East End Review

Tag: Food and Drink

Queen Elizabeth Park eateries: Breakfast Club, Mason & Company, and Randy’s Wing Bar – reviews

The Buffalo wings at Randy are highly recommended. Photograph: Joe Woodhouse

Hackney Wick is virtually unrecognisable from its pre-Olympics self. When I moved in to Queen’s Yard almost six years ago, there were few bars and restaurants. Now it is a bustling centre for boozing.

Once upon a time the famously ugly Olympics Media Centre loomed over the disused canal, rendered inaccessible by a razor wire fence. Whilst passing one day I spotted a dead dog in the water and informed some Park officials. “Oh we know,” they responded breezily. “It’s been there for ages!”

But with the London Legacy Development Corporation’s regeneration plans coming to fruition, this stretch of canal has been transformed into highly desirable real estate, with a glut of canal-front restaurants opening. I visited three of them to investigate. On a sunny day, all of these places have outdoor seating in lush greenery, making it a perfect place to linger with a beer.

Out to brunch

The Breakfast Club, which started out in Islington, is like a TGI Fridays for the younger set. It is a cheerful destination that serves American-style breakfasts, heaping piles of nachos and a range of cocktails. At brunch I had the chorizo hash, which was perfectly serviceable, and my friend enjoyed her vegetarian sausage sandwich.

Later, to see what it was like in the evening, two of us attended a boozy bingo night, where a girl dressed as a grandma demanded that the bar staff bring out shot after shot of sours for the players. It was slightly corporate for my tastes but unpretentious fun nonetheless, and a great place to go with a group of friends or colleagues for a knees-up.

The Breakfast Club
29 Easy Bay Lane
E15 2GW

Playing for crafts

When I heard Mason & Company’s premise – craft beer – I was dubious. The Wick already houses three breweries after all. It is, however, worth a visit. From the owner of the Five Points Brewing Company, this is a glossy bare pine venture with industrial motifs.

The beer menu includes rare and limited edition brews from around the world, and whilst some half pints cost as much as £5, the selection is exceptional, with up and coming breweries such as Siren as well as local favourites Beavertown and The Kernel. Heading up the food is former Kerb regular Capish? with items like deep fried spaghetti balls and meat loaf corn dog. The menu seems to be a parody of traditional Italian-American fare and was too rich for my tastes, although would serve as good ballast for extended drinking.

Inside Mason & Company. Photograph: Owen Richards

Over two visits I tried most of the menu: the aforementioned spaghetti balls were forgotten by the server and never made it to my plate, but the steak sandwich stood out, tender and melting and topped with taleggio cheese. And for vegetarians the aubergine parmigiana was a fine option.

Mason and Company
25 East Bay Lane
London
E15 2GW

Winging it

My favourite among the new arrivals is Randy’s Wing Bar. It was formed by Richard and Andy, two street food graduates with a family connection to a Norfolk chicken farm.

“They couldn’t give the wings away,” Richard explained, and thus a business idea was born.

Like the previous two restaurants, the menu is predominantly American-inspired, with chicken wings, popcorn shrimp, fries and cocktails. The atmosphere is unpretentious and inviting. We had a taster of wings, which include the classic Buffalo and Kansas styles, as well as Gangnam (Korean style), Bombay and Hanoi (a fish sauce recipe akin to the one from the famous street food outlet Pok Pok). Curiously not the only place in this line-up to serve chicken scratchings, it seems like the perfect local joint for a cocktail and snack, where I might head to unwind with friends after work.

Randy’s Wing Bar
28 East Bay Lane
Here East
The Press Centre
London
E15 2GW

July 25, 2016
The Frog – restaurant review

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

July 18, 2016
DishNextDoor – review: feed thy neighbour with delivery service

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.

dishnextdoor.co.uk

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.

July 8, 2016
Hungry Donkey review: Greek street food a welcome addition to East End

Greek Salad at Hungry Donkey

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.

Hungry Donkey
56 Wentworth St, London E1 7AL
hungrydonkey.co.uk

July 8, 2016
Scoffing offal – an East End history

‘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.

July 4, 2016
Gunpowder, Spitalfields, restaurant review: ‘ inventive, funny, and mostly excellent’

Chettinad Duck served at Gunpowder, Spitalfields

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.

