Verden, a wine bar that opened in Lower Clapton last year, has been receiving rave reviews in the national press. Throughout, it is described as a locals’ restaurant, and a sign of how far Clapton has come. One review described it as “good for everyone … locals, especially”, while the Independent lightheartedly claimed its owners are here to educate the East End in a good vintage.
Yet Verden is far from being a neighbourhood restaurant. It was opened by a duo who worked respectively in PR and at Mayfair’s legendary and astonishingly expensive seafood restaurant Scott’s. When we went to dine early one Sunday evening, we were seated between a group who’d ventured there from Kilburn and were debating how to get home from the depths of Hackney, and a family who bought their young child a £17 main.
This isn’t to say the food there isn’t exquisite. Verden makes its own charcuterie, changes its mains daily, has a gorgeous cheese selection, and serves around 100 types of wine. Diners sit in an elegant, minimalist interior, with low lighting and a long wooden bar. However, when I asked our server to recommend some charcuterie and wine, he gave us chorizo and an unexciting Vouvray with no further elaboration – two ubiquitous menu items that did little to showcase Verden’s wares.
Exquisite: A wild mushroom dish
The highlight of the charcuterie was the lardo: glistening cubes of pork fat layered with sea salt and rosemary. Following onto the mains, there should have been three to choose from, but the restaurant had run out of the lemon sole, leaving us as options a lamb neck dish with braised baby gem lettuce (flawlessly prepared but also not revelatory in any way), and a cold burrata with peperonata that, while also faultless, was hardly suitable for a cold and rainy March evening.
The salted caramel chocolate pot that we finished with was rich, velvety and luxurious, and the wedge of Epoisses cheese had just the right ratio of pungency to creaminess, but we left Verden feeling that something was lacking: standing around the corner from a closed community centre and African takeaway, it lacked the warmth and DIY cheer I associate with Hackney, and as long term locals, we did not feel particularly welcome or at home.
Gillian Riley goes on a mission to make Vietnamese food. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The best antidote to an overload of warming British winter stodge is the light, bright, fragrant food of Vietnam. We can enjoy it in Hackney, thanks to a cluster of food stores and places to eat, some in Shoreditch, some on Mare Street.
An evening stroll in Shoreditch, at the end of Kingsland Road, revealed a resolute line of diners outside Sông Quê patiently waiting to get in. No hope. But back at noon the following day, exhausted by a bewildering foray into the Longdan supermarket, I collapsed into a bowl of pho, the archetypal comfort food of Vietnam. The ineffable lightness of the broth with its dense but subtle flavours, wafts the cold and hungry food historian into a beguiling comfort zone.
Trying to make pho at home would be counterproductive, so many ingredients, many of them secret, and so much skill is involved, but the small side dish of aromatics can transform many domestic recipes. The supermarket has a refrigerated display of Vietnamese herbs. The other day I counted five different kinds of mint, three of basil, and the wonderfully aromatic perilla, with its purplish leaves and lemony, minty flavour.
The demographics of the Vietnamese presence in London are confusing; an unofficial count of 5,000 shows it’s a small proportion of Hackney’s population, slipping under the radar, but beckoning clients from all over North London to shop and eat here. We are not a hub, like New Malden is for Korea, where 20,000 of the total 30,000 Koreans in the UK live.
The vast land mass of the Indo-Chinese peninsula has a complex history and a variety of cuisines. All three of Vietnam’s geographical areas have a special kind of cooking, but share a tumultuous history, from Chinese dominion for over 2,000 years to the recent tragic horrors of the Cold War. The fertile but much misused land produces fine ingredients and an amazing range of aromatic herbs and vegetables, and people as gentle and bright as their cuisine.
Balance of sensations
The five flavours of Vietnamese cooking are spicy, bitter, sour, salty and sweet, which are used to enhance or adjust the qualities of the ingredients. Colour comes into it too. Red, black, white, green, yellow, all have a special significance. Taste, texture, aroma and mouth-feel all combine to achieve a balance of sensations, from the crispness of deep fried batter-coated prawns, to the crunch of fried shallot on a crisp papaya salad, to the slithery bite of a rice-pancake wrapped salad roll, or the gooey slurp of noodles in
beef broth.
