Leman Street Tavern, Aldgate

In what was once the colourful heart of the old Jewish East End, the pogrom continues unchecked. Championed by a megalomaniac Mayor who has the interests of Brexit Boris, not London or Britain, at the heart of his cold calculating heart; Goodman’s Fields is yet another shining example of the shiny boxy bland ghettoes to greed that are disfiguring our city, robbing it of all originality and charm. At the entrance to this new 'luxury' slum, Geronimo Inns has splashed out a tidy sum on its latest trough and watering hole, Leman Street Tavern. The same £1.5 million would just about buy a banker a pad here - although possibly not one with a view of the equine civic 'art' that announces it. This is a blessing in disguise: two bronze stallions frolicking in a stream are the sort of trashy 70s sculptures only Beverley from Abigail's Party or deranged deceased dictators, the Caesescus, would brook in their front yard's brook. Geronimo Inns' ('a group of proper pubs with an eye for the different and the delicious’) newbie is comfy, colourful and serviceable… but for ‘different’ read 'design-by-numbers after various punchier postmodern bar-brasserie-gastropubs.' ‘Delicious’? That'll be Macon-Lugny on a list that largely sits south of £30 and offers two dozen choices by the glass for sunny day stragglers drawn to a generic pavement terrace  onto a chronically congested A-road. Fill up on bar snacks of black pudding sausage roll, baked Camembert with buttered soldiers, and potato and leek hotpot. Dine on crab gratin followed by pork faggot, greens and mash, with fried milk and poached rhubarb for afters at  LST, the sort of mid-market one-size-fits-all gaff I imagine morning TV Haribore eye candy Susanna Reid might fancy. Me? I'm off to grittier gaffs on nearby polyglot Brick Lane...before the Curse of the Developer destroys it too. 

Goodman’s Fields, Leman Street, E1 8EY 3437 0001www.lemanstreettavern.co.uk 

The Chesham Arms, Homerton

Three cheers for Andy Bird! Why? Because the co-owner of two of London's key cocktail bars  - Original Sin http://tinyurl.com/qet3kwa and Happiness Forgets http://tinyurl.com/7pv65xk - has only gone and prised an endangered taphouse from the snapping jaws of voracious predators. Bewitching clueless councillors with their promise of 'elegant urban village living', Public (house) Enemy No.1, the evil property developers, contrive to knock down London's built heritage faster than I can knock back No 3. gin martinis - (i.e. alarmingly quick). I weep buckets for the thousands of London boozers lost to these sharks and scheisters. In a small victory for Canute against the cnuts, in Mehetabel Road E9, the developers' loss is this close-knit enclave's gain. With its replanted lawned beer garden, The Chesham is now a fine community asset, the focal point of a handsome grid of chocolate box-perfect Victorian terraces. Bird's painstakingly collated salvaged furnishings - the bar's polished ash counter found on Gumtree and shipped from a defunct Derbyshire tavern; tuffet stools last produced circa Lonnie Donegan; an old Joanna for Mehetabel's answer to Mrs. Mills  - restores the Arms to how it probably looked around the same time Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner first traded port and lemon-fuelled insults in another wee local up North. My nostalgia for pubs past doesn't, of course, extend to a fondness for warm Watney's beer, sickly Spanish Sauternes or luncheon meat slapped between two stale slices of Mother's Pride - standard issue in 1960 when God help the boy that dared to order a Babycham in any East End tavern...unless his name was Ronnie, the gay Kray. The born-again Chesham's pours include sterling stuff from Dark Star and Five Points; Salopian’s award-winning bitter, Darwin’s Original; classy, affordable, French vino and a great G and T or a Bloody Mary that's bigged up by Bird, not at all subjectively, as “London’s best.” Ditto, pork pie and other trad bar snacks, the only food on offer pending the autumn addition of a kitchen. “I loathe ‘gastropubs’ that flog bought-in lamb shank for £15 a pop” rails an angry Bird, promising a from-scratch plat du jour, quality charcuterie and cold cuts. Atta boy, Andy! Now, go support your local... while you still can!

