8th December 2007
Bgl. The rll with the hl
The mere mention of the place gets me slavering uncontrollably like a Pavlovian Pomeranian with mercury poisoning.
There is nothing dignified, sophisticated or "oh aren't we being multi-cultural" about this place. You sidestep London's best-placed begging pitch, you wander steamy-spectacled into the last hot hurrah of the Jewish East End, you queue with the cabbies and the ravers and the Shoreditch spuffers, you ask, you get, you pay, you're out. What do you need, a manual?
At the wrong end (if there is one) of Brick Lane's neon-drenched passanda and pilau paradise, the bakery's policy remains very simple; let's make beigels better than anyone else in London, let's sell them ridiculously cheap, let's never close.
The fact that their black breads, chollas and chocolate brownies are exemplary is almost an irrelevance - everyone in their right mind comes for one of two things, smoked salmon and cream cheese, or hot salt beef and mustard. In a beigel.
On a cold winter's night, in the blank space between alcohol and a sweaty night bus, the black hole of the beigel is the event horizon to my appetite's atmospheric particle, drawing me inexorably towards it, filled with moist chewy salty hunks of brisket, oozing with the sweet hot bite of english mustard and comehereyoubeautycometopapa!