Posts tagged Broadway Market

The Glory of Ridley Road Market

November 8, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , ,

 

A little light lunch of lung, trotters and shin anyone?

Throwing a bonfire party this weekend gave me the perfect excuse to spend a couple of hours at Ridley Road Market buying an excessive amount of food for very little money indeed.

For me Ridley Road is everything that Broadway Market isn’t. It’s rowdy, messy, cheap and authentic. An ex boyfriend once described it as looking like a scene form Mad Max, and although I was furious about his bourgeoise, judgmental sniffing at the time – looking back he did have a point.

Bits of the road are dug up, some of its cordoned off, there’s crap everywhere and there is definitively nothing quaint or picturesque about the place. If you are looking for a French-style market with great produce served by impossibly cliched vendors, then you are in the wrong place. In fact, let’s be honest: it’s pretty ugly really.

But the produce is generally excellent as well as being cheap as chips – and the people on the market, both vendors and buyers, care about the quality. My fruit and veg man filled around 5-6 bags of the best veg for me: carrots, spuds, beetroot, tomatoes, parsley, onions, red cabbage – and the parsnips he’d been saving for his own Sunday roast. His wife got the hump sometimes, he said, because he’d go home without any veg and she’d have to go out to the supermarket to stock up. “Not to blow me own trumpet,” he said. “But their stuff isn’t as good as mine.” He was right – it isn’t. It’s more expensive too. and when your pre-packaged plastic bag of parsnips beeps through the till: the woman on the checkout doesn’t say: “There you are my lovely, think  about me when you’re eating them tomorrow.”

A bit further down the way, Jimmy didn’t have any cooking apples. But he did have a twinkle in his eye as as he handed over 5 apples for 50p, he asked me if  I needed a lift home with my bags. The charm police were out in full force on Saturday, it appeared – as even the chap I bought my shoulder of lamb (which was meltingly tender in my hot pot the next day) from at the first butchers on the left-hand side asked if he could come round for the dinner it would feature in. It did cross my mind that he could have been a distant cousin of Ali, who the ever-hilarious Cereal Killah wrote about in winning terms.

But none of this was sleezy, or threatening  – it was fun, and cheeky and a bit of banter. The type of interaction that makes you leave a market with your hands full of bags and a smile on your face.

I love Ridley Road market. I just hope that it manages to hold its own as Dalston changes around it – all those of you who have moved into the monstrosity that is Dalston Square (the single most ugly and aggressively masculine building in London?) please do go and get your veg there. It might look a little more untidy than the uniform isles at Sainsbury’s, but all the extra joy is free.

 

 

Leave a comment »

Pizza! Spaghetti! Ciao!

May 3, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,


Ok, ok, this isn't an authentic Bella Vita picture. I'm sorry, ok?

So it’s taken me a while, but I’m finally getting round to talking about the new pizza place on Broadway Market.

La Bella Vita has taken up residency in a double front unit that used to be a betting shop if I remember rightly. And it’s really quite good. The boy Savage and I went the other night and a follow up trip for lunch with the Angry Liberal didn’t disappoint.

Thus far I have only tried the pizzas. A Capriosa was good, thin slightly chewy base, fresh generous toppings with a decent amount of anchovies. The house speciality Bella Vita was even better, though I couldn’t help thinking it was a bit like a Il Baccio, from Stoke Newington’s finest pizzeria, but not quite as good.

The puddings are rubbish. Liberal’s cheescake tasted a bit off and a lemon and almond tart was dry and lacking in zing.

And I’m not quite sure how I feel about the atmosphere of the place. It makes me smirk in a nasty ‘oh really, you’re not very cool’ school girl manner that they declare themselves to be part of “the vibrant, artistic community of Broadway Market”. Crackheads over there? They’re talking about you.

The decoration is also not quite right: those cliched “Italian” poster and memorabilia are just a bit naff and inauthentic and the tables are a bit too close together. Oh god, and the music is TERRIBLE. The other day I plonked myself down on one of those perfect poser- watching window seats, only to have the enjoyment of my coffee annihilated by the entirety of Simply Red’s greatest hits. My pizza took on a distinctly melancholic flavour over lunch when the Smiths played throughout. Now, I’m a big fan of the Smiths, but I don’t want to hear my (very close) neighbour warbling along to it while I choke on my chilli oil.

Still, the fact that the place is absolutely packed almost every night of the week shows that they must be doing something right. Even if it is just the fact that they have picked the perfect spot for an inexpensive, simple, tasty, restaurant.

So now that I’ve had an obligatory moan, I’m going to give it a big thumbs up. The staff are really nice, the food is good and at around £30 for two pizzas and a bottle of wine, you really can’t complain. Apart from I can, and did, but you know what I mean.

Comments (3) »

And all that jazz

August 4, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

 

  manhattan

Huzzah. Another drinking establishment has opened in spitting distance of the park. Not that we would want to spit that distance, and actually, it’s not spitting distance. You’d have to be an olympic spitter to spit that far. But close, in any case.

The lovely Off Broadway is all, rough wooden tables and Manhattans and American bar staff. It’s an American cocktail bar, see. Only in London Fields (maybe that’s why it’s Off Broadway, and not Broadway. You know, not the mainstream place were the blue-rinse brigade hang out, but the cool, edgy, yeah, stuff. And yes, I do realise it’s on Broadway Market. But if it were related to street name alone, surely it would be On Broadway? In fact isn’t that the name of the gallery? Argghhh…association overload!)

