Dining Out 023: Rasputin's

Dinner in Hackney.

Sometimes going out for dinner is a three course meal, with cocktails to start and an espresso plus two desserts for the table to finish. Sometimes it’s chips in the pub because you’re having a pint anyway. I’ve neglected to talk about that second, more incidental, type of eating in Dining Out recently, which is a bit stupid really, considering it’s something I do all the time, so that’s what you’re getting this week. 

The meal I want to tell you about consisted of the following: one martini with five olives skewered on a stick balanced across the top of the glass, and two beef hotdogs. The hot dogs had been spurted in ketchup and mustard, with a pasta recipe’s worth of diced, raw white onion sprinkled over the top. These three items cost me £12 in one transaction, and I bought them from Rasputin’s. 

Rasputin’s is a bar on Mare Street in Hackney – basically next to The Dolphin, go figure – run by the “people behind” Dom’s Subs, east London’s stalwart purveyors of Big Sandwich. Considering Dom’s Subs’ strong sense of Americana – take the skateboarding and bodega influences on the aesthetic of their Hackney Road hole-in-the-wall, for example – it’s no surprise that their iteration of a boozer has been done out like a dive bar in New York or Austin or somewhere like that. 

There are movies showing on a loop on a TV behind the bar, and standing atop it are the types of figurines you get from a car boot, or in an especially demented eBay hole at 3AM (for example: Gromit in a Yankees cap). Menus are slim and one-sided, and the whole room is lit with the type of red light which makes you feel like you’re in the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks.  

While there’s an element of all of this that does feel a little bit costume-y – if I was being harsh I might call it theme-y; Big Mamma Group for lads with moustaches – ultimately I do like what they’re trying to do, especially when it comes to affordability and facilitating that most important of things: the having of a laugh.

A “mystery shot” is £3, which of course, I discovered and experienced first hand very quickly (I couldn’t tell you what the shot was), pints are a fiver (£11 if you want two hot dogs as well, which, sure you do), martinis are £7 (£12 with the double dog extra), and should you wish for one simple beef or vegetarian hot dog, fished out from one of two bain maries behind the bar, nestled inside a bread roll and liberally topped, that’ll set you back £4. Having got wind of the prices, I’d been interested to go in for a nose for a few weeks now, so my pals Hannah, Hayley and I headed over last Friday, to catch the place at its start-of-the-weekend best.  

Seating-wise, you go where you like, and there’s a mixture of sofas for bigger groups and high tables with stools for smaller ones. When we arrived at about 8PM, the place was busy but not suffocatingly so, full enough to make the room feel buzzy but not so annoying that you couldn’t get a seat. We sat up at one of the tall tables, and we each ordered the “Reaganomics Special” (the menu’s name for that martini + hot dog + hot dog deal, of course). We had our drinks and our dogs handed to us over the bar to order – no wait; instant gratification. 

I’d like to take a moment now to consider the “hot dog”. There are some foods that are perfect for drinking with. The Forza cauliflower fritti is so satisfyingly crunchy and oily that it should be prescribed for all with a crisp lager on the NHS, for example, and I have also talked before about how more pubs should embrace sandwiches, piled high with deli meats and those little matchstick fries, jusr because the combination of meat and bread is filling and salty and so good with alcohol (that’s why so many pubs do pizza). In the absence of widespread uptake of that particular stroke of genius, however, we get a lot of pub burgers, which are of course great. Hot dogs, however, are less common. 

I think this is because hot dogs are a fundamentally shit food – charred on barbecues by pissed dads; solemnly turning in those cinema or petrol station Rollover machines, like Princess Diana in her grave when they said Camilla was allowed to be queen – which in turn of course makes them an amazing one, particularly in the right context. And it turns out that the hot dog’s ideal context is this: served in pairs, on paper plates, inhaled in two bites, and washed down with a wet, briney martini. Rasputin’s know it. 

Their dogs are, on purpose, nothing special. The sausages are, essentially, boiled; the bread rolls very soft but ultimately cheerfully pulled from a packet, the ketchup and mustard of the sugary, bowling alley variety (huge compliment). All of this comes together, however, in that spectacular way you get with bar food – it does the job, it hits the spot, it satisfies in the moment like nothing else. I’d eat hundreds of these things. They’re cheap and savoury and it feels so good to eat them with your hands while your mates are making you laugh.  

As for the martini, this one is pretty heavy on the vermouth – be warned if you’re not into that – and very olive-y (you get five, as I mentioned). The glass is cold and the drink warms your throat. It’s boozy and it’s £7. Like its meat-in-bread counterpart, it’s what you’re after – and, indeed, I wrote about martinis in London for paid subscribers last weekend, and given their popularity I’d say that the Rasputin’s heads are on the money offering them so cheaply, in the location they’re in. 

Is this the most showstopping martini I’ve ever drunk? No. But did I have so much fun drinking it that I didn’t end up getting home until 3AM, my stomach happily lined with hot dog and a “mystery shot”? Absolutely.

I paid for this visit.

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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, and you can follow us on Instagram here, 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.

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