Each of the elements in a Vietnamese dish could be quite violent if insensitively handled, but the subtle combinations of ginger, galangale, garlic, onions, chilli and lemon grass, with the many kinds of fermented fish sauce and fish paste, and peppermint, spearmint, sweet basil, Thai basil and coriander, and many other special herbs, are gently aromatic.
Try it at home
One can eat, or browse in the food stores and come away with the key ingredients to try out at home. One of these is nuoc mam, fish sauce, a condiment with an unbelievably horrible smell and a sublime taste, made from rotting and fermented fish and their entrails. Liquamen, the Roman version, was manufactured on an industrial scale in Spain and Southern Italy and exported all over the Roman Empire. Some came to London, in ships that docked at Southwark, so it is not too fanciful to imagine the legionaries stopping off in Shoreditch for a bowl of fragrant pho.
Happy shopping: Vietnamese groceries. photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
For the sad squaddie heading for the chilly north, there must have been some comfort in smuggling a small flask of liquamen into his kit. If he could have stopped off and turned right up what is now Hackney Road, the most portable and fragrant condiment in the Longdan supermarket might have been a bunch of lemon grass. This herb is a lemon flavoured grass with all the aroma and pungency of lemon peel without the acidity of the juice. It is associated with Thai cuisine, but used all over South East Asia and brings perfume and pungency to many Vietnamese dishes. Our soon to be footsore and homesick legionary might have had the foresight to bring as substitute a plant of the hardy herb lemon balm, it grows well here, and gives a lemony tinge to salads and sauces; used with the native mint, coriander and mustard. We can use these in our attempts to cook Vietnamese food at home, while the fragrant herbs and vegetables mentioned above add an extra fragrant pungency. But the predominance of this amazing fish sauce can be judged by the impressive display of sauces and condiments in the supermarket. Buy lots, like me.
Duck with Orange
This is my adaptation of a
well–known recipe, of which there
are many versions:
2 duck breasts
2 oranges
garlic (to taste)
2 cloves finely chopped
a lump of ginger, size of a walnut, peeled and finely chopped
3 or 4 stalks of lemon grass
finely sliced
1 tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
a handful each of chopped basil,
mint and coriander
some slivers of the orange peel
Cook the duck breasts skin down to sweat off most of the fat, pour this off and keep for something else. Turn over and add the juice of the oranges and all the other ingredients except the herbs. Cook covered on a low heat until tender (30 minutes to an hour). Remove the fat and slice the meat thinly. Sprinkle the herbs over, and serve with rice and a salad.
Green papaya salad is one of the stars of Vietnamese cuisine. Best done by a professional with a secret sauce and a machine for getting the hard veg into sinuous julienne strips. This dressing can work with any combination of salad vegetables, and cooked meat or fish.
Vietnamese-inspired Salad
Some sliced cooked beef,
rare if possible
1 cup bean sprouts, washed
1 head of blanched chicory
(endive), sliced
1 small red sweet pepper sliced
4 spring onions sliced diagonally
For the dressing
Vietnamese fish sauce
A little rice vinegar or lime juice
Sugar, palm or unrefined, to taste
Vietnamese fish paste to taste
chopped garlic and ginger
several leaves of lemongrass,
very finely chopped
For the garnish
Chopped basil, mint and coriander
Deep fried shallots and garlic
(from the supermarket)
Red birdseye chillies, thinly sliced
Stir fry the sweet pepper and chicory for a minute or two, add the bean shoots and toss for a few seconds, tip into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients, mix well and slosh in the dressing, give it a good turn and add the garnish just before serving.
