evchen

[evchen]

Pickled in Good Company

I’m listening to Jorge Ben on the train. The way I’m dressed indicates three years of Bristol: needless necktie, ill-fitting shirt, horrible jeans, lopsided beret. In the window of my local commuter line, I’m so cool that it almost disgusts me. What’s caused this high? Why am I a little cartoon boy with lollipop and propellor hat, and not someone gagging at their own pretention?

This time, the train is sweeping me from Essex back to Bristol. I could not make this brief trip without giving in to Yas’ insistence that we go to Hackney. It’s our special place, after all.

It always starts the same way. We grab tiny pre-mixed cocktail cans from the M&S at Stratford, we get the Overground, we set up in St John’s Churchyard: in my case, I try not to salivate at the aromatic smoke coming from the market stalls. There was a moment of sadness as I registered that the Hackney Tap has been possessed by a Gail’s. It wasn’t a great pub at all, and I only visited once. It’s still sad to see a pub go.

After my tinnie had sufficiently disarmed me, we head down Mare Street to the Cock Tavern. I love this place for its eclectic pickled eggs and for its local patrons. All the conversations sound beautiful, and remind me that whilst I love the South West, it’s the East End and Essex that I want to hear. It’s home. Every interaction with the bar staff here affirms me that these people are well looked after, too. The interior is dark and cosy and strewn with posters for local gigs. There’s a patch of wall stamped with regional coasters. A wonky lamp in the corner is so proud to be what it is.

I opted for a rhubarb mead. It was too sweet for my tastes, but I inflicted it upon myself in the name of adventure and dutifully chased it with menthol rollies. We chose the roadside tables over the seating area out back: whilst not exactly a sun trap, it was nice to be an island around which Hackney’s pedestrians moved. People walked by and greeted us. Cars held up in traffic blasted kind of incredible music. I stared down Yas’ cider and chili pickled egg and felt envy on a molecular level. There has never been a worse time to be full up from sushi-to-go.

The Cock Tavern advertise an egg-eating competition. I’ve entertained the idea of competing, just to say I’ve done it, although – and this is the same reason I resent pub golf – why wouldn’t I savour such a curious orb? The pickled egg is the briny manifestation of everything freaky and wonderful about British pub snack culture. I’m not here to be an athlete: I will, however, be running back to Mare Street as soon as my schedule allows.

Which came first? Where my Hackney itinerary is concerned, it tends to be the egg. And then the Chesham.

The Chesham Arms is so perfect that I always feel somewhat guilty for going there. We joined the small crowd scattered around its entrance. You know a neighbourhood boozer is good when people are stood there ten minutes before it opens.

Through a suitably residential-looking front door, the Chesham’s bar area greets you first, furthering the effect of stumbling in. There is no preamble, just a bar, and then the warm seating areas blooming from its perimeter. This pub really feels like a place you just happen upon. Beyond this love-at-first-sight kind of spontaneity, it then has the unfortunate effect of rendering the next pub you visit incomparable.

It was nineteen degrees and sunny – thankfully, the Chesham opens out from a small balcony onto a spacious pub garden. The benches in the main section are arranged in sociable rows, the way I like it. Delighted, I watched as two once-separate parties at the neighbouring table were united by mutual eavesdropping. Curious toddlers enjoyed the company of yuppies’ teddy-bear dogs. It was time to drink to the beauty of it all.

Yas is classy: she went for a Campari soda. Its bitterness cut deliciously through the haze of a tipsy East London sojourn. I went for a pint of Seacider, which is cloudy and made with pure apple juice. That is, for better or for worse, all you can taste. As such, my recommendation comes with a warning. Seacider retains none of the innocence of the cheerfully branded carton its fruitiness anticipates. It wants to sweep you away until you’re a mere barnacle on the underside of a wooden bench. If it weren’t for the cat I had to go home and feed, I would be the first barnacle to publish a blog post. Do you like to be beside the seaside?

