Previously: Passing Clouds supporters outside the Dalston venue
Supporters of Passing Clouds who barricaded themselves in the venue in a last stand against eviction have been booted out by bailiffs.
Metal shutters have been put on the windows and doors of the Dalston club to stop any break-ins or further occupations of the venue, which celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this year.
Landhold Developments, which bought the building on Richmond Road in November, had an eviction order upheld by a County Court judge last Friday (12 August).
The decision prompted angry demonstrations outside Clerkenwell and Shoreditch County Court, with protesters wielding banners calling for the club to be saved.
Protesters then occupied Passing Clouds in defiance of the eviction order.
But bailiffs turned up on Monday evening (15 August) and seized back the building.
Now: bailiffs have put metal shutters on the windows and doors of Passing Clouds to stop trespassers. Photograph: Hackney Citizen
Venue boss Eleanor Wilson has vowed to fight on by appealing to the High Court, and has also applied to make the venue an Asset of Community Value.
Calls on social media have been made for Sadiq Khan to step in and save the much-loved venue, with one Twitter user framing it an “issue of money vs creativity”.
@SadiqKhan can you confirm if there is anything you can do to help @passingclouds please? This is a deeper issue of money vs creativity.
The lease for Passing Clouds expired in May, but when the landlord changed the locks supporters broke in to ‘reclaim’ the venue.
A spokesperson for the owner, Landhold Developments, said at the time: “Possession of the premises was lawfully taken back by the landlord on 16 June 2016, with two security guards remaining on site to protect the property.
“Later that day, a mob of 30-40 people, forced their way into the property, damaging the new locks that had been installed and ejecting the security guards.”
Eleanor Wilson, boss of the much-loved nightspot, told the East End Review/em> in June that she had made a private agreement with the landlord to remain until 11 August, but admitted no contract had been signed.
The government last week announced that Eleanor Wilson had been disqualified from acting as a company director for five years for failing to pay tax on time and sloppy book-keeping – details of which werefirst brought to light by the East End Review.
Passing Clouds’ boss Eleanor Wilson was approached for comment by the East End Review but had not responded by time of publication.
Globe Town Mural 24 years on with the residents who were originally involved with the project. Photograph: East End Citizen
When the Globe Town Mural is plastered over later this month it will mark the end of an era for those who grew up playing beneath this local icon.
Painted in 1992, the mural stands on Sewardstone Road, between the Wellington Estate and the Grand Union Housing Co-operative.
Residents from the estate and the cooperative worked together to design and paint the six-panel artwork with the help of renowned mural artist David Bratby.
About 20 people were engaged in the project, depicting themselves and their families. Also included are imaginary vistas that hold particular significance for local people: a Dominican beach scene, a sylvan clutch of birds, and the pagoda that once graced nearby Victoria Park but which, by 1992, was but a distant memory.
The pagoda was rebuilt for the 2012 Olympics, bringing the park up to date with its image on Sewardstone Road.
Design
Bratby teamed up with local co-op resident and artist Laurence Macdermott to oversee the design of the painting, and the pair ended up working together on similar projects around London.
The wall took approximately three months to complete.
Children took charge of the lowest part of the image while adults worked on the upper areas, painting in bits that had been outlined in chalk by Macdermott and Bratby.
When asked by the East End Citizen what struck him about those involved in the project, Bratby said: “They were quite diverse, different communities all came together”.
At the time the mural was painted, an adjacent community centre was a vibrant hub.
Barbara Moss and Brenda Thomas ran a laundrette in the premises, around which residents congregated and socialised.
Gabriela Salva, who grew up on Wellington Estate and knows most of the people in the mural, has been active in chronicling that pivotal period in the 1980s and 1990s. She said: “I don’t think anyone realised at the time what the mural signified”.
Changes
Several years after the project was completed, the laundrette closed and the neighbourhood changed forever. Yet local residents are proud of the fact that the mural is one of the few walls in the area that has never been vandalised.
Ruth Miller of the London Mural Preservation Society said: “One of the reasons we value the Globe Town Mural is that it pictures local residents and they still have an interest in the artwork. Not often do local communities get the opportunity to be portrayed in their local area.
“We think it should be preserved specifically because local people care about it and had some involvement in its creation.”
But preservation does not appear to be an option for the Globe Town Mural. The wall it adorns is owned by the co-operative, which maintains that works need to be carried out to maintain the building’s structural integrity, and that this will necessitate plastering over the painting.