I’m not sure it works. I quite like the concept (good cocktails, friendly bar staff, perching on bar stools*) but we’re all a bit boozy and silly for it to run smoothly. I like you making that yummy cocktail, I really do. But I want it NOW goddamit. Ahem. My uncultivated fault. Please do carry on. 

Still, they do plates of cheese and meat**, and the staff really are rather nice. A bejillion times nicer than the incompetents at the C&M, and I think we’ve talked enough about our opinion of the “bar staff” at the Dove. They need to sort the downstairs bit out, it still feels like a bit of an afterthought. But excellent work on the terrasse and the sunshine streaming through windows on old wood, and the bar stools and the vibe. My new favourite bar. And I really like the multi-faceted name.

Leave a comment »

Oh for the wings of the Dove

February 24, 2009 · Filed under Broadway Market, Uncategorized · Tagged ,

thedove

The Dove. It’s a funny place, isn’t it. Wooden paneling and an impressive array of beers on tap, as well as a range of eye-wateringly priced fruit beers that are frankly disgusting. I mean, why would anyone think that strawberry beer was a good idea. It’s like snail porridge, or egg and bacon icecream….oh, I see. Slightly less twatish crowd than the Mat and Cutton. Well, just older twats like me probably.

Anyway,I like the Dove. Most of the time. I like it when you manage to get a table on a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon and instead of staying for a half like you’d planned, you find yourself talking about your favourite books surrounded by a lovely hazy fog of booze and friendship. It’s good for dates, with candles and red wine and little tables tucked away in the corner. It’s good for taking french people to, as I discovered on Friday night. They loved the offbeat oldworldpubfusedwiththaiandBritishfood charm and tucked into posh sausage and mash with gusto.

As ever, I do have to have a bit of a moan. I realised just then that I should really bloody love the Dove – it has everything I want in a pub namely decent beer, good food, attractive interior and it’s five minutes away from my house. But I don’t go in that often. And you know why? Because too often the people running the place just don’t seem to like their customers very much. Once I was in there with Laura and Nic and we got told off (and I HATE being told off) for laughing. After half a pint. On Friday, a young foreign trendy was not allowed into the pub, even accompanied by an adult, to tell her friends that she couldn’t get in and would wait for them somewhere else. The bloke, who undoutedly has the right to be as nasty to anyone as he wants because it’s probably his bloody pub, was quite needlessly rude to her.

It’s a shame, because all the other bits and bobs add up to make the Dove another little jewel in LF. A little less aggravation, a little more Jupiler (Belgium’s favourite lager) please.

Comments (3) »

Broadway blues

April 27, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Difficult to talk about London Fields for very long without mentioning Saturday’s farmers market. In a typically contrary way, I prefer Broadway Market sans market. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate having a farmers market on my doorstep. I know I sound like a spoilt brat and I do like parts of it. I really love the aforementioned mushroom sandwiches and the range of cheese sold by Hot French Cheese Guy is v good.

The Broadway Market Traders’ and Residents’ Association have done an amazing job in bringing a bit of community magic to E8 and it’s difficult not to admire a market that champions local people and produce. The people on the market clearly care about what they sell and how they sell it.

Patrick White, a former eastender (the place not the fun-filled tv show) recently wrote about the market in glowing terms though even he sounded a little miffed at paying ten quid for a lump of cheese. You can see his point. Regeneration, kids doing it for themselves, keeping Tesco at bay etc etc.

My gripes with the market are completely personal and more to do with stupid arses like me, than the market itself. I don’t like is being jostled by billions of boys in skinny jeans and pointy boots larking around being wacky. And I definitely don’t like queuing up for about 47 hours to get a beef burger, no matter how delicious and expertly reared it is. Broadway Market is ace around Christmas, pretty good throughout spring, but come summer it’s a mess of overly nonchalant thirty-somethings wielding babies like bazookas and idiotically dressed hipsters.

My other problem with the market is to do with my working-class hero evil twin syndrome. It’s not real. Real markets have fat men shouting about tomatoes, and blokes who’ve sold foam for twenty years hence earning the name “Jim the Foam”. Real market stall folk rely on guile and bloodymindedness throughout the winter months and charm the rest of the time. The stall-holders on Broadway Market sell lovely things for a lot of money. But they don’t have to make an effort. Some are friendly enough but most are too busy throwing organic chard to the seething trendy masses to have a bit of a chat. So the joy of market banter is lost. My dad had it in spades. He could charm the pants of an old dear at twenty paces. She’s have a tartan wheely trolley full of slippers for the whole family before you could say bargain.

Our farmers market is not really a market: it’s a tourist attraction. Somewhere to ponce about, meet your pals and pay four quid for a very posh butty. That’s fine in its own way, but I want markets to have good produce that you can afford. I want them to be the place where you go every week to buy all your fruit and veg. I want fat blokes and old blokes and little old ladies barging people out of the way with their trolleys. I want people to be there to buy food and not just for their lunch. I want the traders to make me laugh. Shopping at food markets would definitely go into my Top Ten Favourite Things Ever – but Broadway Market leaves me cold.

Comments (4) »