Gunpowder
11 White’s Row
Spitalfields
E1 7NF

June 22, 2016
Boceto review, Hackney Central: Spanish class

Traditional and contemporary tapas at Boceto

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.

Boceto
171 Mare St, E8 3RH
bocetohackney.com

May 17, 2016
Lobster Bar, Hackney Central, review: sensational crustaceans

Under the sea: Lobster Bar is the latest restaurant to open on Richmond Road

There is now a lobster bar in Hackney Central. While we were all processing the idea of ramen on Mare Street, Lobster Bar opened with little fanfare in early September, nestled between Raw Duck and Lardo, serving seafood, steaks and cocktails.

Cristine Leone, its director, runs the popular Ivy’s Mess Hall and, until recently, the now shuttered Little Ivy’s on Lower Clapton Road. Of the latter, Cristine says its success was also its demise: “People who came for a meal would stay for hours,” she says, “which was great…” The small number of tables however, meant the venture wasn’t financially viable without cuts to quality. So the team decided that rather than compromise they would open Lobster Bar, where I can happily report that no such cuts are apparent.

The seafood is excellent: we had Maldon oysters on the half shell, followed by a smoky, meaty, decadent chargrilled octopus leg (more on this below), as well as seared scallops on a bed of silky cauliflower purée. The lobster melted in the mouth (partially due to generous quantities of butter), without any of the dryness I often associate with lobster. We also had a steak that was tender enough that I suspect it could have been eaten blue, and wasn’t just a standalone for those who hate shellfish.

The restaurant’s inventive cocktails featured a plethora of Italian liqueurs, and as I am wholly uneducated when it comes to wine that is not of the most basic French or Spanish variety, our friendly waiter gently guided us to a stunning Riesling, with sweet undertones but dry enough to partner up with seafood.

We concluded the meal with a delicate poached peach, wexcellent food and servicehich brings me to my only qualm with LB, and extends to most new restaurants I’ve visited in the last year: a sense of reiteration. LB’s tasteful, gleaming “warehouse chic” interior is so similar to its neighbours that after being seated, I expressed consternation that Raw Duck had shut, believing to be in its former premises.

Similarly, there’s food déjà vu: the grilled octopus leg, the single peach as pudding: both have appeared multiple times in places I’ve reviewed in the last 12 months, the peach being at the last three consecutive places I’ve visited. Rillettes and Burrata, while not on the menu here, have also popped so frequently that they seem on track to become the next truffle fry and brioche bun.

I don’t, however, want to detract from the excellent food and service we received at LB, which, on the whole, seems to be what we’ve come to expect from new local ventures, along with charcuterie and pisco sours.

Lobster Bar
205 Richmond Road, E8 3NJ

April 20, 2016
Il Cudega, review: capturing the northern soul of Italy

Italian job: ‘Delica’ pumpkin and barley risotto with crispy salsiccia at Il Cudega

When in Milan, do as the Milanese do.

Well, that’s not exactly how the maxim goes – and this foodie has never been to Milan. But if you visit Il Cudega, a new Lombardy restaurant on Westgate Street, order whatever the staff recommend. You won’t be disappointed.

The Lombardy region in northern Italy takes in the southern Alps, the lakes and has Milan as its capital. To start with we were recommended a complex white wine to accompany a salad with warm goat’s cheese, which was hard, and with an intensely mature flavour.

The wine was a winner with the carpaccio too, which was served generously, with a mustard and lemon dressing and raspadura, a kind of Lombardy Parmesan.

The menu is limited but ample, and changes according to the produce available.

If you can stomach the ethical dubiousness of veal, try the restaurant’s signature dish, Vitel Toné – veal tuna. It is roasted veal served in cold strips, with an anchovy, lemon and caper sauce.

In the 18th century Italians in landlocked Milan could not source tuna from Sicily, the chef tells us. Instead, they pretended to eat the delicacy by cooking thin strips of red veal in a mildly anchovy sauce.

And thank goodness they did, because this is divine. The pairing of a strong fish with a stark meat is unusual – but it works. The veal is so tender it almost dissolves and is served cold – which gives space for the anchovy flavour to come through.