Strain
Ruth Allan, spokesperson for the grand Union Housing Co-operative, said: “We need to do major work to our end of terrace property which is unavoidable.
“The ends of terraces take the strain of the entire terrace and the work required is because the render is crumbling and cracked in parts and this is causing internal damp and condensation.
“We also have a legal obligation to uphold the decent homes standards as set by the Homes and Communities Agency.
“It is true that the mural will no longer be visible and will be underneath the work due to be undertaken.
“It is with great sadness that we have found ourselves in this position.”
Allan hopes that it will eventually be possible to fundraise for a replacement mural, with the help of the Tenants’ and Residents’ Association that Gabriela Salva is currently setting up.
So if one era has come to an end, another spell of community partnership may yet be about to dawn.
Ujima Bakehouse in Nakuru selling healthy sourdough. Photograph: Ben Mackinnon
A bakery in Hackney has joined forces with a Kenyan charity to promote the health benefits of sourdough bread.
E5 Bakehouse, situated in a railway arch beneath London Fields station, is helping the Ujima Foundation in Kenya’s Nakuru region to provide training and employment for local orphans and to raise money for eye operations.
Ben Mackinnon, who founded the bakery, said: “About three years ago we had a call from someone wanting to do a training class with us. They were hoping to start a not-for-profit bakery in Kenya.”
That trainee was a doctor called Madeleine Bastawrous, who, along with her husband Andrew, set up Ujima after they spotted rising rates of diabetes in Nakuru, which is a four-hour drive from the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
Diabetes can cause blindness, and as a consequence there is a growing demand for eye operations in the area.
The couple decided that selling bread would be a great way to support the local community by funding eye operations and providing employment. And they wanted the bread to be healthy.
Mr Mackinnon said: “Madeleine got back in touch and asked if we could bring some bakery skills and training to take the project even further. I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity so I immediately said ‘Yes’.”
Not long after that, he made his first trip to Nakuru.
“I spent a couple of weeks running a training course and preaching the benefits of sourdough. Bread was never a part of the indigenous diet in Kenya, but now that it is, the bread they eat is full of oil, sugar, salt and processed flour.
“With sourdough, the flour is fully fermented and there are no additives, so it is much more digestible and nutritious,” he said.
E5 Bakehouse in London Fields runs courses for aspiring bakers. Photograph: Ben Mackinnon
All the breads at E5 Bakehouse are sourdoughs, and the hope is that replicating the model in Nakuru will help improve the local diet.
The Ujima Bakehouse is up and running, but the project doesn’t stop there, and Mr Mackinnon already has the next step planned.
He said: “The ambition now is to take a team from London to Kenya to help set up a café.
“The bakery is in an absolutely beautiful location, but it is quite a long and bumpy road into town, so it is not the sort of place you can just pop to for a loaf.
“Andrew and Madeleine have set up a new workspace in town, so we want to go out there and help start a café selling cakes and croissants as well as sourdough from the bakehouse.
“The burgeoning middle class and the community of expats means there is a growing market out there, and all profits go into training new bakers and helping to treat people with eye problems.
“For every 100 loaves sold, one person has their eyesight restored.”
Proud: Kevin Gill with his framed letter from President Barack Obama. Photograph: Kevin Gill
An ‘unknown’ artist’s oil-on-canvas painting of a billion-dollar bill with Barack Obama’s face on it has been gratefully received by the US president himself.
Artist Kevin Gill, 20, from Homerton, wrote to David Cameron earlier this year asking him to present the artwork to Obama when he visited. He was politely told this would not be possible, however, and was referred to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Undeterred, he asked Embassy staff if they would mind passing the gift to the 44th President of the United States, and they agreed to do so.
“I wrote to the US Embassy and said: ‘I’ve got a billion dollar bill for Barack Obama and I think it would make a great present as this is his last year in office,’” Gill told the Hackney Citizen.
After Obama’s visit to London, a letter from Washington DC promptly arrived at Gill’s home, signed by Obama himself and thanking him for the present.
In the letter, Obama said he was “moved” by the generosity and wrote that “holding firm to the ideas that unite us we can move forward toward a future of great peace and prosperity for all”.
Gift: Kevin Gill’s billion-dollar bill painting. Photograph: Kevin Gill
Gill, who is being mentored by East London street artist Stik, said he was thrilled with the response.
“To have got the recognition is a great feeling,” he said. “It means a lot.”
He added that he had chosen to paint a billion dollar bill because it represented a “first” as “there has never been a billion dollar bill” and that, until Obama’s election, there had never been a black President.
