Dining Out 014: Leo's and Bake Street

Breakfast in Hackney.

Given that I am a freelancer with a tax payment due at the end of July (incredible way to start the newsletter), it’s unlikely that I’ll be off to sunnier climes in the immediate future. Luckily, however, over the last couple of weeks, the weather in London has shifted to no-bra mode (while it is not always sunny, it can be considered at least “reliably clammy”), so I am currently engaged in a fun game of Convince Yourself You Are On Holiday As Much of The Time As Possible. I’m pleased to share that it is going well. 

Sometimes this game means buying a six-pack of knock-off Crodino at Lidl Italian week, and sometimes it means buying sobrasada at Lidl Iberian week* and spreading it onto bread or cooking it down into pasta sauces. Sometimes it means making yourself an “antipasti” plate (picky bits ft. olives) for dinner; sometimes it means meandering about in the sun in an indecently short skirt not really doing very much at all. As I wrote in my post about the food I ate in New York during my recent visit, when I am on holiday I tend to be guided around a new place by what it is I want to eat there. Walking between snacks or meals is a great way to see a place more generally, and whenever I do it abroad, I always wonder why I don’t do it more at home, too.

You can probably see where I’m going with this, but basically last Friday I had a) a hangover, b) a hankering for breakfast, and c) an extremely rare morning off work, so I decided to go for one of these walks I enjoy so much. My plan was to hit up two places I’d not been to before, but which felt like they matched my fake holiday brief in different ways. The first was Leo’s in Clapton, and the second was Bake Street.

Luckily for me, I was visiting the notoriously popular Leo’s – a bar and Italian restaurant by night, and by day, a café serving Italian-by-way-of-British brunch dishes – on Glastonbury weekend, which meant that Hackney was essentially empty, and I got a table to myself right away. Leo’s is an interesting spot because everything is so perfectly, tastefully in place that you feel a little like you’re stepping onto a film set; a perfect recreation of Florence or Naples or Pisa (and of course, given my fake holiday brief, this was essentially what I was after). 

There are seats in the window, and metal chairs with curved frames tucked under yellow Formica tables. There’s a big, generous bar on one side, stacked high with Aperol and Campari (though you might be surprised to hear that the continent’s €2 spritzes haven’t quite made it to east London yet), and I could imagine sitting at it on a hot night and talking to a stranger. When I went, there were genuinely people playing chess inside, which is obviously minorly insufferable but also in the same breath quite charming. So far, so holibobs.

Sometimes I am a bit put off by restaurants that feel like you could shoot a movie in them, which, these days, for reasons to do with the social media/experience economy ouroboros, are more and more common. The Big Mamma group restaurants, like Gloria and Circolo Popolare, with their ridiculous, OTT decor, for example, fit into this category, as does Solis in Battersea Power Station to a lesser degree, and, to be honest, Brutto in Farringdon. And of course, you also can’t really discuss this phenomenon without mentioning The Devonshire, which is essentially a Living Museum-style recreation of an Irish pub in Piccadilly Circus, selling pints of Guinness as though they were souvenir tea towels and fridge magnets. 

This type of contemporary restaurant fit-out doesn’t really mean anything when it comes to the quality of the food or the service, as most of those that I’ve mentioned above prove to varying degrees. It also doesn’t take away from the fact that the authenticity of a place feels more defined by the atmosphere – the way you’re made to feel when you’re sitting down, actually in there, and whether that matches up to the idea that the place is trying to emulate – than anything else. 

On my visit to Leo’s last Friday, I sat down where I pleased, at one of those cute yellow tables, right next to a blackboard on which the menu was written by hand, as the sun came shyly through the front window. If I squinted, it was maybe like an early morning on a solo trip somewhere hot. After a couple of minutes, the lone server and barista asked me simply: “coffee?” It was the one word that I was dying to hear, and in that split second alone I was completely sold on the place: great service, after all, anticipates your needs. It felt casual, the way a side-street café – rather than a much-Instagrammed E8 restaurant – might. I took him up on the offer and asked for an iced filter coffee, which came in a short, thin sided glass that felt good on my lips. 