15 Mehetabel Road E9 6DU 0793 695517 cheshamarms.com/ 

 

The Natural Philosopher, Hackney

It would be easy to walk past The Natural Philosopher, mistaking its shop window for another East End bric-a-brac emporium peddling retro tat aimed at London Fields poseurs' postmodernist pads. Downstairs, beyond a reception area's rococo geegaws and avian taxidermy - Corrie Steve's Street Cars office as imagined by Tim Burton - lies Dalston members club Manero's new liquor lounge. First however, I'm urged to inspect an anteroom that houses what must be The East End's smallest "museum." Piled on shelves, ten-feet high, is owner/ curator James Manero's collection of computers, myriad Macs dating back to the earliest commercially available examples. Apple anoraks will be fascinated. Anyone under the age of 30 might wonder how we managed in our jobs pre-Jobs. (Search 'IBM Selectric' 'carbon paper' 'jammed keys' and 'abacus'). Me? I'm instantly stressed out by the prospect of the very same Performas and Power Macs that, for all their shiny, sophisticated Californian state-of-the-art promise, would end in hissy fits as two weeks worth of work - my relationship with the floppy notoriously sloppy - were lost as 'bombs' that were definitely not "da bomb" appeared and the dreaded Sad Mac Face (pictured) indicated my much admired hardware was now about as useful as a five year-old Big Mac®. Talk about expensive landfill! Downstairs, the laid-back Natural Philosopher's living room-sized cocktail lounge is served by a funky, deep, sunken bar to one end, its tenders' heads barely visible above the surround that separates it from their customers. Step away from the ledge, Squiffy McGee! Falling face down into a mixologists' mosh pit is a social fail. Such shame should be rare: the house has a table-service only policy. A launch night menu, limited to a quartet of cocktails (normally £9), throws up a couple of hits: summery gin sour, Lord Kelvin and Zabarella, a cardamom-infused Ocho tequila and pomegranate margarita. The house signature is the Parmenides. Well-executed and attractively presented perhaps, but the lure of brandy, yellow Chartreuse, absinthe bitters and white wine is all Greek to me. There again, when I was at school in the first century AD, my favourite tutor was another ancient Athenian philosopher, Agrippa The Skeptic.
489 Hackney Road E2

Qui Qui Ri Qui, Hoxton (Now CLOSED)

I'm not happy. It's chucking it down. I'm out East, and I'm being dissed by a lump of lard parked up in his fart-filled white van. 'Oi darling, ' he sneers, perving over my Glamazonian blonde date, 6ft tall in this season's Marc Jacobs heels and hot pants. 'What you doing with a fat old bastard like 'im, when you could 'ave me' - not to mention the chlamydia, crack habit, spent Stella cans, takeaway containers and skid-marked rancid baby-batter-stained Primark trackie bottoms strewn on the floor of a fetid pit on BNP Avenue E29 that accompany his gracious offer? His type, and the waaaaay scarier wankers who held me up there at knifepoint, aeons ago, are why I largely avoid Hackney Road by night. I have also largely avoided mescal since I holed-up in Mexico - shaking, sobbing and quasi-sectionable - after over-enthusiastic youthful experimentation with tequila’s turbo-charged sister convinced me I was being stalked by a giant sombrero-wearing Technicolor killer banana called Hector. (Me, paranoid... much?) Tonight, I’m back in mescal's clutches...in Hackney Road...in a louche David Lynch-esque basement, its walls plastered with brash 1960s Mexican cartoon porn depicting pneumatic bimbos pursued by ’El Afeitador’ (the shaver) ‘de Pubis’ (guess!). What could possibly go wrong? Ominious as it seems on paper, this sexy/sleazy (legal) late-late-night shebeen - located beneath a kebab shop, for added glamour - is all good. The rare spirits sold at London’s first dedicated mezcaleria, QuiQuiRiQui - that’s cock-a-doodle-do in Spanish to you - really are worth crowing about. After £8 Mescal Negroni and Pink Taco cocktails, mine (Danish) hippy host - who is happily ‘living the mescal lifestyle, man’ - introduces me to the hard stuff. Subtle Santa Domingo Albarradas - all pear drops, pepper, chilli and turmeric notes - for example, would hold its own against many a malt whisky. As, at £10.95 per double, it bloody well should. Presently, Mistress Mescal’s magical fuzzy buzz kicks in, so too does a familiar track, and I'm rendered Comfortably Numb. Have I really spotted Jake Shears dressed as a Day of the Dead skeleton by the tiny bar, or am I hallucinating again? Hackney Road: guaranteed walk on the wild side

184 Hackney Road E2 7QLhttp://quiquiriqui.co.uk/