The Pembury Tavern, Amhurst Road, www.individualpubs.co.uk/pembury/

A Sunday Session of the mature kind to talk about this time. Given we were both horribly hungover the mid-afternoon pub session was replaced by a visit to Epping Forrest. Epping Forrest is only 23 mins from Bethnal Green, who knew? Obviously if the rest of Hackney did then it would be a full of people trying to recreate Withnail and I – but it wasn’t, so they don’t. Walking in the forest is normally reserved for old people and doggers but we went looking for sloe berries to infuse the finest gin Gordon could supply. After 4 hours of walking through mud we had about 12 berries, which does not equal the quarter pound needed to make sloe gin. Also, the quaint country pubs they talk about don’t actually exist in real life, they are full of weird towns people and late 90s food. So we returned to the safety of Hackney to get Sunday lunch.

Arriving back to Hackney I wanted a simple combination of non-Sunday roast food and she wanted a veggy Sunday roast. This is no mean feat, we went to the Broadway, the Cat and Mutton, the London Fields, considered Lardo and ended up in the Pembury Tavern. Now I hear some people shouting ‘why don’t you have roast you crazy welsh nutter’ – I don’t because they are not very good – meat, dry, soggy potatoes, gravy – Sunday roast is the most overrated food out there, after tuna. Oh, and they make pubs smell like cabbage.

However the Pembury Tavern satisfied both our wants. The PT menu on a Sunday covers your main roasts all at very reasonable prices. The veggie nut roast was a mere £8 (amazing compared to Cat and Mutton £14 for VEG!) and the Italian based menu is better than most Italian restaurants. I opted for a ‘Tagliolini Alluovo con polpa di granchio, Chorize & Chilli’ with handmade pasta. This is obviously not normal pub food, and it was the best pasta I have had in a while. The pasta was very light, almost noodle like and the sauce was a deep tomato ragu full of fish, chorizo and capers with a decent kick. It was a punchy dish and cost a ridiculous £8.95. The pub also serve loads of excellent pizzas (and a pizza burger…) and the garlic flatbread had enough garlic butter to make the brown paper it was placed on go as see through as cling film, basically amazing . The nut roast item was shockingly not dry and included a veggy gravy – at least she hoped it was veggy, who can really know. 

The pub itself is laidback and ramshackle in a good way. The beers and wines are cheap and actually really good, and generally you are a bit unlucky if you don’t get a table. This places seems like it is an after-work hangout. However with this menu, they could swap the shoddy chairs and tables with something from Ikea and get a tablecloth, and it could easily be a competitor with Soho’s finest Italian establishments – but hopefully they wont.

Rubys, Kingsland Road, http://rubysdalston.com/

5th blog in, and I am afraid I am going to succumb to the most annoying and overused simile  ‘it was like a tale of two cities’.Anyone who has read  Dickens’ masterpiece will know that basically Paris was full of garlic munching cousin shaggers sitting in their own swill, and London represented a fragrant utopia due to the guidance of our illustrious upper ranks (bar a few grave-robbers).

The bar which provoked me dabbling with this tragic phrasing was Ruby’s in Dalston. So let me begin.

The good:

- Amazing decor, hoxto-shabbiness and pleasant atmosphere

- Great music that provoked the phrase 'God damn it, is that Fleetwood Mother Fucking Mac'
- Very good and different drinks
- Not too full, busy but sitting room for most
- Friendly service
- A customisable cinema sign out front!

(So far, so utopitastic...)

The bad:

-  A round of drinks took 26 minutes

-  A round of drinks took 26 minutes
-  A round of drinks took 26 minutes

So let's pick up the minor point of the 26 minute wait. This isn't 26 minutes from the time of finishing our drinks, it is 26 minutes from ordering, being told in disbelief that it would take 20 minutes and then bitterly timing it. This happening at 9pm on a Saturday night, when you are trying to get out of your mind so you can love Efes, is not helpful in anyway. It is also amazing how awkward conversation can get when soberness kicks in half way through a Saturday night and you begin to realise how much of a dick you look. When I asked whether it would be slow because the girls had shown stepford wife mentality and ordered the same 2 drinks between 8 of them, they laughed - I forgot, never, ever, rush a 'mixologist'. It was like requesting a souffle in a restaurant and being warned it may take a while, but you don’t normally mind, because, at the end of the day, you are drinking.

