london restaurants

tried to get into pizza east yesterday, a fucking monday, and there was an hour's wait, even though the place was huge. fucking hipsters. went to hoxton furnace instead, suckling pig pizza was fantastic.

walked past hoxton furnace recently...is that new? it was absolutely packed on friday afternoon

suckling pig pizza!

"Furnace – at 10 years old - is one of Hoxton’s oldest restaurants" they say.

just saw that yeah...never noticed it before. i'm only on that street when i've had little to no sleep and want to go to the breakfast club, which is generally really great food imo despite the insufferable ultra-branding.

The oldest 'on-trend' restaurants in Shoreditch are Cantaloupe, Viet Hoa and the Great Eastern Dining Rooms. Furnace has great pizza and they will let you split one with your friend while you nurse a glass of wine, without chivvying you along. And if you're in a hurry, they don't disappear just as you're trying to pay and go.

It's not the hipsters' fault that a restaurant they go to can't manage its own floor - I think the management just might be... shit? Pizza East also sucks because if you reserve for 10 people for, say, a birthday party, they a) want the table turned in two hours and b) inflict a £30/head set menu on the group (which includes NO drinks and a lot of salads and cheapo appetizers you probably wouldn't order, given your own free will with your own money). Both a) and b) are unforgivably cynical IMO because I don't know anyone that wants (or expects) to spend more than about £15 on food at a pizza restaurant or to spend only two hours celebrating at a birthday dinner.

Oh and also Hoxton Bar and Grill, going roughly 15 years (!), which is still reliably good.

Nothing anyone is saying about Pizza East makes me want to even bother, but then I'm not sure I'd go to Shoreditch for pizza.

Has anyone tried that Saturday night food market yet? Seems like a genius idea but I'm rarely in the area at the right time.

Their pizza *is* good, but I've only ever had it in a catering/served at afterparty context. NB the Pizza East party was one I wound up not attending because THIS IS NOT HOW WE BEHAVE IN THE LATE CAPITALIST ERA, OK? I do think many of my current pizza issues would be solved if Malletti was open nights and actually delivered.

Seriously tempted by the hot dog cart on Old Street but I am suffering similar logistics issues to MDC.

i like the pizza at Story Deli (which has just moved up Brick Lane a bit to Sclater Street) but man it's kinda pricey.

the pizzas in the lauriston are pretty good...stone oven, v tasty.

were you in spitjack's last night tracer?

No, tonight!

i look fwd to a report, that spot has changed hands a few times (as well as the one next door)

noticed there's a byron opening up in hoxton sq which is long overdue...

After that, they need to stop expanding. Otherwise they will become shit.

they really are taking over

There's like 15 of them already, I can't see how a few more is going to cause a massive drop in quality if they're careful.

they have just opened another breakfast club restaurant just off bishopsgate. the food is quite nice but yeah really pretentious (and quite pricey iirc?)

pizza east is pretty rammed in the evenings - try going for an early lunch it's not so bad.

pricey enough yeah. i get the chorizo hash browns every time, it's about a tenner. the drinks are mad pricey tho.

ive never been to breakfast club which is weird since i really like going out for breakfast

ooh that sounds good. it's a shame because i love the idea of ny diner breakfast food in london except in new york it's cheap.

to be fair to them for what you pay you get v big portions, a nice salad on the side, good quality ingredients imo. the chorizo hash browns is like a breakfast chorizo with i think, two eggs, and the hash browns are lots of fried potato really, think there's a mushroom involved too and a big green salad on the side. often struggle to finish it..

I know I shouldn't blow our own trumpet and stuff, so please take this with the usual caveats, but I'm really proud of the Saturday brunch menu we've just started doing at Mason and Taylor. It's on Saturdays noon until 5-ish. Bottomless coffee too!

actual brunch in london is cause for celebration wherever it may be found. and i bet M&T do it really well.

p sure i've mentioned it before on here but you owe it to yrself to try the hawksmoor's breakfast at least once

yeah i've been...it was amazing. hard not to stay for hours drinking cocktails and racking up a gigantic bill mind you.

yeah the combo of food + drinks pretty much writes off the rest of the day

the burgers there are good actually, had one a month or so ago...

how much are they? like you said, every time i go there i end up spending way too much. sort of need to decide beforehand what i'm going to get + then not stray from that idea

think they're 15 quid, not really worth the saving vs a steak unless you definitely don't have cocktails. that said, the day i had a burger they asked did we mind sitting at the bar cos it was really busy, a sunday afternoon. it was actually way nicer for two people in the circumstances (dudes having a drink, rather than say romantic drink) and the barmen kept giving us little shots of cocktails they were experimenting with, so ended up getting fairly drunk and a bit of free stuff. worth considering if there's a chance to sit at the bar.