Coffee connoisseurs: Owner Josh Strauss and Dane at the Wash. Photograph: Independent London
A new addition to Well Street, The Wash café is a coffee connoisseur’s destination. Customers can first choose their beans from a range of artisanal blends and roasters – including a guest blend – and then the method of preparation; as well as the traditional espresso machine drinks, there’s an American style filter coffee and an Aeropress.
Owner Josh Strauss was inspired by spending time in Australia and New Zealand, and is determined to bring the Antipodean passion for great quality coffee to his business. He and his head barista will enthusiastically talk you through different roasts in the way a sommelier recommends wine. In addition to coffee, The Wash also has fresh juice and a variety of teas on offer.
As there is no kitchen, food options are limited to a few simple options of soup, salads, toasties and homemade beans on toast with a boiled egg. While lacking in excitement, this is perfectly pleasant lunch fare, and is served with excellent bread from the social enterprise Dusty Knuckle bakery. There’s also a good selection of baked goods.
Hearty breakfast fare at the Wash. Photograph: Independent London
Opened just a month ago, The Wash has ties to the community and has hosted a live broadcast of Wick Radio. Other projects in the pipeline include film viewings, pop-up supper clubs, a potential veg box scheme and a bottomless filter coffee option for nearby office workers and freelancers. There are other DIY renovations and experiments in the works, and the atmosphere of The Wash is summed up by a turntable against which are some cheerfully propped up records for punters to play. It’s a homemade, welcoming atmosphere paired with a sharp focus on quality coffee. A good example of the small, ethically-minded businesses that lend Hackney its quirky charm.
Seared scallops and chorizo with Jerusalem artichoke purée. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
If you walked past Palmers restaurant on Roman Road, you might not make a point to dine there, not least because it’s often almost-empty.
But that would be your loss.
Unlike most new restaurants in East London, Palmers is better than it looks, not the other way round.
This place is decidedly substance over style. Located on the ground floor of a block of new-build flats in Globe Town, it could be mistaken for the dining room of a cheap hotel – cavernous and purely functional.
Large photographs of illuminated produce don’t do the place justice. A close-up of a jar of pickled onions look like a science experiment in preserving eyeballs; another of octopus tentacles illuminated red are actually quite frightening.
Run by a Czech father-and-son team, Palmers serves up modern British cuisine with a French twist – a suitably diverse combination for a neighbourhood restaurant in E2.
The ‘rustic’ food zeitgeist has led too many restaurants to think they can get away with anything as long as it’s served on a board. Thankfully, Palmers hasn’t caught on.
Nothing here is try-hard. Artfully-arranged seared scallops and chorizo with Jerusalem artichoke purée (pictured), and a difficult-to-master Bouillabaise are downright classy dishes, but big enough to be good value – and not a cheeseburger in sight.
Just out of reach of passersby buzzing below on the towpath, Palmers sits at street level near an intersection of the Regent’s Canal constantly traversed by weekend food explorers. In the search for a perfect Sunday roast, too many miss a trick by skipping Palmers out.
The Sunday feasts are a neighbourhood staple, filling the place at around £12 a head, and with portions far more generous than the sceney Empress across Victoria Park.
On a recent visit, a neighbouring diner was so enthusiastic about the beef she invited herself into our conversation to recommend it. She has it every Sunday without fail, apparently.
Beef being sold out, we sprung for the pork belly – a huge slab of the stuff with plenty of crackling and perfectly crunchy roast potatoes, topped with a tart cranberry sauce that should have been apple, but that’s by the by.
Mare Street has become a new foodie destination, dotted with hip new eateries like Rita’s and The Advisory. The Narrow Way, however, still feels like a relic of old Hackney, untouched by so-called gentrification. So it feels odd walking up this stretch of road on a Saturday night, looking for a ramen bar of all things, where previously the best food offering might have been a Greggs sausage roll.
Yet here we are. Tonkotsu, which also has a branch at Selfridges, is not only open for business, it is absolutely heaving. A security guard at the door informs prospective diners that it will be at least 20 minutes for a table. Meanwhile, customers sit at the long, industrial bar, sipping custom made cocktails and Japanese beers while they wait. It looks like the restaurant staff are struggling to cope with the rush: we watch the waitress count table numbers under her breath and repeatedly try to deliver a broccoli dish to our neighbours, who insist they have not ordered it.
