Cafe Grill, Brick Lane

Not Not a Review

Not not a review of Cafe Grill — 35 Brick Lane, London.

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Fred aka @britishcuisineasmr with the goods

We lived on Brick Lane for four years, above a bad café which turned into a bad vintage store, whose manager began each day with Karma Chameleon at full volume. I was trying to write poetry and blamed Culture Club for failing. Most of Brick Lane is horrible – Casa Blue, the (non-Kosher) beigel shops, identikit ‘vintage shops’, the Truman Brewery, the stag-do Indian (Bangladeshi-owned) restaurants, each of which serves the same menu of delicious, comforting Anglo-Indian food. And so on. But pass all this, on the way to Whitechapel, and the street becomes noticeably poorer, as if it was impossible for tourists and the citizens of Essex to turn right on the way from Liverpool Street. Here is working-class East London. 

Here you’ll find a cockney shovelling disgusting, scurvy-giving food into his red and white face. He’ll be wearing a flat cap and screaming about eels and crime and women and Millwall, even though they’re from South London. 

I kid. There are complicated reasons why the white working-class left East London for Essex and it’s important to point out that not all of them did. But to think of the disappearance of pie and mash as emblematic of wholesale working-class displacement is a mistake. East London is still heavily working class, it’s just not all white. 

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