But, being from London I am going to be the better man, because to be fair, when we moaned about the prep time they provided us with a free Sambucca. This didn't  help reignite us after 30 minutes of sobriety, but was a kind offer. It was an annoying night because I really wanted to like this place, and we all did, but it was still a pain. I would definitely recommend coming here if you wanted a date to end with some loving. It is perfect for that, it is not perfect for fun in a large group. Which is a shame, because it should be.

 

Stingray-Globe Cafe, Columbia Road http://www.stringraycafe.co.uk/stringray_globe

Now that I have started on debauchery I may as well carry on– as they say go big or go home…

I often wake up on Sunday still quite drunk and have quite a fixed routine – it follows like thus:

10am– Wake up slightly shaking and dizzy

11am– Start mission to get sugar based products, Yazoo and Sunday papers
12pm– Read papers and bitch about whatever is ‘going up or going down’
2pm– Achieve hydration and get bored
3pm– Go to the pub for ‘food’
4pm– Realise everyone else has same idea, drink standing up and wait for seat
8pm– Eat hammered in different establishment
9pm- Vague

This is routinely referred to as the fabled ‘Sunday Session’or S². It has destroyed lesser people, it has caused many embarrassing Mondays in work and it has even caused the odd rave. Its unpredictability is what sets it apart from the Saturday mash up with the danger of Mondays inevitable awfulness.

Last Sunday I stuck so rigidly to the timetable above it was like I had a diary secretary. Having spent 5 hours festering we walked a whole ten yards to the Royal Oak – but as mentioned before, tables are like finding hens’ teeth (I hate this phrase) and so we proceeded to drink and hope one of the very settled tables of patrons would leave the log fire pub. They didn’t. However, in the darkest hour often springs opportunity so we skipped 20 yards down Columbia Road and went to the Stingray Globe Café.

The Globe Stingray Café is the stuff of legend – a slightly ramshackle pizza place which knocks out decent food cheaply. The legend is, pleasingly, very true. We were seated within 20 minutes, after having some v cheap red wine by the fire, and were offered free olives as an apology for the delay (BONUS). The menu boasts the standard range of pizzas, and a variety of changing dishes, such as Italian sausage with cous cous (£4). Noticing the pizzas resembled bin lids in size and the calzone looked like a rugby with tomato sauce on top, we opted for two pizzas between three. Feeling classical, we went for pepperoni and a less classical Mexicana – the pizzas were the anticipated bin lid size, very light and fresh tasting and all for the princely sum of £6. The toppings are decent but definitely not artisan – this is much more about tasty comfort food than seasonal produce sourced from the Italian wilderness. Stingray is almost always busy and the type of cheap local food place people would kill a flower shopper for.

Anyplace which does a pizza and beer for £6.50 between 5-7pm is a little bit special. It even does a crowd pleasing bannoffee pie for desert for about 3 quid. You walk away stuffed and drunk on the £12 wine (white good, red ropey) with enough change from a twenty to ensure that your Sunday session is finished with a few debrief pints somewhere else. The less said about Monday morning the better.

 

Royal Oak, Columbia Road, Netil House and the Cat and Mutton, London Fields ( royaloak.com , netilhouse.com , catandmutton.com )

This blog so far has been remarkably undebauched. So to avoid falling foul to the internet accuracy police, I have attempted to correct it this weekend through visits to various pubs in the area.

The first establishment was the Royal Oak – this Columbia Road pub is a stalwart of the East London pub landscape and has been known to be frequented by Alexa Chung (this is according to my girlfriend so probably give that 60% chance of being correct). You get it all here, the barmen obviously all have tatts, you don’t normally get seats, people dwell at tables over the Guardian weekend magazine and criticise the blind date section - but essentially, it is a great pub. I wouldn't eat here, as a non-banker I have a bit of an aversion to main courses which cost over £13. Steak doesn't count, but the staple items on the menu being around 15 quid is too much. Some owners may claim quality but plenty of places now manage to hit the £12 mark and are excellent (Market Cafe - I am looking at you with thumbs up). Leaving the Oak - where a Bloody Mary costs a very friendly  £4.50 (chefs, take note of your barman’s pricing policy) I set out to continue my saturday drinking to Costcutter. I shan't review this, all you need to know is that it has a cash machine with the language option of cockney, and shop assistants who probably carry guns, in a friendly ‘protect your neighbourhood’ type of way. 