Tonkotsu, meaning ‘pork bone’, refers to a pork bone broth from the Japanese region of Kyushu. This style of broth is a creamy, thick, fatty pork soup made from boiling pork bones for many hours, and the stock really feels like it would turn to jelly if it were not warm. Served over a generous helping of homemade wheat noodles, and topped with a soft boiled egg, gleaming pork belly, spring onions and bamboo shoots, I can finally see what the fuss is about. This rich, hearty dish is well worth £11. My dinner partner, who orders the vegetarian Shimeji, Shiitake & Miso Ramen, finds her dish to be good but a little dull, but I suspect that even the most expertly prepared miso-based ramen will pale in comparison to the succulent meat stock.
We order a variety of side dishes – the shiitake and bamboo shoot gyoza are excellent, as are the crab croquettes. The salt & sansho pepper squid is unremarkable. There are a variety of other amuse-bouches to order, such as fried chicken, and okonomiyaki (Japanese savoury pancakes), however the restaurant has run out of these. They are really a sideshow anyway: we’re full and satisfied, and will have plenty of time to try the other bits when we return for another bowl of ramen, which we will assuredly do soon.
Street life: Kaffa Coffee on Gillett Square. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The original coffee drinkers hailed from the Ethiopian province of Kaffa.
According to legend, it was there in the ninth century that a goatherd experienced something of a Eureka moment when his goats started behaving excitedly after munching on some bright red berries.
On his wife’s suggestion he took the berries to a monastery, where they were renounced as the devil’s work and thrown into the fire. The rich aroma of the beans filled the monastery, and led the monks to investigate further.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to travel quite so far to sample authentic Ethiopian coffee. Kaffa Coffee is located in Dalston. It uses beans grown on a plantation in the Kaffa province and roasted on site in Gillett Square.
Full of beans: Kaffa Coffee roasts its own beans on site. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The plantation and business are owned by Markos Yared, who founded Kaffa Coffee in 2004. The original Kaffa Coffee was a stall in Camden. Four years later, Yared moved into new premises.
His signature coffee isn’t cappuccino, latte nor macchiato but a black, strong, rich coffee served in a small espresso cup with an Ethiopian flag.
Strength in depth: Kaffa’s signature blend. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Kaffa is very much a family-owned business, and Yared’s wife Haile serves homemade injera and wat, typical Ethiopian cuisine, every Thursday and Friday.
A few outdoor tables are available to sit and chat and staying outside this laid back and unpretentious coffee place makes you feel local to the square.
With the shop open till late, Yared also enjoys sharing his taste for Ethiopian jazz, reggae and blues, turning Kaffa and Gillett Square into a very lively and vibrant place to be.
Kaffa Coffee serves probably one of the best Ethiopian coffees in town. Its coffee is strong, and so is its fan base.
A new café and sustainable start-up in Dalston is providing fresh meals on a pay-what-you-can basis prepared from food that would otherwise go to waste. Ruth McCabe and her co-director James, a chef, were inspired by a video by the Real Junk Food Project in Leeds, a restaurant that serves perfectly good food diverted from landfill.
They decided to replicate the project in London and were met with support from local businesses and the Food Surplus Entrepreneurs Network. The Bootstrap Company in particular (also based in Dalston), helped by donating a piece of land to the team in August 2014.
So far the most popular menu item is deep fried tomatoes and the café, which aims to cater for everyone, had a large selection of vegetarian and gluten free fare, although it also serves chicken and, most recently, ribs. The outdoor venue is warmed in winter months by firepits and a chimney, although it will probably benefit most from the summer months.
Customers so far have ranged from the homeless to families with children and Ruth says on the whole the money they receive balances out the times people don’t pay. “Our aim is to demonstrate that you can start and run a business cheaply,” says McCabe, “and we have a policy of not judging people about payment at all – the point is that the food would have gone to waste anyway.”
