With who: Ed Hitter and a host of other work types
How much: starters around £5/£6, mains between £9 and £15 and pork pies at the bar for £2.50
When one of our team won a dance class in a work raffle there was no way that we weren't all getting involved. Twelve assorted writers, editors, business types and a random designer who happened to be in the room when we discussed it. I'll leave those who know me to imagine this class. Less of the Ballet Russe, more Ballet Grosse. We fell out of the class covered in sweat and neon. You can take a man to dance, but you can't always make him spin (in a coordinated fashion). We fell over the road still in our street-dance costumes and into the Crown.
When Hackney gentrifies, it does so quickly. Sloaney pub chain Geronimo takes a dicey neighbourhood boozer, though admittedly one in a beautiful old Victorian building, across the road from the tower block guarding the entrance to Victoria Park and turns it into somewhere you'd expect in the monied parts of South West London. This also put us into the deepest depths of Hackney, an area I'm not familiar with, even after more than ten years in the capital. Call me biased and parochial, but I can get my squalor closer to home and it's rather too close to the asymmetric haircuts of Hoxton's bars and cafes. We all have areas we love, and I've never had a Hackney state of mind.
Usually, I'd be channelling the burger in a place like this, and certainly as a precursor to a night of fairly heavy drinking, however it had only been 24 hours since my last one and not even I can justify that. I'd also had a fairly awful fish and chip lunch quite recently at their West end outpost The Adam And Eve and didn't want to have another pub standard massacred by mediocrity. As such, I turned to a Butternut Squash and Red Onion pancake with goats cheese. Don't judge me, I was wearing neon leggings and a crop top. More pedestrian than a German rambler and aggressively priced at a tenner considering the costs of the ingredients (a perennial whinge with vegetarian dishes - How CAN it cost more than a burger or a fish fillet to buy?). It's a great concept for a dish, wholewheat pancake filled with a roasted, slow cooked mix of squash and onion and wrapped like a parcel. The goats cheese then sits on top before it's thrown under the grill and served with a balsamic dressing and rocket. It just didn't deliver. Pleasant enough, all of the elements needed to be turned up by 30% (with the exception of the rocket, at the hight of its peppery heat).
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