 

Netil360 or Netil House is a non-pretentious private members’ club. Hhhmmmm. It presents a friendly atmosphere with yurts, hot tubs and amazing rooftop views over London. This place makes a lot of sense in the balmy summer, but coming in November isn't great. It is obviously cold and horribly exposed, and despite gallons of (bring your own) booze, a few hours of the type of exposure normally experienced by Sir Ralph Fiennes, leaves you wanting to cry. I will come back here in the summer, mainly to see more (unpretentious) people in yurts by London Fields and attempt to sneak in more booze to avoid the corkage prices – my crotch is not THAT impressive.

Leaving Netil House we decamped to the Cat and Mutton. It sits adjacent to London Fields, and is definitely a decent and civilised boozer. They have plenty of table and not much standing room but upstairs they have a bit more space for tangoing or whatever, and often have live music courtesy of the chaps at Hoxton Radio. You can’t really go wrong with this pub, although I would recommend booking a table if you are planning on eating to avoid awkwardly standing round the small bar staring at people eating, like one of the homeless chaps in residence opposite. Expect a fuller review once I have managed to get a table here.

Jones Dairy, Erza Street, http://www.jonesdairy.co.uk/

A lot of places in Hackney feel quite planned. A well rehearsed restaurant is not necessarily a bad thing but there are some occasions when you receive a receipt with a smiley face on, and you question whether the whole experience is designed to illicit happiness. There is only so much carbon filament light bulbs  and cutlery in metal tubs one can stare at in an admiring manner before one starts to feel coaxed.

So when something pops up which is accidently authentic, it is very pleasing. Jones Dairy Cafe is one of these places. On an alley off Columbia Road, the place is inevitably empty for 6 days a week due to people thinking that after the Sunday flower market the street disappears. Turning up on a Saturday morning the place felt like somewhere rural which had forgotten about the agreed gentrification of East London. The grill had broken, they had beetroot juice which was heavy on beet and supplied my partner with lip stains which supplanted lip stick for the weekend, and the receipt was handwritten. This is not somewhere which has a focus group to decide to hand write receipts, they just don’t have a modern till. I opted for poached eggs on toast which were excellent, any place which supplies Marmite as a condiment is obviously a winner. It also has a wood burning oven in the corner and does single oysters which leads to an atmosphere closer to a Norfolk farmhouse than an East London establishment. Prices are very reasonable and when we went there, there was only one menu for the entire place which amused. If it started doing Bloody Marys it would quickly become my go to destination whilst hungover on a Saturday morning.

El Paso, 350-354 Old Street, Shoreditch, http://www.elpasohoxton.com

Between the ages of 13-18 my favourite night out was, of course, TGI Friday. It had everything a young Cardiff lad could dream of, milkshakes with biscuits in, chicken wings in a variety of 'sticky' flavours and, best of all, fajitas which came in a tower with a sizzling, and potentially hand scolding, plate. Shockingly I now approach tex mex establishments with certain trepadation, but having spotted El Paso on the 55 bus several times I thought I would take a mexi-risk and go for it. 

The first thing you notice is that the place is decked out in the Shoreditch uniform of mismatched chairs and retro tables, but then you see the menu and notice that it's CHEAP. I haven't seen a pint of decent beer (Red Stripe) for 3 quid since 2002, and you will get change from a tenner from all but one dish on the menu. My wallet was happy and then my stomach was happy.

The fajitas came with a sizzling plate, standard, and they were actually good. It is always a good sign when you have too much filling for your wraps. The chicken was flavoured in a non aggressive manner and the veg was touched up with courgettes and carrots, that is michelin for a mexicana  place. My guest had a deep fried vegetarian burrito (chimichanga) which was all that you expect deep fried cheese to be, excellent.

It was quiet on the night we went, which is odd as the place is off Hoxton square, cheap and not dominated by cunts. El Paso wont trouble Heston but when you want a nice quick meal it will make you happy. It also advertises itself as a 'workspace', i do not know what this means but if you do then it can only aid your experience.