The recipe for the perfect specialty coffee shop sounds simple: great coffee served by friendly baristas in a beautiful, relaxed setting. In practice, though, it's all too easy to miss the mark on one or more of these ingredients. Commons at Old Street Works nails all three and scores plenty of bonus points for their Oreo canelés. Yes, you read that right!
With signs of spring finally arriving in London, it's the perfect time to share some of my favourite coffee discoveries from the past few wintry weeks. Whether you're looking for standout London cafes to visit or great specialty coffee to brew at home, this round-up will keep you well-caffeinated.
Since I moved back to London 15 years ago, I have spent a lot of time eating my way around the city's increasingly diverse and impressive restaurant scene. To help me keep track — and for when friends and family asked for recommendations — I started jotting down my favourites in a Moleskine City notebook, which eventually evolved into a Google Sheet and then a blog post in 2016. An update was long overdue and here it is: my 50 favourite restaurants in London.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I've visited a fair few specialty coffee shops over the past 16 years. Many of these cafes have been beautifully and thoughtfully designed. But the new branch of % Arabica in Spitalfields really takes the cake (canelé, perhaps) with its stunning coffee bar. If you enjoy the works of Yayoi Kusama, you'll probably feel at home here.
Sometimes a new specialty coffee shop opens that just has it all: warm hospitality, beautiful design, a relaxed atmosphere and, of course, excellent coffee. Nagare Coffee, which opened in Spitalfields at the end of January, lives up to all of these, and both of my visits so far have been a pleasure.
Since I put together my London brunch guide a few months ago, I've been drawn more than ever to speciality coffee spots that do a mean brunch. The perfect example of this is Brunswick East in Dalston, which serves creative, Australian-inspired brunch dishes alongside its coffee offering. I enjoyed my first visit, a few weeks ago, so much that I went back for more last weekend!
The expansion of WatchHouse Coffee is such that at this point, there's a veritable Watch Village — or, at least, at Watch Hamlet — in and around Bermondsey. I visited their newest location in 70 St Mary Axe last week, and it was highly impressive: both in terms of the cafe build-out and the coffee itself.
My visit to Walthamstow last weekend wouldn't have been complete without a visit to Wood St Coffee, a coffee roastery and café at Blackhorse Workshop, a short walk north of Blackhorse Road Tube.
If you look at my map of London speciality coffee shops, you'll notice that there's a bias towards central and south-east London. But I've been trying to expand my horizons and hop on my bike or the Tube to visit more coffee spots further north and west of my Bermondsey home. One such outing was to Bühler and Co in Walthamstow last weekend, where I was able to sample both the coffee and the brunch.
While cycling through Fulham recently, I overheard a woman describing a restaurant as "a combination of my two favourite cuisines, Italian and Japanese." I knew exactly where she was talking about because I was going to the same place, Angelina in Dalston, a few days later for a belated birthday dinner with my brother.
I've been frequenting Ozone Coffee Roasters' original London coffee shop, near the Old Street roundabout, since 2012, and the Kiwi roaster's second London cafe in Bethnal Green has been on my to-visit list for a while. On Friday, I took advantage of a sunny day off work to divert my daily walk via Ozone II; although London is currently locked down, the cafe is open for coffee and food to take away.
After a cold, rainy January in London, 1 February was a gorgeous sunny day. For once, I'd picked a good day to take off work. Of course, with the UK in lockdown, my opportunities for fun were somewhat limited, but I did get back on my bike for the first time in a few weeks, and cycle to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Hackney Wick, a straightforward ride along Cycle Superhighway 2. I wasn't planning on making a coffee stop, but when I was about to head home, I happened upon The Roasting Shed's Hackney Bridge location. I knew the espresso bar was in the area but had managed not to add it to my Google Map.
Although London is in lockdown for the foreseeable, we are at least still allowed to go out for exercise once per day and despite the cold, grey weather, I've been going for a walk, run or cycle ride every day. Well, as I'm still a fair-weather cyclist, I've mainly been walking and running, which does limit the places within a reasonable distance. Much as I love running west along the river from Tower Bridge, close to where I live, I have done the same loop about 150 times in the past year and so I've been looking for some other options.
We're now inching closer to the end of an exceptionally challenging year. Despite everything, I know I'm very lucky to have remained healthy and in work (busier than ever, in fact, as I work for a science journal) throughout, but it's been such a difficult year for the hospitality industry, as coffee shops and eateries have had to adapt and then adapt some more in the face of constant change.
With a week of locked-down annual leave in London earlier this month, I took the opportunity to get on my bike and visit a few of the coffee shops that I'd been meaning to visit. Among these was Paradox Design + Coffee, based in the spot Terrone once occupied in London Fields' Netil Market.
With both my holiday and birthday plans brought to a screeching halt by the sudden announcement of a second lockdown in England last week, I took the opportunity to arrange a pre-lockdown early birthday dinner for myself. The Clove Club in Shoreditch, which has a Michelin star and which features on the world's 50 best restaurants list, has long been on my fine-dining wishlist. Its popularity means booking well in advance is usually essential, but changing rules and restrictions in London and beyond, meant I was able to secure a slot at the chef's counter on Lockdown Eve Eve.
One of my favourite things to do — on my travels and at home in London — is to eat out at different restaurants, new-to-me or old familiars. What with one thing and another, this has been from difficult to impossible over the past six months, but as London eateries begin to take those first steps towards that elusive 'new normal', I too have now dined out a few times.