I munched on scampi fries as I let Yas grill me about questionable romantic interests from my teenage years. If my choice of cider is a useful metric, which it is, I’d like to think my tastes have grown far more refined.

The Chesham Arms is romantic. It’s tucked away, to some extent: “Remember when we found that pub?”. There are more secluded tables towards the back of its sizeable garden space. And it helps that Mehetabel Road is itself a talking point, what with its aspirational townhouses and classic cars.

This romance is not without its footnotes. You can’t talk about Hackney without talking about how Hackney has changed. I tell my East Ender Dad about this pub, and he goes “yeah, I know exactly where that is”, thumbing through neighbourhoods on Google Maps with bullet-precision before mentioning a distant, dangerous vision of Dalston.

Down the road in Newham, entire communities were gutted so that a sweaty, corporate patisserie of national pride could barge in. The Olympics and a Gail’s have little in common: they do, however, belong to a slick project of convenience and hybrid work that is decidedly the legacy of a few guys in Spandex doing laps around an iron doughnut.

Someone on Reddit describes Hackney ‘as a kind of Disneyland for people in their 20s’. Although a light-hearted and woefully general description of a historically diverse area, it holds sickening truth. You go here to work. You go here to club. Someone in your life tells you how badly you need to go to Dalston Superstore. You’re middle class, and you don’t even live here. What now?

In any argument you make about protecting informal community spaces, you should consider the absurdity of the perspectives of hybrid work, or the flexibility afforded by broadly unaffordable higher education. These are the pillars of regeneration projects like HereEast, itself a few Overground stops away. Concrete and conferences and glass. A workday in a snowglobe occupying the cavity of a demolished housing estate: these developments distort – or even obscure – the reality of thousands of Hackney households enduring temporary accommodation.

The severity of Hackney’s housing crisis remains. Social housing provisions are failing to meet the demands of a waitlist. The Olympics can largely be blamed for the area’s inflation problem. In celebrating the preservation of a pub – a place dependent on its patrons – we need to consider how, or if, these patrons are able to exist in proximity to it.

The pub represents somewhere to bed down and talk. It’s a space for informal community socialisation, and so everything about it is in defiance of the convenient or corporate. Embracing the passing visitor is a given in hospitality, but any discussion of a pub you like should account for how that pub serves devoted locals. I was both saddened and delighted to find out that the Chesham Arms operates today thanks to the efforts of campaigners who saved it from illegal conversion in 2015. This was a two-year battle for a very, very old boozer. Hackney loves this pub; they were willing to fight for it. This conviction is perhaps what I saw in the late afternoon crowd scattered around its front door. Statistics surrounding the unaffordability of East London housing and the prevalence of unstable temporary accommodation suggest that this conviction is not so generously offered to the housing crisis.

That’s not to say efforts aren’t being made. The Morning Lane People’s Space campaign operates in light of Hackney Council’s unjust purchase of a site occupied by a big Tesco. Feign shock as I tell you that their intentions were to fill the space with unaffordable private properties. MOPS activists consult locals, who call for social housing, stress the convenience of a big supermarket, and demand youth amenities. Their surveys are far more rigorous than those of the Council, and operate on the ground: stalls outside the big Tesco directly engage the people using it. As of April 2025, Hackney Council claim that they “are committed to involving the Hackney Central community in the plans for the site”. This has yet to be reflected. Still: it’s worth celebrating the sustained efforts of this group, who should not have to pick up the Council’s slack and emphasise the obvious – people want affordable homes, and somewhere to get food.

My reluctant departures from my favourite East London pubs affirm a few things. Chiefly, that this is a place of tension. Often, I have experiences here that obscure – perhaps by design – the fraught relationship that Hackney has with looking after its own residents. I have a dreamy, train-window lens on things that is both enriching and detrimental. That’s not to say I approach every pub visit with a morosely critical lens. It’s all about balance. I sink pints, I come home, and I think about the more miserable things. Business and pleasure.