The cast of From the Ground Up. Photograph: Almeida
We are rather familiar with binary choices these days – leave or remain, independence or union, Clinton or Trump.
Our views on these issues unite and divide us, and depending on how you look at it, they can define us.
From the Ground Up is an immersive performance devised by the Almeida young company touching on the binary decisions that matter.
Written by the co-founder of the pioneering and provocative Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, it asks the hardest of questions directly to its audience.
Performed underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, the audience is led from the foyer to the street, and down into the recesses of the building.
On the way a fellow audience member suggested turning on her pedometer. Indeed the signs suggested it would be us, rather than the company, doing all the legwork.
The Almeida’s education department enjoys an excellent reputation, and is not afraid to challenge their young members with alternative and contemporary theatrical forms.
This show was no different – not quite a play, not quite live art, in fact it was more of a lo-fi game show experience where the only answers were yes and no and the only questions devilishly difficult moral dilemmas.
“Are you afraid of interactive theatre?” A stifled laugh. “Are you afraid that we might ask you to do something?” A terrified silence.
Once we were numbered and the preliminary assessments made, the real questioning began. Are benefit cheats unforgiveable? Does race matter?
Half of the group watched whilst the rest wrangled with their moral compass. Is monogamy idealistic? Would you fight for peace?
Absent of ‘actors’ in the traditional sense, the ‘stage’ became something else too – a means to view each other, and ourselves. With those who participated exercising their right to speak but at the high cost of being judged by everyone else.
And the company made it crystal clear that was what we were all doing: “Number 19 has never engaged in sexting” they would announce, exposing to the room any admission which had gone unnoticed.
Executing an unusual piece like this demands a huge amount of confidence and clarity from the performers, as well as the ability to put an audience immediately at ease.
The company had this in spades. The standard of work and the ability of the performers far outreaching their age and relative inexperience.
To create such intelligent, interrogative work and deliver it with such presence and panache, the fact that this cohort of 16-25 year olds is destined for great things is no longer in question.
Tucked in at the end of Commercial Street – just before it opens out onto Aldgate East station and the surrounding chaos – you’ll find Chuck Burger, plainly fronted with a black sign and solitary neon light.
The place is outfitted with no-nonsense tables, industrial metal fittings and paper menus, a bugbear for some but one that’s never really concerned me at laid-back fast-food restaurants. If you’ve ever visited a Meat Liquor restaurant, think that kind of mess-hall layout, but more laid back and without quite so much nightclub lighting.
Add a smidgen of Yankification as well, which stretches to its drink selection – resplendent with American and American-inspired beer offerings including the white-collar hipster’s choice Pabst Blue Ribbon, along with cocktails and ‘hard’ milkshakes with added rum.
Aiming to get into the American spirit, I decided to start with the diner staple that is the Oreo milkshake. However my sense of place was swiftly rerouted back to East London once I noted that said shake came in a jam-jar, as most things do when you’re that close to Shoreditch. Nonetheless it totally hit the straw-clogging spot, and I was ready for real food.
I was surprised, when I asked my ultra-friendly waiter for a recommendation, that the first thing that came out of his mouth was “the wings”, rather than anything beefy. He explained that they are first smoked, and then fried to finish, with a faraway bliss in his eye that suggested this was a Very Good Thing. Obediently, I ordered the buffalo wings, which come in sets of six or 12 for £5.50/£9 (as do the the Korean hot wings.)
They arrive slathered in sauce that delivers an unexpectedly huge piquancy (and almost lung-searing acridity if you breathe it in too closely.)
However the effectiveness of the cooking techniques, and therefore the moistness of the meat hidden away under the sauce and skin, ensures that the flavour of the chicken is not lost – a minor miracle.
It’s a similar story with the burger. The meat, at the centre of it all, speaks for itself – it tastes clean, fresh and with a perfect medium-rare texture. As Chuck prepare their own patties, they can even legally take it down all the way to rare – a treat for punters still gnashing their teeth about the pernicious effects of ‘elf and safety on the redness of their beef.
The additions, which consist of red onion, pickle, American cheese and Chuck relish (which includes Sriracha, seemingly a house favourite) in the cheeseburger, are nice but nothing out of the ordinary – think Burger King if they upped their patty game. I find myself wishing I’d plumped for a more adventurous item: perhaps the halloumi stack, or the Thai inspired pork ‘Same Same’ burger. The burgers range from £6.50 to £8.
