‘Much more than quite good’

How do you make Zone 2 of London, less than 15 minutes’ walk from the cacophony that is Dalston Junction, feel like a village?

As a restaurant owner, you cannot simply transplant a duck pond, beaming locals or rolling hills.

What you can do is craft a cafe seemingly built of pure sunlight and balanced decorously on a corner of De Beauvoir Town.

However, we are a long way away from the cream teas of Devon or the egg and chips of east Yorkshire.

Scott Pattinson has created a chameleon of a venue: simultaneously local, reasonable, humble (almost to a fault), and congenial.

This is a place to grab a coffee and a croissant, leisurely tuck into a heaped salad, or dive into some rather refined flavours under the cloak of darkness.

The space looks like the member’s area of the Tate Modern, and that is only a flex if I wasn’t to reveal that I have a joint membership with my mother (I could never lie to you, reader).

Strips of planked Treebeard dart up and down the space, covering some walls completely and leaving others free for appropriate art.

The tables and chairs match the hearty wood and are lined up neatly in the sunlight.

Again, this is a cafe and then some.

Instead of a clump of peonies in an old teapot, here we have miniature sunflowers in a 3D-printed purple jug that looks like it would be used by the Xenomorph if they were big on flower-arranging.

Dig into the £5 negronis (yes, you heard that right) or a refreshing Pacifico beer in a razor-thin glass so favoured by trendy places but absolutely not dishwasher-proof.

Now to the first common hurdle for any judicious diner.

Like the painfully stylish website, the lunch menu is minimalist, only mentioning Big Salad, Big Soup, and Sandwich. We are told to refer to the specials board for the actual ingredients.

Going on the assumption bred by our ungenerous lady London that anything under £11 would be the size of a baby pigeon, we order four plates.

But these are proper mains: mounded, glistening, on big boy plates, with side salads and vegetables. I almost cried.

The smallest plate is the most entertaining. It’s a slab of salted burrata, wobbling away. Lounged over it is a horn of squash, seared on the outside and exploding with pumpkin orange flesh on the inside, in its own bayou of hazelnut pesto and olive oil. Hello autumn, come up and see me sometime! The squash is a delight compared to the hard chunks of the vegetable found in bad vegan curries across the country.

Cheddar tart is a semicircle of the lightest, crunchiest pastry – if clouds did pie. Caramelised onion for sweetness, tang from the cheese, and a salad of carefully dressed, peppery strands of rocket.

The team at Albers know their way around a salad, make no mistake, and here it gymnastically leaps out to crunch between shards of tart.

Then there is the neolithic burial mound of dark greens and flashes of white capers, with parsnips cooked to resemble both chicken and tofu, alongside lentils and radicchio. It’s just the right amount of salty, fresh and filling. A salad to cry over, or into? It was so darn good.

It could be that the last dish, and the one we were most looking forward to, was a victim of over-ordering.

By the time we turned to the coq au vin, buttons had been undone and foreheads mopped. The lonely limb of chicken stranded on a bed of mash was a little plain in comparison to the wonders in ruins around it.

You want a deep low dish of bubbling flavour, not a rather dry appendage of bird over some uninspiring pulverised potatoes.

There is a udon broth, and a chicken and capers bap, along with a case of pastry delights that we were too full to even ogle at.

And don’t forget fried pollock and chips if you’re really hungry or, let’s be more realistic, painfully hungover.

The eventide gets serious with polenta, mussels, sea bream, bavette and more, all for serious prices – around £25 for the heavy hitters.

What struck me as I spied the restaurant’s glass-panelled exterior is a sign that reads, ‘Quite good grub’.

As a writer, I am an unerring fan of self-deprecation, but selling oneself short when you are confident in your output is both eye-winkingly clever and cloyingly British.

With Izzy Wallace of Jolene and Noble Rot’s Alistair Walling at the helm, they know what they’re doing at Albers.

This is ‘quite good grub’ like Dior does quite good clothes or Meryl Streep does quite good acting.

Pop along for much more than quite good.

Book a table you fool! Click Here!