Martello Hall, Hackney

Replacing seen-better-days pub, The London Fields, this cafe/ breakfast/ diner spot aimed at hot-deskers and E8 slackers morphs into a party bar as the day wears on. Strategically distressed decor suggests a low-heeled hostelry circa Queen of the Hackney Empire,  Edwardian songbird Marie Lloyd. What’s to sing about at this mooted template for similar venues across the capital, are its local beers, Italian artisan wines on tap and a louche upstairs cocktail lounge. Many fixes depend on East London-produced booze, doctored with homemade tinctures, sherbets and cordials. Distilled on-site in small batches, Martello gin underpins a Bramble (£11) and a twisted G&T. We’re more for Mexican Negroni, Ginger Caipirinha Royale and miniatures to share - Punchy Cosmo for four at £20, for instance. Dissolute dandies drawn to disco DJ lates and live up and coming bands will flirt with the green fairy; absinthe from various producers drawn from Belle Époque fountains. Served in a groovy Brooklyn-style diner out back and in the ground floor bar, chow down on ‘humble comfort food’: Bologna-style dumplings (torta fritta); roasted squash and beetroot, ricotta, hazelnuts, beetroot pesto, mint and kale among ten edgy wood oven-fired pizza toppings, and meatballs, coppa, tomato, taleggio and oregano, king of the weekday po’boys. Weekend scran includes set £20 Sunday lunches and a £40 ‘Festa Italiana' blow-out.   

137 Mare Street E8 3RH 3889 6173 http://www.martellohall.com

Every Cloud, Hackney

The Manhattan Project, the cocktail consultants that recently made a splash at Hawaiian joint POND (before the restaurant's fortunes took a dive and its owners shut up shop), have taken the plunge, branching out on their own just off Hackney’s main drag, Mare Street. Head honcho Felix is all for “strong drinks, low lights and good times” at his sweet, wee pineapple-themed bar-ette where “creeps” are persona non grata he says. Every Cloud’s silver lining is a list of off-the-wall innovations from £8 such as a 'Champagne Daiquiri’ that contains no actual Champagne, preferring instead lab-created acidic fizz that tastes like the real thing to some.  A gin, strawberry and Bahamian bitter bark spirit twist on a classic Negroni is described as “somewhere between vanilla Coke and cough syrup” which sounds a bit too close for comfort to my tweenage attempts at cocktail-making when Night Nurse, Vimto and a miniature of vodka nicked from the local Co-Opleft me puking into the porcelain. Equally off the wall Irish poitín potion, Blue Bán Group, is touted as the liquid equivalent of Violet Beauregard, the obnoxious brat in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who is juiced by oompa loompas after she morphs into a giant blueberry. Blimey!

11 Morning Lane E9 6ND 07843 613628 everycloudbar.com  

Paper, Dress, Vintage: Hackney

In Hackney, rummage for 60s frocks, 50s fun furs, flouncy frilly blouses, fawn felt fedoras and fuchsia feather boas and - since there's no way you're ever going to squeeze into those hot heliotrope Biba hot-pants circa Thin Lizzy you just spotted; you might as well squeeze in afternoon tea and cake served on colourful mismatched china that last saw action back in the Black and White Minstrels' black and white telly days. Anytime I revisit retro threads, I'm struck by how skinny we were back in the day before my one-time 27-inch waist was hit by rampant inflation. By night, at this Second-Hand Rose's delight  - recently relocated from Shoreditch - pull on your glad-rags as a funky preloved clothes shop transforms into a bar and social open until 1am at weekends. Her dress rails tidied away, stylish owner Hannah serves classic pre-batched gin, rum, whiskey and vodka cocktails courtesy of Bethnal Green bar, Craft Cocktail Co, as well as a selection of beers by Crate, Hackney and Pressure Drop. Served by a second (microscopic) bar, the upstairs men’s department morphs seamlessly into a live lounge. A small stage hosts rockabilly, soul, blues and swing artistes when the room is not otherwise given over to jive classes, comedy, burlesque, cabaret and drawing classes. There’s even a wee garden in which to model the King's Road dolly bird @ Chelsea Girl halter-dress, serape, sun hat and cats eye shades Ms Moss would kill for. Like serial party animal Kate, Paper, Dress, Vintage has got the London Look.