If I were to pinpoint a disappointment, it would be that the onion rings, listed on the menu as “pickled onion rings”, had no discernable difference in taste from the usual, and in fact were a little too thin and overwhelmed with batter. The fries, McDonalds-esque in their slimline saltiness, or the sweet potato fries, are potentially better options side-wise.
However, for those hoping to knock back a few beers and some meat in a comfortable setting, Chuck Burger can barely be quibbled with – they certainly get the ‘meat’ bit 100% right.
Taking on the world: Sean McAuliffe and Femi Adeyemi. Photograph: NTS Radio
A Dalston radio station is going global after receiving funding for an international tour.
NTS, an online station run from a small studio in Gillett Square, has been awarded £57,000 by Arts Council England to take its sound around the world.
Sean McAuliffe, Managing Director of NTS, said: “We are really happy that, with Arts Council England’s support, we will be giving a group of young DJs and producers the chance to perform in countries across the globe, including Greece, Canada, China and Australia.
“The fund will also make it possible to help promote these artists and hopefully further their careers globally.”
The NTS International Festival Tour will take a selection of underground artists overseas as part of the Arts Council’s International Showcasing programme.
Joyce Wilson, Arts Council England’s London director, said: “We’re really pleased to be able to support NTS and its international tour.
“This exciting organisation is one to watch as it takes the vibrant talent of London from the underground to the world stage.”
NTS was founded in 2011 by DJ Femi Adeyemi and operated out of the tiny shack in Gillett Square where it remains to this day.
Adeyemi wanted to create a counter to commercial radio with no on-air advertising and interesting music 24 hours a day. The station’s tagline – “Don’t assume” – sums up the diversity on offer.
Five years later and NTS reaches more than 360,000 listeners in the UK and beyond, with extra studios in Los Angeles, Shanghai and Manchester.
The station has over 200 regular hosts and has helped establish artists such as Skepta and the Young Turks record label.
You can see the red, green and white of Italy’s national colours in the pizza made with tomato, basil and mozzarella, named after Queen Margherita, who was captivated by it on a visit to Naples in 1889. She and her husband King Umberto were there on a charm offensive, to consolidate the newly acquired unity of the country, little knowing that this humble street food would go on to captivate the rest of the world, becoming a symbol of Italy.
The red of the tomato is perhaps the defining colour of Italian cuisine today. It was also the colour of the shirts of Garibaldi’s army, which helped achieve that unity, a reminder of his comrades recruited from the slaughterhouses of the Argentinian beef industry, where they wore protective garments that mitigated the horrors of the job.
It’s hard to imagine the food of Italy without tomatoes, but in the centuries of fine cooking that preceded their arrival, after the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century, Italian gastronomy was famous throughout Europe. So what did tomatoes have to add? Precious little according to some, who like Elizabeth David, poured scorn on the red tide of crude colour and all-pervasive flavour that has in many ways coarsened this subtle cuisine. Ingredients that can speak for themselves are often drowned in a flood of over-assertive tomato, that comes cheaply, as a paste or purée, tinned pulp or whole fruit (yes, botanically speaking it’s a fruit not a vegetable), or sun-dried.
What do we get from tomatoes that can’t be got elsewhere? A sharp sweet fruitiness, which in the past used to come from a squeeze of unripe grapes (verjuice), gooseberries, pomegranate juice, lemon or bitter orange juice, dry white wine, or a bitter, acidic herb like sorrel, and an additional oomph from umami, sometimes called the fifth taste (more on that in next month’s Citizen), which properly used tomatoes can give us, more as flavour enhancer than bulky ingredient. So let’s go for the fruitiness, and keep tomatoes for what they do best, bringing out other flavours rather than drowning them.
We like to think of sweet old grannies in sprigged aprons lovingly preparing homemade bottled tomatoes and purée, and there are a lot of them about, but in reality commercial tomato products are a major industry, a huge chunk of Italy’s economy, as David Gentilcore tells in his gripping Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, and a huge factor in the cooking of other nations too.
A pasta recipe, All’Amatriciana, is a delicious combination of tomato and other flavours. It’s based on ‘cinque P’, five P’s: pasta, pancetta, pomodoro, pecorino and peperoncino. A tasty version involves serving the pasta, spaghetti in this case, with a sauce made by frying some pancetta cut into small pieces until crisp in a very little olive oil, you put these aside and cook some garlic in the oil and fat until golden, than add a little dried chilli to taste (I use Chinese Facing Heaven chillies, taking care not to burn them which would make them bitter), then chucking in some chopped fresh tomato, not too much, and quickly cooking it down. Serve this on your cooked and strained pasta, with some grated pecorino or parmesan, and the crisp bacon pieces.
