Mouse & de Lotz Cafe
103 Shacklewell Lane
E8 2EB
0203 489 8082
www.mousedelotz.com
by Jane Rasher
As a former resident of Shacklewell Lane, I'd been feeling a tad ambivalent about Mouse & de Lotz. You know, out of that jaded sensibility that takes hold once you've lived in an inner-city neighbourhood long enough to pre-date its most recent innovators: 'But I was here first!' your inner pioneer wails. 'In the mornings of old, I used to be greeted by yellow bulletin boards crying murder, not a quaintly chalked menu offering sun dried tomato sandwiches, Square Mile coffee and zucchini cake.' Well, yes, but you didn't set up a light and airy deli-caff in a disused shop, did you? Well, no.
And with that realisation, I walked the 15 minutes from my ever so slightly grittier new neighbourhood, back down memory lane to breakfast with a former flatmate. Feeling like locals, we compared recollections of the 'bad old days' of 2007 and pondered the march of the artisan eatery and the impact on the area's traditional Turkish stronghold. Variety, we decided, was the spice of Dalston and who were we to stand, po-faced, in the way of multicultural entrepreneurship such as that of Nadia Mousawi and Victoria de Lotz? Well we'd be fools not to appreciate the good taste and humour that can couple mismatched charity shop-salvage tea cups with vintage postcards bearing such punchy annotations as 'Jesus was a cross dresser.'
I made a similarly un-PC faux pas when mispronouncing my order of Bircher muesli as if it related to Islamic dress. Not so clever now are we? But the waiter took it with good grace and tactfully explained the soaking process that distinguished the uncooked oat concoction from your Alpens and your Jordans. I was presented with a snazzy almond, passion fruit & natural yoghurt variation on Dr. Bircher-Benner's 1890s recipe; part sharp bite from the gem-like pulp, seed & flake topping, part milky, gloopy goodness beneath. My muesli was served up in a recycled Bonne Maman jam jar, which I think would improve most things, from flowers to frogspawn (which, if we're going for the gross-out vote, my brekkie did slightly resemble). Together with its deservedly reputed restorative effects, however, it was the perfect comfort food accompaniment to a lengthy monologue on the twin peaks and troughs of career and romance. By the time Esther could bear to listen no longer, this marvellous mush can only have improved. Would that more of life's pleasures were as amenable to distraction, and for £3.50 at that.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Friday, August 05, 2011
Workers Cafe, Archway
Workers Cafe
740 Holloway Rd
Archway
N19 3JF
020 7281 5333
by Fi Tatta
A guy had broken my heart. Broken it like he'd intended to all along, like he'd been playing a long game since the day we met, broken it like he meant it.
He'd done the job thoroughly. My heart was shattered like the crazed glass of his dropped iPhone.
It's at times like these that one really needs breakfast. In my case, a dirty breakfast - the kind of breakfast that would meet my mood. Sparkling glassware and linen tablecloths and thick fingers of homemade bread would only have presented an appalling contrast with my inner despair. I needed a greasy spoon.
I entered the Workers Cafe in Archway (no apostrophe, no need to bother with such trivialities) in a haze of tears. And I ordered the breakfast, expecting lumpen eggs, grey sausages, a limp disaster of bacon. But, I was mistaken. Don't get me wrong. This isn't good food. It's bad food. But it's bad food done well.
There were piles of crunchy hash browns. Simple sausages with crisply browned skins. Fluffy scrambled eggs. A puddle of perfectly normal baked beans. There was even a little disc of bubble and squeak. It was the Platonic ideal of an ordinary fry-up, and yet how far we usually fall from ordinariness. I would eat it again. In fact I have done. It had the simplistic comfort I needed, the sense that a breakfast just like this has been eaten many millions of times, will be eaten millions of times in the future.
It is a curious thing, the end of a relationship. You end up carrying around the shared secrets, the hidden invented mutual language even though the thing to which those secrets appertained is gone and the only other native speaker of that language is vanished. I imagine that ex-KGB agents still sometimes find codewords and ciphers playing on their tongue as I remember that exact way he would tap my shoulder three times very softly which meant, in our symbolic language "I love you".
And then, eventually, will we pull out the same tired words, the same once-adorable gestures, for a new partner, who will not know their origin? We hope that love will bring something new out in us each time, but perhaps that is only an illusion. We are who we are.
Breakfast, curiously, is a kind of solace for such thoughts. Perhaps there was once an ur-sausage, a first slice of toast. Probably there was some moment when we first tasted a fried egg. It is lost to us now. But the need for breakfast does not go away because the first breakfast is gone. More important than recapturing the perfect breakfast is accepting one's longing for breakfast, and being willing to take what delight is available in the breakfast before you.
I did not expect to be reminded of delight by the Workers Cafe. But I was.
740 Holloway Rd
Archway
N19 3JF
020 7281 5333
by Fi Tatta
A guy had broken my heart. Broken it like he'd intended to all along, like he'd been playing a long game since the day we met, broken it like he meant it.
He'd done the job thoroughly. My heart was shattered like the crazed glass of his dropped iPhone.
It's at times like these that one really needs breakfast. In my case, a dirty breakfast - the kind of breakfast that would meet my mood. Sparkling glassware and linen tablecloths and thick fingers of homemade bread would only have presented an appalling contrast with my inner despair. I needed a greasy spoon.
I entered the Workers Cafe in Archway (no apostrophe, no need to bother with such trivialities) in a haze of tears. And I ordered the breakfast, expecting lumpen eggs, grey sausages, a limp disaster of bacon. But, I was mistaken. Don't get me wrong. This isn't good food. It's bad food. But it's bad food done well.
There were piles of crunchy hash browns. Simple sausages with crisply browned skins. Fluffy scrambled eggs. A puddle of perfectly normal baked beans. There was even a little disc of bubble and squeak. It was the Platonic ideal of an ordinary fry-up, and yet how far we usually fall from ordinariness. I would eat it again. In fact I have done. It had the simplistic comfort I needed, the sense that a breakfast just like this has been eaten many millions of times, will be eaten millions of times in the future.
It is a curious thing, the end of a relationship. You end up carrying around the shared secrets, the hidden invented mutual language even though the thing to which those secrets appertained is gone and the only other native speaker of that language is vanished. I imagine that ex-KGB agents still sometimes find codewords and ciphers playing on their tongue as I remember that exact way he would tap my shoulder three times very softly which meant, in our symbolic language "I love you".
And then, eventually, will we pull out the same tired words, the same once-adorable gestures, for a new partner, who will not know their origin? We hope that love will bring something new out in us each time, but perhaps that is only an illusion. We are who we are.
Breakfast, curiously, is a kind of solace for such thoughts. Perhaps there was once an ur-sausage, a first slice of toast. Probably there was some moment when we first tasted a fried egg. It is lost to us now. But the need for breakfast does not go away because the first breakfast is gone. More important than recapturing the perfect breakfast is accepting one's longing for breakfast, and being willing to take what delight is available in the breakfast before you.
I did not expect to be reminded of delight by the Workers Cafe. But I was.
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