352A Mare Street E8 1HR 8510 0520 http://paperdressvintage.co.uk/bar 

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

Pearl's at The Cat and Mutton, London Fields

After 10 years as a gastro, Broadway Market's landmark pub was more overcooked Mutton than Top Cat when I visited last year. Not long afterwards, it shut, sold to new owners appaz. If the pattern in similar gentrified pockets of London held true, I reasoned, the new owners would be a chain of burger barons, bento box pimps, Carluccio's, Space NK, Oliver Bonas or some other yuppie knob wank. Would I mourn the Cat? Not really. I'm not local. Even if I were, there are more interesting places to drink on this East End strip where, perversely, the rarest sight these days is the genuine article. Eastenders don't, as a rule,  go by India or Hugo, rather Mason and Paige. Presently, I heard good news. The Cat and Mutton would reopen as a pub not a branch of Foxton's and, most interestingly, with Tom Gibson at the helm - he of dishy Dalston dive bar Ruby's, a gaff that's well worth crossing town for. Come April, I'm schlepping out East again -  a tedious habit since my manor, Chelsea, became about as cool as chlamydia. I'm here for the CaMutt's re-launch. Roadblock! The old girl is as stowed out as the first day of a Sloane Street sale, only with a crowd that doesn't look like lumpen X-Factor audition losers, what the queue for Gucci's sale appears to consist of these days. And lovely, the new improved Cat turns out to be. A more attractive but not unrecognisably different spin on what went before, it has craft beers and Licky Chops on kitchen duty downstairs and, of more immediate interest to me, Pearl's, a cocktail bar upstairs. Gussied up like an Edwardian bordello, Pearl's is accessed via a vertiginous spiral staircase whose polished steps should be approached with caution when well-oiled. How to get that way? £8.50 cocktails called fiery mare (gin, Kamm and Sons, lemon, wasabi and cucumber) and frisky Nellie or some such similarly hoorish handle. Alfred’s porter is an interesting Victorian-style fix that says much about London Fields' now. Asking for brandy, stout, honey and oyster sauce would have got you laughed out of the Cat when I first drank on Broadway Market long before it talked with a Mockney accent. In the punk days of my childhood, bootleg vodka and Vimto with a Dexedrine chaser was how to start your night.  
 76 Broadway Market, E8 4QJ 7249 6555 http://www.catandmutton.com

based on my review for www.squaremeal.co.uk 

Oslo, Hackney

I've never been to Norway. There was a near miss, aged 13, when I was invited to the land of the Ford Fjord by Jorgen from Bergen, a pen pal. (Note to dem yoot: that's the ancient equivalent of a Facebook friend.) As luck would have it, the parents of another pen pal, whose name was Yves, I vaguely recall, invited me to France that summer. Blackhead-plagued geek Yves may have been of zero interest - 'Experiment with your chemistry set?' Moi? At 13? 'Es-tu fou, matey?' - but his parents' villa, overlooking St Tropez, where I'd escape after lights out to cruise its cafe terraces, sure as hell was. Tonight, I finally make it to Oslo. That's Oslo as in the latest lounge to open in baradise aka East London, not as in Nordic nowheresville. Oslo occupies the Victorian pile that, until 1945, housed Hackney Central station's booking hall. Its handsomely conversion in the post-industrial bare washed brick stylee is just the ticket. Alight here for local microbrewers Crate and Five Points' ales at a butch bar flanking the dining room. Cocktails, if at all, are basic: no-nonsense Oslo is not your place for fancy Nancy molecular malarkey. Bar food includes 3 for £10 sexysloppysliders, oxtail poutine (£5) and chicken poppers in BBQ sauce. Two further bars inhabit a live music room/  electro club upstairs, open until as late as 3am at weekends. At the former station, hear tomorrow’s big tracks on a badass sound-system when grime MCs, garage. surf, nu-folk and grunge bands play. Norway, nul points? Not so at Oslo!

