Dining Out 044: Bar D4100
Lunch in Nunhead.
All hangovers are not born equal. Some hangovers are only slightly awful, and they make you feel just bad enough that a sort of guilt descends on you. On these occasions, rather than decomposing in bed and ordering £40 worth of bad Deliveroo, you force yourself up and cook yourself some eggs and feel better for it, like a real member of society rather than a 30-year-old teenager.
Other hangovers, however, are more sinister. There is a darkness. You wake up knowing it’s not good, you eat some Nurofen, and then writhe around for just long enough that your bedroom begins to feel fully gross – and it is at that point (usually around lunchtime, or when you start to be able to smell yourself) that the healing must begin. The Conscience Eggs will not do in this scenario: instead, these hangovers call for some non-negotiable magic elements as you attempt to rejoin civilisation*.
This is an intensely personal process. For you, the necessary elements may include some combination of items like: an almond croissant bigger than your head, a Lucozade Sport, a fry-up, a cold Ribena. For me, however, when I am feeling rotten and indulgent, I tend to be after: 1) a massive pizza, and 2) at least half of a cheesy garlic bread. And considering that there are very few restaurants where I’d rather procure each of those things than Bar D4100, this is the place that ended up as a pit stop during a recent more-on-the-dreadful-end situation.
I kind of can’t believe that it has taken me until entry number 44 (!) to actually centre a weekly review on Bar D4100, because it’s one of the restaurants I probably go to most, owing to the fact that it’s affordable, reliable, fun, and quite near to where I live. If you aren’t familiar, it’s a bar and pizza place in Nunhead which has had lots of mentions in Dining Out over the course of the newsletter’s existence, though never its own Actual Write-Up. You’d probably describe it as the flagship site of Dinner For One Hundred, which is a small ‘group’ of pizza places – one at Telegraph Hill Park, one at a pub called The Perseverance in Bloomsbury, and then this dedicated site on what I will call The Nunhead Strip, next to Goodcup and El Vermut.
I like Bar D4100 because it’s a good encapsulation of what the Dinner For One Hundred “brand” (sorry) seems to want to do. These are hospitality people in the proper sense of the word: their food, drinks, and venues are genuinely welcoming to everyone: they do late nights, they sometimes have live music at the weekends, and they hold kids’ parties as well as singles’ nights for all ages – and are basically responsible London’s current obsession with the latter.
As such, while some similar south London places skew too self-consciously cool or too Yummy Mummy, Bar D4100 keeps a pretty neutral balance by not prioritising any demographic too much – they just cultivate a chilled atmosphere, accessible food, and very friendly, warm service. It’s a cosy, casual restaurant, where you tend to be able to walk in, as long as it’s not a Friday or Saturday night, the prices are very reasonable (you can get a main for a tenner and a pint or a spritz for a fiver), and there are pizza choices of both the crowd-pleasing and creative persuasions.
All of this is music to the ears of a very hungover person (me), with pizza on the brain and gluttony in her heart, so I sloped along last Sunday in the pissing rain – a very on-the-nose example of “pathetic fallacy”, emphasis on the “pathetic” – to try to sort myself out.
We got two pizzas, a cheesy garlic bread and three dips between two people, which turned out to be the exact right amount, because it meant that there was extra to take home for dinner later on. Where the garlic bread is concerned, it’s a pretty straightforward pizza bread – but show me a person who doesn’t enjoy this combination of soft dough, sharp garlic butter and chewy mozzarella, and I will show you a joyless husk – and the dip selection includes nduja mayo, truffle mayo, and lemon and rosemary mayo, all of which are great (obviously because I was in a minor fugue state, I ordered all three.)
Pizza-wise, I picked the MacGyver which is Dinner For One Hundred’s ‘signature’ pizza and it’s pretty much what I always get, because I love the flavours so much. It’s mozzarella, chorizo, whipped feta, crushed fennel seeds and hot honey on a red sauce base, and it works brilliantly every time (this time, they went a bit harder with the fennel seeds, which I was actually very into as a FennelFan420).
Texturally, this is a pretty saucy fella (as are the rest of the D4100 pizzas), so if you’re one of these people who loves going on about New York and snappable bases and “best pizza in London” discourse, this is not the place for you. If you are amenable to a pillowier, homelier, closer-to-Neapolitan style, however, there’s probably something here that you will like.
Crusts are eminently rippable (and dippable), and Dinner For One Hundred’s general ethos of generosity and abundance for all absolutely extends to toppings – they are piled high and wide. Occasionally, this does admittedly make the pizza a bit difficult to eat, and you have to do a bit of origami in order to safely deliver it to your gob. The whole operation is so good-natured, however, that it’s hard to be properly put out by a bit of sloppiness: I think if you just accept that you’re going to leave this place with sauce on your nose, you’ll have a better time.
I ate half of my MacGyver and a couple of slices of garlic bread basically without breathing, and by that point the hangover dragon was sated: the weird ambient headache subsided, replaced by a good warm-in-the-tummy, Sunday afternoon-type feeling. The food contributed to that, for sure, but I think moreso, it was the atmosphere at Bar D4100 that did it. It was cosy on a rainy day, and as always, it felt like a place where you can show up and be made to feel comfortable whether you’re celebrating a birthday or just hanging out. I left with half a pizza for later and quite a lot more bounce in my step than I’d arrived with – pretty good spoils, I think.
*When I mention non-negotiables I mean food-wise, because honestly the only actual failsafe hangover cure I will ever offer you is thus: having a shower.
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.
Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.