M&T might be a good place for London ILXors to celebrate 10 years of elegantly wasted time...

as it so happens i finally managed to get down to m&t for the first time on sunday - thought it was pretty great, even though you could obviously kinda tell sundays aren't its raison d'etre in terms of how the place is laid out/conceived etc (quite
understandably). had the nicest bit of pork i've had in a while.

the midweek plates and yeah, the saturday brunch look amazing though, i look forward to coming back for those.

I tend to go to M&T for the beer rather than for the food per se but the small plates are really good for just ordering a load when you suddenly decide you're hungry. It's become my pre-cinema boozer of choice now.

i had half-intended to have a little dig at the chef for the grilled mackerel with rhubarb sauce the missus had but googling around it turns out that the recipe is actually a thing and not some virtuoso flight of fancy so fair do's i guess, people must like it generally. hardly a disaster or anything and it almost kinda worked even, but it didnt convince me personally.

xp haha yeah i should probably get back into drinking beer, felt a little shamefaced just ordering ale there...

re pizzas in east, no one will thank me for saying this but if anyone's feeling lazy the haggerston actually spunk loads of unnecessary money on the finest ingredients for theirs, believe it or not. delusions of bistro etc.

the haggerston? ugh

i guess if it's not 1am on a saturday it might be ok

no... it's never ok. but for a takeaway it's an option is all i'm sayin.

also i heard pizza east make so much money they send dudes over to like miami conferences to become pro pizza baristas or whatever. have never been fucked to try them out myself though. and there's always shitty old stingrays on columbia road.

love that place! it feels like san francisco or something. yeah the pizza's not great but really, if you find yourself pitched up on columbia road during the day, who cares, you're living the good life.

had a horrible pizza in stingrays before...just go to brawn and spend three times as much to feel as if you can afford to live on colombia road.

i want to live in a world where every pub has the ale options of m&t, tho actually i almost always just order camden pale ale, love it. has anyone noticed sainsburys selling better ales these days? you can get brewdog stuff, sam adams, blue moon, and a few others all on special for 99p a bottle (at least in sainsburys whitechapel.)

if i don't find 99p a bottle blue moon in my sainsbury's local this evening i'm blowing the place sky high.

Blue Moon.. it's like a sweet white lager or something? my dad loves that shit

I'm not a huge Sam Adams fan (too cloying, like Sierra Nevada) but i wouldn't mind a sixer for old times sake

don't think the locals have it...since the first commandment of sainburys local seems to be "thou shalt only sell two types of piss lager at more expensive prices than corner shops"....

Has anyone tried the Jamaican place next to the Shacklewell Arms yet? I've noticed they do portions of jerk/curry et al with and without the rice and peas, but I only had patties after my friend's party and haven't sampled anything else.

Camden Pale Ale and Camden Lager seem to be spreading round London a bit - they were on sale in the Royal Albert in New Cross last week. That stuff is no Meantime, but it's decent all the same.

kernel is my favourite of the three, i prefer camden to meantime tho. possibly just cos have meantime all the time in the florist, no doubt it's not kept properly there either, certainly varies in taste a lot.

kernel's really good, wish you could get it in more places

is blue moon that fancy stuff that certain bars serve you without telling you it costs a fiver a pint? cos GRRRR.

yeah and beware, there's a blue moon that's a BELGIAN WHEAT BEER that has a barely distinguishable tap, it's horrible. i also discovered recently, not the hard way thankfully, that somebody here who said the florist sells pints for a fiver was right. it's that rothhaus shit that they have. had to drink freedom lager there on saturday as everything else was off, it wasn't good at all.

you can buy bottles of kernel in the deli downstairs at vic park, it's about 2.50 or 3 quid tho.

kernel is my favourite of the three, i prefer camden to meantime tho. possibly just cos have meantime all the time in the florist

thread is so disorienting to someone used to restaurants in the distant bourgie suburbs where u can still find italian places petrified in time since 1981