 1A Amhurst Road E8 1LL 3553 4831 www.oslohackney.com 

Lanes (of London), Mayfair

 (Doh! Hard to miss really) 

I'm invited to road test the lounge bar at refurbed restaurant Lanes (of London). We meet at The Dorchester - handily located next door, I seem to recall from the deets I've stupidly left at home. "Eurr Eurr' as the buzzer noise goes when some fool on Family Fortunes is asked to 'name a famous Arthur.' "Shakespeare." (That's a 'true say', as they say down Essex way, by the way). Stymied by a new mobile whose internet settings my Luddite mojo can't master and, with my chum's Blackberry's battery deader than a Monday night in Dartford, I'm in and out Park Lane's hotel doors like a £90-a-pop whore. "Do you know where Lanes (of London) is?" Nobody does. 20 minutes later, at Grosvenor House, a breakthrough. It's part of the same Marriott group apparently, only 'with not as many stars.' claims a staff member. This does not bode well. If the hotels of Mayfair were Premiership footie teams, I imagine Grosvenor House as Aston Villa - mid-table and a bit too full of Brummie businessmen in flammable tuxes for my comfort. Presently, we discover Lanes at the wrong end of Park Lane - the Primark end as I refer to it. All toffee tone, candlelit, leathery luxe (as a DFS customer unused to edgier five star sleepovers might put it), its drinks are more interesting than the decor. The big 'concept' is a selection of cocktails that introduce buzzier quarters such as Hackney and Dalston to tourists (although perhaps not the dozen Romanians we've just negotiated, begging in doorways outside). For Mayfair types whose idea of slumming it is W10, that postcode inspires amaretto, apple brandy and chai syrup idea, Portobello champagne punch (£13), and beetroot and gin West London ‘gimlet.’ Another success, if not an improvement on a straight vodkatini, is Grey Goose tahini martini: a nod to Edgware Road, oddly. Surely the Muslim mile is not exactly awash with alcohol? Decent beef sliders, samosas and vada paav in a bap, ceremoniously presented on a platter as if they were the head of John The Baptist and my name is Salome (which it might be if I ever decide to do drag), is essentially Whitechapel street food tweaked for the second most expensive square on the Monopoly board. Is Lanes an address I'll enter in my new phone? If I ever figure how to, maybe.

London Marriott Park Lane, 140 Park Lane, W1K 7AA 7647 5664 www.lanesoflondon.com

Sager + Wilde, Hackney

One bad mistake aside - a winter sun week in Arenal, the boil on beautiful Majorca's backside  - my parents didn't do package holidays. Where my childhood chums were deported to the building sites of the Costas, we were discovering another side to Spain. Drained by the drive from Scotland, my father had stopped off in Zarautz, a small seaside town 20 miles beyond the border with France. Nominally Spanish, the Basque Country - with its impenetrable language. beret-toting hombres, pelotta frontóns, and the added frisson of knowing that a separatist's bomb could go off at any minute - was, and still is, a curious place where 'full English breakfast with a free can of Carling' and GB car number plates are rarer than pink unicorns. Contemplating exuberant, colourful locals en familia in buzzy alfresco bars enjoying pinxtos (as we did not yet know them) as the sun set on surfers riding in on Biscay breakers towards a glorious sweep of golden sands, Dad decided we need not venture further. Zarautz would be a holiday destination we would return to several times after my parents' initial coup de foudre (or whatever the Basque term is). This year, holidaying in the French Basque port of St. Jean de Luz, I revisited Zarautz. Some smart new apartment blocks aside, the old place looks and feels exactly the same - the  children who'd been snacking on pinxtos all those years ago, now grown up with kids of their own, were hanging out in those self same cafes and bars. What has this to do with a new gaff in Hackney? I'll explain. Aged 9, hot chocolate and churros were my Spanish fixes. But  this year, I got to grips with Basque wines - "wersh (i.e. 'acidic' in Scots) gut rot" according to my father. As with Catalonian Cava, production methods have come on in leaps and bounds.I fell in love with ruby rich Alavesa riojas, French Basque Iruléguy, and summery young white, Txakoli. Light, slightly sparkling, with a crisp bite, it's produced in the lush Pyrenean foothills around Zarautz and the neighbouring commune of Guetaria. I was thrilled to find a Bodegas Rezabal Txakoli on a notable list at Sager + Wilde -  a handsome wine bar from a young husband and wife who clearly know their grapes. Tricked out in architectural salvage (Victorian cast iron and glass brick pavement insets as bar counter), all tasteful tonal chic, this is not what you expect to find on an East End strip where 3 for £10 mini-mart muck is the norm. Whether Txakoli is still available a fortnight later, I can't confirm: the offer is revised daily depending on what great bin ends the Sager-Wilde's have tracked down. All wines are available by the glass: from Kentish bubbles, via top drawer riesling and lovely light Loire reds to a Comtes Lafon 2007 Meursault at £15 a pop. Cheese platters, cheese toasties and charcuterie are what to eat at this admirable reboot of a once dodgy boozer. If you're travelling out East and spot Sager + Wilde; remember my old man's words "Why go any further?" 
193 Hackney Road E2 8JL http://www.sagerandwilde.com