The Save the Date café was built entirely with reclaimed materials by a core of volunteers and opened in two months. Food is donated from wholesalers at Borough Market, local groceries, and a high street chain known for their chicken that have declined to be identified. The café benefits from a tremendous selection of fresh ingredients and a menu that can be adapted everyday – “a chef’s dream,” McCabe says.
When asked about the name Save the Date, McCabe says she chose it to demonstrate the arbitrariness of best before dates on food: “They are not necessarily an indication of the quality. For example, groceries can only keep vegetables on a shelf for a few days or bakers have to sell all their bread within one day when it’s still great
to eat.”
Worth their salt: bagels prepared on Brick Lane. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Where better to pursue the curious history of the bagel than Hackney? Far from its apotheosis in the modern New York Deli, this enigmatic ring bread has been made, revered, and consumed by people of many faiths in many lands from ancient times to the present day. In Hackney we have East End bagel bakeries producing thousands of them every day, alongside equally committed Turkish bakeries with their delectable simit and other braided or plaited breads, all part of the same family.
A bagel has been defined as a doughnut with rigor mortis, or more accurately as the Roll with a Hole, and perhaps too much has been made of the hole, its metaphysical and corporeal potential exploited in jokes and anecdotes.
The distinguishing features of the bagel are its shape: a ring of bread with a hole in the middle, and the cooking technique: a preliminary boil in salted water before baking in a hot oven. A yeasted dough made with white wheat flour is shaped by hand into rings which when they have risen are dunked in a cauldron of boiling water, taken out after 30 to 40 seconds, allowed to dry, then baked. The preliminary boiling gives the bagel its firm chewy texture and dense tough crust. “Munchy firmness” as an enthusiast put it. Cheap mass-produced versions, made with a blast of steam instead of boiling, to save time and effort, have the disappointingly fluffy texture you might expect. Avoid them.
Pretzels are made in a similar way, the intricate knotted strips of dough are first treated with lye (caustic soda) or boiled in water with bicarbonate of soda, then baked. The preliminary treatment gives the surface a sort of glazed effect, a salty sweetness and a crunch, that is irresistible.
But neither of these methods are specifically Jewish, they have been deployed all over Western and Eastern Europe for centuries. Roman soldiers marched on their conquests with buccellatum, rings of twice-cooked bread that were hard and unyielding to eat, but kept well. You could soak them in water and eat with anything, like ship’s biscuits which are also twice cooked. In Puglia in the south of Italy taralli are a much-loved snack surviving from the Middle Ages. They are rings of dough, made in the same way as bagels, but cooked to a hard crispness, and made to last, unlike bagels which are best gobbled up straight out of the oven.
Medieval paintings of the Last Supper show ring-shaped breads on Christian tables. In the 1650s Suor Maria Vittoria della Verde, a nun in an enclosed convent in Perugia, wrote down a recipe for ciambelle affogate, drowned ring breads, in her kitchen notebooks, recognisable as what we call bagels. Bartolomeo Scappi, master cook in the papal kitchens in sixteenth-century Rome, had a recipe for boiled then baked ciambelle.
For centuries the East End of London has been home to waves of immigrants, French Huguenot weavers and Dutch merchants. From the 1880s Hackney has been home to immigrants from Poland and Russia, joined in the 1930s by Jews escaping persecution by fascist regimes. By then the bagel had become an iconic Jewish bread in Warsaw, evolving from a luxury white bread for the privileged to a much-loved cheap snack for the many, and cherished here in London as a memory of home and a tangible token of solidarity and comfort.
