New featured article — Beck's Cafe, Holborn, WC1

[ewan]

Hello again!

This week's featured article is Beck's Cafe, WC1R 4PS, a greasy spoon cafe offering excellent quality breakfast in the Holborn area. bob's been a regular nigh on twenty a year now. In my own opinion, sausages are the key, good quality sausages, can't overemphasise how important these are.

Two new entries include Bongo East, a Ghanaian restaurant/bar in Barking. It offers some tasty fufu. I'm still not sure what that is. Some kind of bread?

Another addition is Albina, another bar/restaurant this time in Plaistow. It offers food from the Ukraine, and is probably a good deal safer to visit than that country is right now (/topical). I would suggest reading our review carefully before you go in, because there's some good stuff if you choose well. Bonus Cyrillic action.

Finally two reported closures are Viajante, whose award-winning chef Nuno Mendes has gone on to other projects (he's currently cooking at the Chiltern Firehouse, which your updater is confident he will not be eating at, what with it being London's current hot ticket). At the other end of the gastronomic spectrum, the E5 Cafe in everyone's favourite postcode has also shut up shop, not long after advertising non-existent Punjabi food, which may perhaps have confused their potential customers and been something of, dare I say it, a marketing error.

Comments

[katstevens]

I am going to try and get a table at the Firehouse anyway :)

[ewan]

Good luck! I assume this is for you & R? Let me know how it goes, I'd still love to go...

[mrs_leroy_brown]

I'm actually genuinely gutted about the erstwhile Workmans/E5 closing down - last greasy spoon on Chatsworth Road is now gone and nary a place to get breakkie for under a tenner. The poncey cafes won :( I mean there's a place for them and all, but sheesh :(

[nou]

+1

[nou]

Re fufu, I'm never quite sure how much detail to go into when describing food that some readers may be unfamiliar with! Fufu is a little bit like mashed potato, but stretchier and more cohesive. It's made by boiling and pounding some form of starchy food such as yam or cassava. You can see it in the background in this photo.