Stories, Hackney

London Fields' latest bar/ cafe/ gallery/ social hub (origami classes, anyone?) is from the crew behind The Book Club and The Queen of Hoxton - venues synonymous with the sort of  nu-hippies, style bloggers, Guardian-reading geeks, bohos and lazy bozos you can also expect to find here. In fact, the only demographic you'll have trouble locating dahn Broadway Market these days, are the indigenous Cockney sparras flushed out their natural habitat by smug sHabitat-chic colonisers priced out of the leafier parts of Islington.  Brunch, from 10am until mid-afternoon, and bar food that includes wild mushroom and mozzarella arancini, beef and chorizo burger with peppers, pigs in blankets, squid and prawns piri piri (£5), are served in a postmodern space that feels like the canteen / chill-out zone / hot-desking area (or whatever the current buzzword is) at some achingly cool Shoreditch brand agency. Network and bounce around ideas for your new viral ad campaign/ indispensable app over a pint of draught London Fields ale, wine from £4 a glass, or various ‘stories’ cocktails from £6.80. Try ‘sob’ ‘adventure’ (rum, orgeat, apple juice and lime), ‘likely’, ‘shaggy dog’ or for the likely lad on his laptop who claims Google is about to snap up his big idea as the next Tumblr, ‘cock’n’bull (Four Roses bourbon, lemon juice, Cointreau and lemonade)

30 Broadway Market E8 4QJ 7254 6898 http://www.storiesonbroadway.com

This, and similar reviews, appear at www.squaremeal.co.uk

Coppa, Hackney

Lardo, pizza purveyors to Hackney’s hirsute hipsters, has a got itself a summer smash in this funky 200-cover bar that's already pulling in a simpatico crowd. The only way is up for ‘a rooftop Italian beach holiday' - one that's a whole lot more fun than being pursued by the syphilitic local grease-ball out looking for his next quick roll and Rimini in Adriatic sand dunes, I imagine. Cop a load of Coppa's meaty mouthfuls: lamb and chicken skewers and spicy Calabrian ‘nduja from the BBQ. Otherwise, load up on radish celery and chickpea salad, arancini, calzone and fritte. Grab a boozy granita and, at £6, say "cin cin!" to Amaro mules and similarly tasty Milanese mouthwash. English beach huts don't do it for me. I've never seen the point of dreary days out in Dorset, with a flask full of hot chicken noodle soup for your goose bumps, while playing Five Go Mad in Mudeford, lost in some 1950s Bunty Annual make-believe. As for cu****g, cold, coastal Kent hellholes, let's not go there...literally! No, I'm more of a Mr. Ridley wannabe (minus Jude Law's final fatal scene, natch) and Coppa’s kitschy-cute cappanni (wooden huts) are a lorra fun to shack up in with up to 12 amici, your bambini, and even your Gucci poochy. You'll also find deck-chairs.... and blankets. London Fields is not Liguria, purtruppo! 
Hothouse Rooftop, Martello Street E8 3QW http://www.coppalondon.co.uk 

