Wapping Market - Wapping

Shadwell Pierhead, London, E1W 3TD

When I moved to London I had certain preconceptions about various areas of the city. Shoreditch, trendy. Mayfair, posh. Clapham, boring. While some proved true, most were definitely false. There are far too many tramps outside Patisserie Valerie for Mayfair to be truly posh, while Clapham's so exciting its chicken shop has its own reality TV show. With Shoreditch, on the other hand, 'trendy' hits the nail on the head. Presumably, a sustainably sourced bamboo nail, hit with a Scandinavian designed hammer, made from recycled fixie bikes - so says the self-descried lifestyle blogger, typing on his Mac in a loft apartment just off Hoxton Square. What a hypocrite!

Wapping, I had noted as a place to avoid. A home for Victorian murderers and, until recently, the News of the World. Occasionally, I'm wrong though; ever-so-slightly wrong. It's a pretty nice place, Wapping. Expensive warehouse apartments overlook the Thames on one side and flagstoned streets on the other. It has pubs owned by celebrities, restaurants by Ramsey, and a harbour full of luxury yachts. Not exactly surfing the breadline, as I thought it might be. As I said, I was wrong; very occasionally wrong.

Wapping now has a market too. One of those middle-class delights of a market: artisan cheese, artisan bread, artisan meats, and artisan street food wagons. Not a £1 washbowl, 50p bag of clothes pegs, or a stolen bike in sight. There it sits, on a strange park-like paved islands in the middle of Shadwell Basin, overlooking the canoeists on their Sunday morning lessons, and temptingly close to the Prospect of Whitby pub with it's stunning views of the river.

We managed two laps of the fifteen or so stalls at Wapping Market before deciding on something to eat. A nibble of cheese here, a salivate at some ham there, and a couple of purchases for dinner in the week. The market has a good mix of vendors. Chicken farmers and market gardeners rub shoulders with the trendy donut and burger brands that gridlock East London car-parks every weekend. Finally, a stomach rumble too far, I took my pew in the sunshine with a bowl of rabbit pasta from Pasta e Basta. Sweet tomato, gamey meat, eye-popping olives. It's a hearty way to begin a lunch or, in this case, a breakfast. Simply delicious.

While I might almost always moan that I'm full after eating, rarely does it last long. A pudding was on the menu. A mother lode of a pudding from Crosstown Doughnuts. Sea salt caramel so sweet it's diabetic, banana cream so rich it makes lobster taste like ash, and chocolate 'soil' so dark, light itself cannot escape (blatant plagiarism there). How is this thing legal?! Be glad it is and get one before the government change their mind. Just don't try and share the thing - you'll lose friends, as you won't want to, and besides, trying to cut it in half just results in a t-shirt covered in banana cream.

Thanks to @JaxxNelson for this one.

Wapping Market might seem out of the way, but it's not. A couple of stops on the DLR from Bank, a short walk, and you're there. Definitely under an hour from those more trendy, posh, and boring parts of London. An hour worth spending, especially if you can get to the front of the DLR for some Hyperlapse fun.

Eyre Brothers - Shoreditch

70 Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4QX

Think of Shoreditch and think of meat by the bucketful, pop-up stalls in car parks, hotels selling coffee, and a mile of Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road. The idea of fine dining is something held further north amongst the pushchairs of Angel or further South amongst the suits of Moorgate. But there are actually plenty of places offering polished silver, black shirted waiters, proper wooden tables, and natural light - Eyre Brothers is one such place. A smart Iberian (read tapas) restaurant on Leonard Street, you’re best visiting when someone else is paying and when you’ve planned a stereotypically Spanish afternoon.

Visiting at lunchtime and hearing a pin or two drop in the restaurant, the bar seems the best place for this agoraphobe. Here you can choose from a short tapas menu that features such delights as slow cooked pig cheeks in red wine. The desire to simply stop there and order five of those dishes is a difficult one to repress, but then they do have casseroled belly pork two rungs down, so it’s a good idea to read on. The meal can be slightly stodgy if you order before the bread basket arrives. The small white rolls are moorish and perfect for wiping around the finished casseroles, soaking up every last drop of the fatty, tomatoey, garlicky goodness. Even after the sobrasada (pork paste on toast) and the pa amb tomaquet (tomatoes on toast), just one more roll was needed to finish wiping each dish clean. 

Pork isn’t actually mandatory at Eyre Brothers and the delicate anchovies, fried peppers, and prawns provided a good palate cleanser between each mouthful of meat. As does a small sip of sherry - that afternoon siesta looking ever more tempting. The prawns arrived nestled between strands of green plants, which I managed to knock deftly aside. I presume this garnish was purely decorative. The boquerones (anchovies) were slightly more challenging, my fat clumsy fingers struggling to retrieve the breakable fish without picking up the accompanying garlic and walnuts - both non-meats, but they tasted surprisingly good.

A place like Eyre Brothers, with it’s refined dishes, crisp white napkins, and lack of craft ale shows that Shoreditch can offer cuisine above that of the half-foot burger, the bucket of diablo wings, and child-sized steak. It’s a taste of things to come, possibly, as the suits from the City edge ever closer to the trendy trendy streets of Silicon Roundabout.

Street Feast - London

You have to love the power of social media. Something that will never be fully harnessed or even understood by the big corporates, it let's a hard working guy selling ribs in East London attract customers and investment from across the city, and no doubt beyond. Of course, content is still King - the food has to be good; but you don't get 750 backers and £16k of investment without tender, sweet, juicy pork oozing deliciousness through a bun.

And so for being one of those 750, I was tempted by old-fashioned email to Street Feast's Back Yard BBQ and Key Party with the promise of a 'thank you' beer. Occupying a builders yard, in the 'dickhead' trendy East, Street Feast hosts regular weekend events where check-shirts, loafers with no socks, and square white sunglasses are the order of the day - not to mention some of London's best street food and craft ale.

After picking up our free beer and a handful of BBQ pork, we basked in the sunshine and drank our way through a few pints of Camden Town Brewery's fruity Gentleman's Wit (4.3%), before moving on to the 'standard' Hells Lager (4.6%). When the sun is shining, there are few better places to be sat than equidistant between a well-stocked bar and a choice of BBQs.