East London in the Summer: a veritable posse of pop-ups

Cometh the sun, cometh the pop-up.  Places, which only weeks before would have seemed highly improbable locations for restaurants, are transformed - abandoned rooftops reworked, work yards receive a makeover. And the arches by London Fields station, it appears, is the epicenter of this culinary explosion. Not a bad place for food at the worst of times (think Broadway Market, E5 Bakehouse, Buen Ayre), come summer your options multiply.

On the rooftop of Emigre Studios is Coppa, the new outpost of Lardo (a great little Italian round the corner serving up seriously good pizza from their disco ball oven).  Serving cicchetti - Italian tapas - the menu is concise, we ordered at least one of everything.  There are fresh chickpea and celery salads, unctuous nduja-laden arancini and rich caponata.  Less impressive were the spiedini - little skewers of tough lamb, grilled bread with cheese or prawn (note the singular - for £4!).  There were various other fried things - zucchini chips, proscuitto tomato and mozarella calzone fritte (and to think people scorn the Scots for deep fried pizza, although that's maybe because we add a healthy dollop of HP sauce!). All perfectly fine, but not really worth searching out.  Great place for a beer and arancini, but would stick to that.

Literally round the corner (it was one of those kind of days) is a collaboration between Climpsons Coffee and Lucky Chip (here, Licky Chop - see what they did here) - Climpsons Arch.  Housed in the arch used to roast coffee beans, most of the place is outside, a yard surrounded by a couple of meters high metal fence.  Not the most inviting of spaces you might imagine. But, as with another newly opened railway arch restaurant, Beagle, Climpsons and Lucky Chip have made the most of what they've got. 

The menu is made up of my kind of things - oysters (the ones with tapioca pearls are quite possibly the best I have ever had), bone marrow on toast with a smoked anchovy spread, onglet steak (there it is again!) and even a whole roasted pigs head, medieval! We opted for the bone marrow - roasted hunks of bone with sourdough, could have done with an extra slice of toast though.  The hake with cocoa was also good.

A sun trap (well at least on the day we visited) serving interesting food and great drinks (you've got to try the bottled rhubarb cocktail) - I think I can forgive them that fence.

The Young Turks: hopefully not just a pop up

What do you get when you combine the former head chef of St John (one of my favourite restaurants in London) with the development chef at the Ledbury (somewhere near the very top of my wish list) - the Young Turks of course. 

These two have been popping up all over London doing events for a couple of years.  However their nomad years may shortly be coming to an end.  Having started as a two month pop-up in November of 2011, the pair have now been serving up a different menu upstairs at the Ten Bells pub every week since and have just extended their residency to the end of April. We will just have to wait and see whether this latest extension is the last or whether this is one "pop up" which ends up being permanent.

Having tried to get a table in both November and December I was delighted when I got a reservation in January.  On arrival you go through the door at the back of the pub (with a large no entry sign on it) and up the stairs to the restaurant.  It is a small space and, unless you are a large group, the likelihood is that you will end up sharing a table with others.  Unconventional but quite fun.

The experience starts with a Hendricks gin-based cocktail.  The week I went it was beetroot - nice idea but the flavours were weak and it just didn't pack enough of a punch.

We started with a home-cooked bread served with a trio of starters:  pheasant and pine needle salt, smoked cods roe and a take on Jeremy Lee's (of Quo Vadis and formerly of the Blueprint cafe) smoked eel sandwich.  The eel was incredible, the smoked cod roe delicious but the pheasant, whilst the most visually engaging of the trio, lacked flavour - the pine did not come through at all.

Smoked Cod's Roe

The Jeremy Lee Sandwich

Pheasant with Pine Salt

This was then followed by January King (a hardy type of winter cabbage), mussels and seaweed, absolutely delicious!

We then moved on to swede, mutton and purple sprouting broccoli.  The mutton was rich, deep and full of flavour but the real star was the liquor which came with this dish.  Distilled clear it was the kind of thing you would dream of on a cold winters day - simply brilliant!

Next up were sweetbreads, turnips and oats.  The sweetbreads were tender but, as in the last dish, it was the sauce that was the real treat.  As well as a few crispy oats, underneath the sweetbreads was a milky oat sauce - I would never have thought that this would work but it did.



Last up was one of the best deserts I have had.  The Fashionista even placed it above those which we had on our visit to Osteria Francescana (2011's fourth best restaurant in the world).  Buttermilk panacotta, a layer of reduced rhubarb jam and some slow cooked pieces of rhubarb on top.  Very good indeed.

Dinner at the Young Turks pop up was very, very tasty.  Especially when you consider that all of the above (including the cocktail) came for thirty nine quid.  With wine that is guaranteed to be marked up by no more than ten pounds a bottle you can eat and drink here incredibly reasonably.  Part of me hopes that this residency never comes to an end but, given the Turks wandering spirit, I would bet that before long they will be off on their travels creating another culinary hot spot elsewhere in London.  If this is the case, London can only hope that they don't take too much of a break...