Portside Parlour, Hackney

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! And what bastard stole my original Westwood pirate shirt now that I need it most? Tonight I'm swashbuckling out East to a new pop-up...if I can find the ruddy place (I've got until at least May 2013 to do so, I'm told) Let's see...clue 1: locate Off Broadway, a popular Hackney haunt set in a street market that packs up around the time Portside P opens (5 pm). Clue 2: make as if to spend a penny….and hello sailor! We're in to what looks like a cosy, candlelit take on a Captain Pugwash's cabin; although, this being PC Hack-en-ee, there'll be no smutty Seaman Staines, Master Bates and Roger the Cabin Boy jokes here, Matey. (Did you know? You can still buy Matey, my favourite childhood bubble bath introduced to me by a caring auntie because 'all the nice boys love a sailor' as she put it, cryptically...presciently). Set up in collaboration with Appleton Estate, Portside P's back bar boasts over 50 rums including barrel-aged rarities and Venezuelan Santa Teresa Rhum Orange liqueur. From £8, choose from a selection of grogs, cups, punch, slings, daiquiris, and just about any other style of drink the tar's tot of choice is suited to. Order Mai Tai (£8), spiced rum mulled cider or Hot Buttered Rum (served from copper kettles) from £12 for two to share. Should rum not be your cup of tea, so to speak, you’ll find beers from Kernel and Hackney microbrewery Craft. The soundtrack is appropriately Jack Sparrow/ Keith Richards/ Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (pictured) Shakin' All Over ...and if you don't know that particular tune, that's what's YouTube is for. 

63 - 65 Broadway Market E8 4PH http://portsideparlour.co.uk 

Crate Brewery, Hackney

On a steamy August night, Hackney Wick’s gritty industrial estates recall a 70’s Blaxploitation flick set in The Bronx circa Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto. In E9, it’s estate agents who are cleaning up, marketing this ‘urban village's’ desirable designer pads to young professionals. East London's shiny new middle class is out in force tonight, crowding onto tables on the canal towpath at Crate Brewery, the latest microbrewery/ bar combo catering to our new-found thirst for artisanal craft ales. Available on tap in its adjacent bar-cum-canteen, intense, hoppy, nutty Golden Ale - one of  three house draughts - is as good as I’ve tasted lately. Equally intriguing, is Brewfist Space Man: a notable Italian from a range of imported bottled beers that includes Bear Republic’s California-brewed Red Rocket. Crate’s owners have imaginatively kitted out the brewery's taphouse-cum-canteen, warming up an austere breeze block shell with a bar made from old railway sleepers. A mishmash of furniture is wittily fashioned on the cheap from what looks like Eddie Stobart’s cast-offs: crates, pallets, trolleys, heavy duty webbing and the likes. Dominating one wall, a humungous pizza oven takes pride of place.  ‘Yum’ I say, contemplating my (£8) red onion, courgette, feta and gremolata thin crust. ‘Double yum!’ says my date, clocking ' a 'spicy salami' and the exotic waiter who serves us: in a T-shirt bearing Jim Morrison’s image,  he makes The Doors’s smouldering late frontman look plain by comparison.

Unit 7, White Building, Queens Yard, E9 5EN http://cratebrewery.com 

Hemingway, Hackney

The decor at The Hemingway looks much as at similar refurbished boozers; all antiqued leather, flea market finds, statuesque art deco bronze lady-lamp and obligatory stuffed animal heads in a vaguely Victorian neocolonial-style parlour. The pub’s co-owners also seem familiar: did they once serve me at Quo Vadis? The Groucho? Soho House? Newly established in Victoria Park, their baby’s pumps dispense Deuchars and Broadside and there's merlot from £3.25 per (small) glass. An open kitchen does - whisper it! - gastropubby food. If these guys did work at swanky Soho gaffs, they've imported five star pricing. Moules (marinière...ish) and burger and industrial chips - done better and cheaper at nouveaux chains like Byron - are audacious at £13.50, no matter how well-heeled the locals. Rumbling us as away-dayers from ‘up-West, a loquacious Cockney salt claims 'yuppies' have pushed up house prices here.  ‘We’re the Highgate of Hackney, now,’ he says, managing to sound simultaneously pleased and regretful - nostalgic for the Krays, outside karseys and rickets. ‘In Queen Victoria’s day, the park was full of deer. Now it’s full of them festival lot from Lovebox what p***es in your doorway and nicks the guvnors’ brass companion set.’ he muses, motioning to the boozer’s salvaged fireplace. Can't tell you what he said about performer Grace Jones...lawyers and all...but I soooo don't believe it.    

