Market Cafe

London’s Hackney is replete with homely cafés serving up locals three square meals, with snacks and sandwiches, craft beer and fine wine in between. Market Café takes the cake, so to speak, with a location overlooking the canal at the southern end of Broadway Market, a big space with wooden floorboards and kitchen tables. Breakfast and brunch starts at a good mid-morning hour on those crucial, hungover Saturdays and Sundays, with Bloody Marys and light and fizzy mixers prominent at the tops of the menus. Perfect to start, or peacefully interrupt, the weekend.

Market Café elevates the standard Hackney brunch menu with panache, serving a clash of British and Italian comfort foods, with a smattering of French references, to the ravenous London masses filing down Broadway Market come the weekend. It’s a 10am until 4pm event on Saturdays and Sundays, the busiest times of the week, for sure, but they do the same Monday through Friday at the more restricted hours of 11am to 4pm. In any case, you’ll want to take advantage of either the Bloody Mary, the draught prossecco, a grapefruit Mimosa, a bubbly pink Bellini, espresso Martini, or a (thankfully) non-alcoholic cranberry and ginger.

Market Café does supper, too. And in keeping with its home kitchen aesthetic, it’s a simply ordered affair, with dishes ranging from bar snacks (giant green olives, peppers, truffled rarebit and mini saucissons), through small to large, with sides and desserts nicely cordoned off just in case. Smalls are a curiously international bunch, with French cindarella pumpkin soup, baby squid with Amalfi lemon, and charred cucumbers with milk curds and mint oil. Large dishes take in whole filleted sea bream with braised fennel, squid ink and shrimp butter, a spelt risotto, Market Cafe’s signature cheeseburger, and a duck leg confit with leeks and creamy white beans. Many of Hackney’s hipper entertain the thought of a dazed trip through Hackney’s Broadway Market of a weekend midday. But if your real intention is not to pretend interest in the various trinkets on sale but hunt down a satisfying refuel at a classic British bistro, make London’s Market Cafe your next destination.