For breakfast, I had two boiled eggs with soldiers slathered in anchovy butter. Firstly: can you imagine being hungover and seeing that on a menu? It is like God Himself is trying to communicate directly with you to assure you of His existence. The yolks were sunny and runny, the bread was crisp, the butter was salty, and the anchovies gave the whole affair both a beachy feel, and the sort of oily indulgence you are always absolutely desperate for the morning after drinking**. I knew I would enjoy the food at Leo’s because it’s run by the same people as Juliet’s Quality Foods, which is, I think, the best breakfast place in London*** but it really did measure up nicely. 

And there was a tactile pleasure in eating it, too. I was alone but I had fun knocking the tops off the boiled eggs, and dunking my soldiers into them, and then scooping up the whites as they wobbled a bit on my spoon. It felt novel, like a treat, the sort of thing you only do when you’ve got the time to do it – the type of thing you do on holiday, I guess. 

To keep that feeling rolling, I decided to do something else I’d probably only do abroad and that was: eat ice cream before midday. I often think that one of the best things about being an adult is that you can have ice cream whenever you want, though I don’t act on that anywhere near enough. But last Friday, something took hold of me. I had the time, I had the inclination, and I had, to paraphrase Anthony Bourdain, a serious lust for soft serve. I knew exactly where I wanted to get it from. 

The walk from Leo’s to Bake Street takes about 30 minutes. I never really spend that much time in east London anymore, so it was novel to have an excuse to trot about. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like it felt as out of the ordinary as walking around might when you’re genuinely in a new place – according to my phone, the only thing I felt was worth taking a photo of en route was a block of flats called “Gooch House” (lmao) – but I sometimes get complacent in London, and I think seeing the place on foot, making connections between streets you know and others that you don’t, is a good way to get to know it better, even after nine years.

On my arrival at Bake Street, which is a bakery and café with a small outdoor seating setup that I’d never made it to, though its excellent reputation proceeds it, I had ice cream on the brain, despite the fact that it was actually a pretty overcast day. So while I’d have loved to try everything – the creme brulée cookies in particular turned my head like a worldie in Casa Amor (I’m the only person in the UK still watching Love Island ask me anything) – I ordered a soft serve, took it outside, sat on a bench and savoured it. 

The flavours on that day were kesar mango and Yorkshire yoghurt, and the blend was essentially like the most banging Solero you could possibly imagine. The mango flavour in particular was perfect – there was a little hint of saffron in there too – and texturally it was as smooth as a Mr. Whippy, only with loads more body. The yoghurt flavour was a little bit harder, but the tartness went well with the fruit and as a combo they were awesome.

As I ran my spoon around the plastic cup, I thought about checking my emails and then figured that it could wait. I was back on the clock that afternoon, but for the morning, under the gloomy London clouds, I was on my holidays. 

* Admittedly it absolutely almost always involves Lidl, because the sheer novelty involved in every visit is unmatched by other UK supermarkets, and it’s the closest thing we have to the type of shop in Spain or Greece or wherever where you end up just spending hours ogling the crisps and shouting “Have you seen this?? They’ve got paella flavour!” as if you’ve never left the house in your life. And when I say “you” here I do mean “me”. 

** The greatest item you can buy to satisfy this requirement, and perhaps the greatest £1 it is possible to spend full stop, is of course the McDonald’s hash brown .

*** I hate “Best X In London” discourse – why can’t something just be good? – but Juliet’s is where I make the exception. Their food is phenomenal and will challenge your expectations of “eggs”.

I paid for these visits. Also, the email version of this newsletter erroneously stated that Bake Street is near Victoria Park. I have no idea where I got that from. Geography: not my strong suit!

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday. This week, the paid post will be a list of fun places to dine ~al fresco in London.

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