What makes this dish for me is the home-cured bacon of Meat N16 in Stoke Newington Church Street which I use instead of pancetta. It’s made from some of their free-range pork, nice and fatty, salted for only few days, then lightly smoked.
And the tomato needs to be tasty too; it’s worth paying a bit more for a heritage/heirloom tomato, rather than the watery, insipid little supermarket beauties, bred for appearance and shelf life rather than flavour. If you look up commercial tomato sites on the web, there are awesome statistics covering every aspect of the mass production of this nice little earner except flavour, whereas on the Isle of Wight site every other word is flavour, with poetic images of pleasingly irregular multi-coloured specimens.
Hackney citizens are fortunate in being able to get these and other organic tomatoes in its many farmers’ markets and whole food stores. They are so good to eat that all you need is salt and a generous splosh of olive oil (don’t ever try to ‘drizzle’ the stuff, a meteorological misnomer if ever there was one); then if you add some chopped garlic and a few basil leaves you have Italian patriotism on a plate and a nice lunch, along with a bit of cheese and some bread, for less than a quid, whereas a cheap pizza, made with inferior ingredients, would set you back many times more.
If you want to experience Italian pasta without tomatoes try the now trendy carbonara, using this time not bacon but guanciale, cured but not smoked pork cheek, which gives up lots of gently flavoured fat in which you toss the cooked and drained spaghetti together with one beaten egg per person, and generous amounts of parmesan. The trick, as some of our best recipe writers have told us (especially in the Guardian), is to reserve a cup of the well-salted cooking water from the pasta and add it in small amounts as you rapidly stir in the egg, so that the sauce goes all creamy, and doesn’t curdle. With all that bacon fat the one thing you don’t need is cream as well. This is a subtle dish, where the pasta is not overcome by the sauce, and you get to enjoy its taste and texture, as well as the smooth coating.
Way back in the 1460s Maestro Martino, cook to popes and cardinals in Rome, made his Chicken with verjuice (see Hackney Citizen, September 2013) using sour grapes to get a nice fruity tang to some chicken joints fried with chopped bacon and finished with a sprinkling of fresh herbs. If you substitute tomato for the grapes you get Pollo alla Cacciatora, which in spite of the pundits I see as fried chicken, with the addition of chopped bacon and vegetables, including tomatoes to give that sweet fruitiness we mentioned, and a splash of wine tossed in at the end, and reduced quickly to a concentrated dry braise, not a stew.
The magic combination of tomatoes and bread lurks in fond memories of the soggy tomato sandwiches of childhood picnics, which should have been horrible but were blissful. There is something about the way moistened stale bread (if it is good bread to start off with) combines with tasty tomatoes and a few basic seasonings like salt, oil and vinegar, to create a new taste sensation. The pundits don’t say why or how this happens. Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen explains most of the physics and chemistry of food, but not this. It looks as if a very happy relationship between the enzymes that make stale bread a good vehicle for liquid things (somehow it doesn’t get soggy) and those that give ripe tomatoes their tastiness, creates a magical mixture of textures and flavours that can be found in panzanella, a salad based on tomatoes and stale bread, (see Hackney Citizen, August 2014) and the Spanish pan con tomates.
Here the simplest possible combination of ingredients creates one of the best and most basic items of Hackney’s many tapas bars; that at Escocesa in Stoke Newington Church Street is lovely. The good bread keeps its bite, while the garlic rubbed into it when toasted, combines with the fresh tomato, salt and plentiful olive oil, left to rest a few minutes, to give a savoury mouthful that is both soft and crunchy at the same time. Gazpacho is an extension of this; chopped tomato, garlic, and whatever stuff comes to hand (onion, cucumber …), together with grated stale bread, seasoned with salt and augmented with good olive oil, somehow creates a mixture that is more than the sum of its parts. It can be whizzed up in a blender, or pounded by hand in a pestle and mortar to get a rougher texture, and of course the seasonings are up to you, but it is those mysterious enzymes that do the trick.
The Cast of The Childhood of a Leader. Photograph: Tom Munro
Last month’s East End Film Festival premiered Brady Corbet’s chilling directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader.
There is certainly a lot at play in this film, which is part political thriller, part psychoanalytic drama about how a fascist leader is created.