84 Victoria Park Road E9 8510 0215

The Hackney Pearl, Hackney Wick

Hello! What’s this? Negroni, Whisky Sour and pukka Pouilly Fuissé on offer in a menacing locale that is just a disemboweled corpse away from being a set from Jack The Ripper?  For that’s the spooky crepuscular vibe abroad when, eventually, I track down The Hackney Pearl to a prosaic industrial estate, eerily deserted at weekends. Worth the effort? Deffo! For their chutzpah, I applaud both this new café-bar - and next-door neighbour Martabelle-K, a funky French traiteur-cum-café - pioneers in a bleak hinterland. Simple as you like - painted breeze block walls, wooden packing crates as shelving and a skip-load of seen-better-days dining suites - the joint is a cut-price cutie. To a sultry Etta James-y soundtrack, sweethearts knock out plausible cocktails, uncork - or rather, ‘unscrew’ - better-than-gut-rot bargains  and prepare highly affordable and consistently  edible all-day scran: zingy bacon green bean and boiled egg salad, panini, grown-up comfort food and ‘more tea vicar?’ cakes with served on someone’s Auntie Beryl’s mismatched china.  So who frequents this lovely wee local? If the gaggles either side of us are representative, smug, thirty-something, organic granola-crunching, self-congratulatory, PC peabrains; their cultural references lifted, wholesale, from the Guardian. Not so much engaged in conversation, as in loud competition - ‘Did I read you my mission statement, Hattie? It’s fantastic!’ - they contrive to get on my (Hackney) Wick. Faux-ney Eastenders aside, the Pearl is the nuts. 

11 Prince Edward Rd E9. Tel 8510 3605 

Off Broadway, Hackney; Library, Islington

£5 for a Manhattan is a steal. But that’s what you’ll pay for a well-made cocktail from a concise selection at Off Broadway (pictured). An unpretentious Manhattan neighbourhood-style lounge, it’s ‘Off Broadway’ as in busy Hackney street market of that ilk; consequently, it’s rammed with Eastenders that are less Phil and Grant, more Phil and Kirstie, so middle class has this insufferably smug location location location become. There’s perfectly formed Vespers and Sours, accessible vino and tasty American beers including Genesee Cream Ale from upstate New York and four from California’s Flying Dog. What scran there is - cheeses and salamis mostly- is top notch, but this new narrow L-shaped venue is not for the claustrophobic: I get my homely antipodean neighbour’s entire CV, like it or not. ‘I used to be at Grazia’ she booms. Perhaps its editor grew weary of Oz’s answer to Ugly Betty’s foghorn monologue and an armpit that smells of neglect? What drowns out chat at new late night bar, The Library, is an XFM-ish soundtrack; fair enough, it is a music venue, its small stage apparently has hosted Bloc Party and the Fratellis as well as comedy turns, which is how detractors might dismiss the Glaswegian rockers. The main bar - a dreary bottle green painted space with potted palms, fake books by the metre and workaday furniture - is supposed to say ‘traditional gentlemen’s club’: Hmmm, the British Legion, Scunthorpe? Thankfully, the crowd is less mundane, as is food such as mutton stew, roast partridge and venison sausages and mash. Drinks, meanwhile, are affordable and include ‘artisan’ cocktails and slacker-friendly brews for Mr. Scruffs.

Off Broadway, Broadway Market E8 7923 9265
The Library, 235 Upper St, N1 7704 6977