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Page 10 | 24 - 30 May 2017 CITYMATTERS.LONDON
CITYMATTERS.LONDON 24 - 30 May 2017 | Page 11 Food Matters BAD EGG’S FAMOUS BRUNCHES ARE BACK AND EVEN BETTER THAN EVER TOP of the BOTTOM baked eggs, tacos, ribs, wings, burgers, plus a load of Asian-inspired slaws, sides and salads. The type of food your arteries will scold you for but it’s so worth the spanking. Central to this offering remains weekend brunch, a curated offering of the most popular egg-based dishes on the all-day menu, from which diners can make their choice of two per person. Stick with unlimited coffee, freshly squeezed OJ or soft drinks, or upgrade to bottomless so bad but so good: is the ethos at Bad Egg THE London dining scene is famously fickle. Restaurants are seasonal affairs, trendy pop-ups are here one day, down south the next, and our insatiable hunger for the ‘Next Big Thing’ has made standing reservations at old faithfuls a thing of the past. So when Moorgate all-day diner Bad Egg quietly closed its doors last October to rebrand as barbecue joint Little Smoke, owners Noble Inns probably assumed their customers would shrug, sigh and move on to the next, with LET’S DO... MARKET VALUE / Sourced Market The Barbican’s Waitrose could be up for some serious competition from independent deli-style eatery Sourced Market, which opened its fourth site below the Citadines Hotel on Goswell Road last week. The open layout showcases a huge range of artisanal food producers, with room to dine in-store or al-fresco. Expect cured meats from Borough Market favourite Cannon & Cannon, honey from Bermondsey Street Bees, Origin coffee, plus breakfast, lunch and dinner options fresh from the Sourced kitchen. 7-21 Goswell Road EC1M 7AH BEIJING STREET FOOD / Mama Lan The first City outpost of this Brixton-born Chinese chain brings with it authentic dumplings made in-house, noodle soups, and street snacks. Founder Ning Ma has based many of her recipes on those of her grandfather and mother, who used to run a dumpling and snack stall in a Beijing Street market – hence the name. The menu has grown to include fresh noodle soups served in slowcooked house broths, cold noodle salads, steamed buns and rice dishes, but make sure you save room for hero snacks such as prawn and water chestnut dumplings and spicy chicken wings. Unit 9, Avant Garde E1 6LD die-hard fans able to get their fill at the weekend pop-up. Not so, in the case of this City favourite, for less than six months down the track demand for Bad Egg’s Tex-Mex diner-style brunches grew so strong (and waiting lists for weekend bookings so long) that they had no choice but to extinguish Little Smoke and bring back the Bad, full-time. It means the return of executive chef Neil Rankin’s wonderfully dirty all-day menu of NATIONAL BARBECUE WEEK What better way to mark the official start of summer (hear that, Mother Nature?) than with a celebration of the season’s best method of grilling. To celebrate National Barbecue Week (29 May until 4 June), D&D London’s Thames-side enclave of restaurants at Butlers Wharf will be putting on a series of limited edition barbecue menus to be enjoyed on dining terraces. Chow down on Onglet steak with chimichurri at Blueprint Café, a 400g smoked Gloucester Old Spot pork chop at Butler’s Wharf Chop House, and seafood and vegetable barbecue skewers at Cantina del Ponte, and pray for sun. Special menus available at Blueprint Café, Butler’s Wharf Chop House, Cantina del Ponte and Le Pont de la Tour. Bloody Marys, prosecco and mimosas for your two-hour timeslot, which, judging by the general raucousness from neighbouring groups of revellers, most people opt for. And this is where Bad Egg rises to the top of the Capital’s arguably oversaturated bottomless brunch market. Diners demanding the volume from their £35 often results in a decline in service standards; whether staff are simply run off their feet refilling drinks at twice or three times the usual standard or rightly fed up with slurred cries of “another one, sir!” But neither was the case at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon at Bad Egg, where the party was in full swing and the staff were having just as much fun as the birthday girls and boys, all the while weaving between tables to take orders and top up tipples with ease. It’s a far smoother operation than the one we saw on a visit to the restaurant in its infancy back in 2015 and now matches the quality of the food coming out of the kitchen. Breakfast tacos are surprisingly flavourpacked for what is essentially scrambled eggs in a tortilla topped with avocado, with a smokey chipotle and punchy salsa working wonders. Reservation Spices and sauces are again the heroes of the chilaquiles, a sort of pimped out nachos topped with chipotle, guacamole, peppers, goat’s curd, jalapeños and a fried egg. Pulled pork, beans and kimchi on sourdough is not for the faint of heart or stomach, with a rich salty sauce that could be a mite heavy for this time of the day, but the macandchini – fried balls of mac and cheese – were bang on; diner food for the modern diner. Sign us up for that standing reservation. Bad Egg, City Point, 1 Ropemaker Street EC2Y 9AW menu full of favourites: to help line the stomach
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City Matters Edition 034

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