For the more ethically-conscious the vegetarian food is as robust and flavoursome as it comes. I plumped for a main course of dark and meaty wild mushrooms, with a sweet pumpkin puree that cuts through the warm, oozing Gorgonzola served on top of crispy polenta.

For dessert, the Gorgonzola sorbet sounds terrible but is quite the opposite. The cheese flavour is subtle, and it comes served with a scoop of mascarpone gelato, a pear compote and walnuts. The flavours sit somewhere between a cheeseboard served with fruit and a cheesecake. It came with a flavoursome sweet, red dessert wine.

The quality of the produce, the hospitality and the extensive knowledge of the staff are as impressive as each other. The chef and waiter visit each table to explain the provenance of ingredients and why they’ve matched them with others.

Whether it’s the name of the beef farmer on Lake Como, the time at which they harvest the pumpkins, or the type of wine to have – they know their stuff and it enhances the experience.

There’s little to fault about this eatery. It’s pricey, though so are many places in Hackney these days, and the portions are modest. But you get so much bang for your buck.

Il Cudega
358 Westgate St, E8 3RL
ilcudega.com

December 16, 2015
Kansas Smitty’s – bar review: ‘like a big living room but with live jazz and kickass drinks’

All that jazz: Kansas Smitty’s

There’s nothing more electric than live music and it feels there’s never been a better time to enjoy it in East London. A couple of weeks ago I sat in a cellar bar packed with people listening to nothing but the sweet sounds of a piano and a double bass picking out tunes like ‘Pitter Patter Panther’ and ‘Lady Be Good’ with just the chinking of glasses being picked up and put down on tables.

It was Basement Tapes night at Kansas Smitty’s, one of the area’s newest jazz hangouts, where each week one member of the self-titled house band invites other musicians in to play music to a ticket-only crowd. That week it was band member Joe Webb on piano and Conor Chaplin on double bass and both were excellent.

It’s ticket-only, presumably, because otherwise there’d be a scrum on the door. Open since May, the venue already has a loyal following of regular customers, with one saying he and his friends got there several hours early to make sure they got a spot.

The Kansas Smitty’s house band regularly play the likes of Ronnie Scott’s, the Vaults and the Vortex. They’re led by Giacomo Smith on clarinet, who hails from upstate New York. The bar is their permanent base in the city, with a film night on Tuesdays, jazz throughout the week and plans to put on more live events as autumn draws in.

The model of bringing in musicians from the wider jazz community to play there means there’s always fresh music coming through and creative collaboration really is at the heart of what they’re trying to promote with the venue.

“The clearest goal we had from the outset was that we had to one day have our own bar,” says Kansas Smitty’s manager Jack Abrahams. “We’ve always felt that there was this whole group of people we’d met along the way and were yet to meet who just needed a home to come together in – we are now in the what-happens-next phase.”

With the Jackdaw jazz café just opening in Clapton, is this something of a ‘golden era’ in terms of the jazz talent in in the city right now?

“Absolutely,” says Abrahams. “As London’s land value goes up the larger venues are proving unsustainable and closing down so lots of smaller ones spring up. So much so that the independent arts, music, drink and food scene in London is bordering on frenzied. Plenty of shows means plenty of musicians which means everyone’s bringing their A-game no matter how small the show.

One thing you’ll notice, is that it’s not a pretentious place. It feels more like a big living room, except with a kickass drinks menu and some of London’s brightest musical talent performing each week.

This wouldn’t be a bar review without mentioning the drinks and here it’s all about the juleps. There’s a beautiful ‘Scarborough Fair’ with bourbon, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, toasted almond, salted heather honey and mint. The Allotment is also good, this time with gin, nettle, elderflower, carrot, coriander seed, apple, pear and mint.

All the alcohols are infused over night with herbs and flavours. Served in crushed ice out of a metal cup, the idea is that as the ice slowly melts different flavours are unlocked – so don’t knock them back to fast. With ingredients ranging from Tonka bean, nutmeg and pimento to cloves and chamomile there’s plenty to try, as well a fridge-full of cool beers and ales as the music heats up.

Great music, great atmosphere and exemplary juleps. Don’t miss out.

Kansas Smitty’s House Band will be playing at the bar on 23 September to celebrate the launch of their debut album.

Kansas Smitty’s
63-65 Broadway Market, E8 4PH
kansassmittys.com

September 18, 2015