.
Hackney had its share of those, but was ideally placed for the commercial activities of hard-nosed entrepreneurs.
In the 1590s there had been famine in London, and feeding the poor was a priority; root vegetables helped, and so plentiful crops of carrots, parsnips, turnips, neeps and swedes, were grown as a substitute for grain.
Exquisite turnips
A century later Hackney was renowned for its exquisite turnips (it was only later that they became cattle feed) and today you can find in fruit and veg stores all over Hackney, small tender white turnips, or fresh radishes, which can be simply cooked and eaten hot or cold.
Claudia Roden has a wonderful recipe for simmering them in a very little water with afew fresh dates, then finishing off with butter or olive oil and salt and pepper.
It’s easy to chide the multinational supermarkets for promoting out of season fruit and vegetables, but our London market gardeners were just as crafty; there was big money out there and customers willing to pay for asparagus in early spring, tender young peas in April, long before the main crop, hothouse fruit, and abnormally precocious cucumbers and melons.
Londoners also provided the ‘night soil’ from privies and rubbish heaps to manure these costly crops.
What is now Pimlico was once a network of intensively cultivated plots, the Neat House gardens, and our own Mare Street was surrounded with garden plots and orchards, where Sarah Chandler nearly copped it.
Hackney was a good place for nurseries where exotic plants and palms were grown for sale, and Lord Zouch’s physic garden, run by Matthias Lobel, a world famous botanist from the Low Countries, flourished in Homerton High Street.
The Four Elements: Earth by Joachim Beuckelaer. Courtesy of the National Gallery
The painting immediately above shows the sort of vegetable stall that the advanced horticulture of the Netherlands could produce, a stunning celebration of enjoyable products, even allowing for the symbolism that both artists and their clients enjoyed.
Symbols
The vegetable kingdom is not lacking in phallic symbols, but some like the cucumber have double meanings, where it can signify the purity of Christ, and the apple that it is often associated with the fecundity of his mother.
The hothouse grapes might not have been displayed on every fruit stall, but they were out there to symbolise both the chastity of the virtuous young market woman, or the fruitfulness of a respectable married woman.
Fat-bellied cabbages and melons speak for themselves. Carrots and roots sit athwart each other in the shape of a cross, another possible religious meaning.
Late autumn fruits like mulberries are shown alongside early cherries, and various kinds of apple, the overall effect not unlike the more enterprising greengrocers of Hackney today.
Hackney offers most of the seasonal vegetables – from asparagus in whole food shops and most supermarkets, to ‘greens’ of various kinds.
It’s always irritating to be told that the only way to enjoy asparagus is to cut it just before use and run with it from the garden to a pot of boiling water in the kitchen. As if.
And even more irritating to have to boil the living daylights out of it the English way, before dunking it in slowly congealing melted butter, which oozes inexorably from fingers to wrist to elbow to armpit… such a mess, cancelling out the guilty thrill of eating with one’s fingers, when a sharp knife and fork are surely what nature intended.
But better still is to roll the trimmed and dried spears in good olive oil and salt crystals and roast or grill or barbecue, and eat with just a grinding of black pepper. Or you can sweat them slowly in plenty of butter until just tender, then serve with freshly-grated parmesan cheese.
Or scramble some beaten egg and cream into the butter-softened spears.
A good risotto is easily made with a stock made from the discarded woody ends of asparagus spears, along with a chicken carcass or some wings; the rice sautéed in butter or olive oil, then doused with the broth, and then the tender spears, cut into one inch lengths, incorporated into the rice after about five minutes, and the risotto, with more broth stirred in from time to time, served with more butter, and generous amounts of parmesan.
Gillian Riley is grateful to Malcolm Thick for sharing his gleanings from Hackney’s rural past.
Boceto, a café and brunch place by day and cocktail and tapas bar by night, has opened on Mare Street at the former site of quirky French bistro Bouchon Fourchette.
A little too far south of Hackney Central and too far east of London Fields to be located in a high density trendy eatery zone, Boceto nevertheless stands in good company next to infamous and hallowed institution The Dolphin (which might explain why the bottomless Prosecco brunch is not loudly advertised at street level).
A sister venue to two other restaurants in the revamped Brixton market, Boceto, like its siblings, focuses on signature cocktails and small plates.
The interior invites customers to linger: with the front shutter up, one can sit al fresco at a g-plan coffee table and observe the delights of Well Street junction.
Further inside the long and narrow space, the decor is simple and intimate, dusky and candlelit after dark: a fitting ambience for perusing a drinks menu.
Smashed avocado with fresh chillies and sunflower seeds on pan de coca
Whilst its south-of-the-river counterpart Three Eight Four has an eccentric, almost humorous menu, Boceto sticks to the classics.
The offerings don’t stray from traditional tapas fare, so chorizo, patatas bravas, gambas, croquetas, padron peppers and calamari are all there.
But the servings were generous and all the dishes were good. The chuletas (grilled lamb chops) stood out, served pink with pungent herbs and pockets of succulent fat, as did the shiitake and chestnut mushroom croquetas.
True to the version served in Spanish churrerías, churros were served with a hot chocolate pudding rather than molten chocolate sauce. The service throughout was warm, knowledgeable and helpful.
What the food menu lacked in range was more than made up for by the kooky cocktail list, where institutional confidence shone through. Helpless to resist any cocktail that has chilli in it, I chose the Abuela, which contained mezcal, chilli, raspberries, chocolate bitters and ginger ale.
My dining companion wistfully opted for the Bouchon Fourchette, in tribute to the closed restaurant and the steak tartare it took with it.
This was a fluffy pink concoction made of gin, creme de rose, egg white, lemon cream and lavender, and served with a macaroon.
With other enticing combinations like the ale-smoked Old Fashioned and the Gunpowder Negroni, I would recommend taking advantage of the £5 special introductory price for cocktails during May and June.
