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.