The historian Maria Balinska in her book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modern Bread has unearthed the fascinating history of the bagel as iconic Jewish comfort food and its migration to England – and to New York – from Poland in the nineteenth century. The bagel had a big part in the development of trade unions in New York where the battles of Local 338 to secure decent working conditions for bakery workers was a critical phase in labour relations. But by the 1960s the millions of them consumed daily were supplied by massive out of town factories, steam-baked, not dunked in boiling water, like the traditional product, but sliced, frozen and distributed far and wide. This mechanised bagel became emblematic of New York’s vibrant deli culture, and now the ‘bagelisation’ of America has given it a universal identity.
Bakeries like the ones on Brick Lane and the Kingsland Road area are survivors from the time when the population was predominantly Jewish, and are now selling wholesome old-fashioned bagels to an appreciative cross-section of the borough’s multi-racial residents.
Brick Lane has perhaps an over-hyped reputation for food from the Indian subcontinent, but it’s also home to a huge spectrum of food from other faiths and climates. An austere and sophisticated Nordic eatery rubs shoulders with the long-established Beigel Bake at number 159 where visual appeal is nil and warmth and friendliness a huge plus. You wait in a line with passing strangers, beautiful but bewildered Japanese visitors, and determined elderly food historians from Stokey along with eager gastro-tourists and their guide, all rubbing shoulders amicably with tolerant locals, patient to wait their turn for freshly baked bagels filled with lox and cream cheese, or massive portions of salt beef. A similar establishment flourishes amicably two doors down.
It is quite a contrast to another 24 hour bagel bakery on Ridley Road, supplied by Mr Bagels, a hugely successful company that makes industrial bagels for wholesale or retail sales, prepared in frozen or partly cooked form, using mechanical shaping and steam baking methods.
Halfway up Stoke Newington High Street is The Bagel House, with good bagels with a wide range of fillings, and space to enjoy them. Further north is a small, less hyped bakery, with Turkish pastries and breads as well as bagels baked on the premises. It seems to satisfy the wide range of customers at the bottom of Stamford Hill, but its Turkish products are more satisfactory than the rather mild bagels, which are not what our nostalgia calls for.
You really do have to go to Brick Lane to experience the tough love of the real genuine bagel, chewy and resistant to most molars, freshly baked and smelling of yeast and flour, perfumed by the whiffs of gherkin, lox and salt beef, that lurk within. Get there now, stand in line, and bite into a fragrant chunk of East End history.
Gillian Riley is the author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, published by Oxford University Press.
My favourite restaurants are restaurants that don’t feel like restaurants. They have good, simple food, nice people and a well-stocked bar. They feel more like you’re sitting down to dinner at a friend’s house. Just with waiters.
That’s why Efendi popping up in the neighbourhood was such a pleasant discovery. It’s the latest venture from the team behind This Bright Field, which used to stand in its place on Cambridge Heath Road.
This time owner Emel Sumen is going back to his roots and serving authentic Turkish food. It’s billed as a neighbourhood kitchen and is just that – a light and airy restaurant full of scrubbed wooden tables and a long serving bar where you can see the chefs at work.
One wall is floor-to-ceiling windows, so it’s full of light all year round and outside there are plenty of tables to take in the evening air and watch the bustle as the days get warmer.
We took too long picking, so they started bringing out heaped platefuls to try.
We kicked off with a very decent carafe of house red, mopped up with some freshly baked bread and lemony, garlicky hummus goodness.
Next was a mezze plate laden with everything from sigara boregi – warm little cigars of crispy filo pastry stuffed with feta and herbs – to sucuk – grilled discs of spicy Turkish sausage, to crunchy falafel.
The icli kofte was another highlight – moist little balls of bulgar wheat with minced meat, herbs and walnut – as were the fried squares of juicy halloumi-like hellim from Cyprus. I fear there is no upper limit to how much of that grilled cheese I could eat.
Luckily the mains came out before I could find out for certain. We had an impressive platter of morsels from the grill including gently spiced chicken shish – and lamb too for good measure – as well as lamb ribs.
Emel says nothing goes on the menu without his approval and that’s clear. The food is simple, but delicious.
This is a wonderful, homely Turkish kitchen that will draw you in and post you back out into the night well-fed, well-watered and well looked after.