Set in 1918 in a quietly beautiful but bleak French village, the film imagines the life of the son of diplomat and aid to President Woodrow Wilson as his father negotiates the Treaty of Versailles.
While the characters’ interior lives remain mysterious, the tyrannical patriarch’s son Prescott has his lonely, cruel childhood laid bare.
The film stars the much-adored Twilight idol Robert Pattison, but critics have been left mesmerised by the brilliantly unsettling performance of ten-year-old Hackney-based actor Tom Sweet as the film’s leader in the making.
One might assume that Sweet had starred in a number of plays from a young age. As it happens, Childhood of a Leader is his first performance.
Even more surprisingly, the opportunity came about by chance. “I started acting when I was nine, it all happened really quickly – I was walking home from school with my parents one day, and I was just stopped and asked if I’d liked to audition for the film,” he explained.
Sweet’s role certainly isn’t an easy one. The film progresses through a number of increasingly disturbing ‘tantrums’ by the politician’s son, as he boils over under an austere, rigid home life.
Prescott doesn’t seem to gain any enjoyment out of antagonising the adults around him. He reacts with indifference to the recipients of his outbursts and his lack of emotional intensity appears far more believable than the usual ‘creepy child’ stock character rolled out in Hollywood.
Sweet and I were in agreement that Scott Walker’s shrill, orchestral score makes Childhood of A Leader truly fearsome. “I hadn’t watched any scary films before and I don’t like them that much but I’ve watched Childhood of a Leader four times and didn’t find it too bad! I suppose it definitely helps that I know it so well and understand the character. I remember being really frightened of the score when I watched it in Venice though – the music is amazing but so shocking”, he said.
It is clear that Prescott’s uncaring parents are to blame for his rebellion. Sweet admits that a number of scenes were difficult to film. The first scene he shot involved an especially violent altercation between himself and his onscreen father, but for Sweet, that’s all part of the fun. “Yeah, he’s definitely very mischievous! I think what I love most about acting is that I can be two totally different people, it’s the chance to step away from ordinary life for a bit and become someone else.”
While much of the critical attention to this film may be on Corbet’s debut as the director, the articulate, gifted Tom Sweet also provides much cause for excitement.
Grilled crispy pancetta, with trimmings. Photograph: Victoria Seabrook
The Woodberry Wetlands nature reserve on Stoke Newington’s east reservoir is startlingly beautiful for something in inner London. Wild flowers roam rampant across the banks and birds and butterflies shelter in towering reedbeds.
So beautiful, in fact, that to take in the surroundings most would happily tolerate a café offering only greasy fried eggs and watery coffee.
Thankfully you needn’t do so at Lizzy’s at the Coal House, the café in the converted former 19th century coal store.
For the healthy there’s bircher muesli or eggs any way you like them. For the indulgent, choices include grilled pancetta, or truffle mushrooms with chevre. There are a few less common options too, such as hot smoked mackerel or homemade salt beef.
It is a sweltering July day when we take a seat on the lawn outside. The weather doesn’t scream soup, but the chilled and creamy lentil, pistachio and mint soup was quite refreshing and plenty filling.
For mains I (the indulgent one) pick the grilled crispy pancetta, with garlic peas, parmesan, and poached egg, topped with basil oil. With such fine ingredients it is a cut above your regular cooked breakfast and costs only £8. And it arrives piping hot, unlike at some breakfast joints where the food seems to have been kept lukewarm. The added truffle field mushrooms are well worth the additional £1.
My companion (the healthy one) opts for a middle eastern style quinoa and cauliflower salad, laced with cumin and raisins. The light, fresh flavours nicely cut through the earthy tones of the accompanying smokey aubergine paste. The dish was served beautifully, though it was a touch on the small side.
A local flavour runs through the menu, with much of the food sourced from London businesses. Most of the bread – nutty flavoured seed-packed rye or crispy sourdough – and delicious cakes – think date and cashew or chocolate and Guinness – are baked by the local Spence bakery. The ice cream is from a North London gelateria – we recommend the salted caramel or pistachio.
To my surprise few of my friends in Hackney even knew the reservoir existed. So I am somewhat loathe to sing the praises of Lizzy’s café too loudly, or the beautiful surrounding nature reserve, in case I might no longer be able to find a free table. But the food is so delicious, such good value and the café is in such a peaceful setting, this eventuality is surely inevitable.
Lizzy’s at the Coal House is open 9-4 daily and the kitchen closes at 3:30pm.