[evchen]

The Mother of All Oysters (30/03/2025)

I

The 11:30 train from Bristol Temple Meads to London Paddington was in no hurry to get going, unlike its horde of envelope-licking passengers – if they could be seen at all beneath the foliage. I hoped these mothers had vases. Anyway, it’s not my job to inform you that Great Western Railway doesn’t operate in service of sentimentality.

I, however, do. Or at least I did, for about half an hour, as we crested the rolling hills of Westbury – I think. There was an inexplicable diversion. I didn’t really care because it was sunny and I was seeing my family, but I wanted to see them faster. I let Outkast soundtrack my impatience until it became too hot to stand my headphones. After that, I was just hungry, and couldn’t form a thought that wasn’t shaped like a sandwich. There was no trolley service, of course. But nothing says ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ like a text from your daughter about how hungry she is, so it all worked out in the end.

Once at Paddington, I made a beeline for Sainsbury’s. Being in London compels you to do strange, fearful things: in this instance, paying £2.05 for an Orangina and blaming being in London, rather than reflecting on your unwavering brand loyalty. Whatever reflection I started doing was snagged in the closing doors of the Elizabeth Line train now shuttling me to Liverpool Street. I was listening to Kano as I emerged from the Moorgate exit, probably with a horrible smug expression. Look at you, going to London and listening to music about London.

In these banker parts, I often feel like the sun pinging off the great glass monoliths will fry me dead. I’m an ant, that’s the magnifying glass. This day was not so offensively hot, and because it was a Sunday, I was not at risk of being crushed underfoot by a stockbroker. Moorgate was quite peaceful: if I closed my eyes, it was a balmy evening somewhere in the Med, and not a sparse plaza missing its commuter footfall. This becomes a theme. Anyway, I reached into my bag for the elixir. I cracked that bad boy open. As the French say: Et sa flipping pulpe. A treat for the soul and for the gullet.

My mum wanted to go to a pub that was closed, so she re-diverted me to Leadenhall. Often, when I’m in this neck of the woods, I play a navigational guessing-game. I pretend that my parents’ knowledge of this area was passed along to me, and piece together bits of their stories about this pub, that building. Anything to forgo reliance on my phone. As a general rule, I only get slightly lost. A brief diversion through Bank – somewhere I’m at least familiar with, thanks to boozy nights at Forge – landed me, eventually, at Leadenhall.

I didn’t love the eerie quiet. Leadenhall's ornate ceilings made a strange church of the Sunday stillness. I do not subscribe. My first stop was the Lamb Tavern, where my family were posted up outside. They’d procured for me a heaven-sent pint of Asahi. I cannot say for sure that I enjoyed this more than the Orangina, but it was a delight. And in good company, too, although being in Leadenhall on such a glorious day was absurd. Thankfully, we moved.

Our next stop: the Borough Market INSTITUTION that is The Market Porter. It’s nice when things do what they say on the tin. This place is a beacon of laid-back coziness just at the edge of all the bustle. Its outside space occupies a corner, and whilst calling it “space” seems generous, it protrudes just enough into the buzz so that you feel involved. It’s like a really chill VIP box. At The Market Porter, the world moves around you, and your orbit around the sun is irrigated by the Camden Hells on tap. My favourite – and a love I cannot quantify because I’ve already lost count. All I know is this: there exists a drink which conjures the ecstasy of a summer’s afternoon spent with dear friends, and you can get it at The Market Porter. I probably had about five hundred.

II

There were all the ingredients for a perfect day. Great chat, great beer, great weather. I’m lying to you. There was another one: a salty, briny blob I couldn’t yet imagine.

Our table at Rambutan wasn’t for another few hours, so we sent my brother into battle with the vendors. Me and my dad had an enthusiastic chat about East London pirate radio stations to pass the time. Little did I know my taste buds were about to tune into a different frequency entirely. My brother returned with a plate that could have been a still-life drawing – a cruel prank on my appetite. This was no feat of smudgy graphite, however. This was The Sea on a paper plate. Several viscerally slimy mounds of it.

Here’s the thing: I couldn’t wait. I’m from Leigh-on-sea, the cockle capital of my heart. I’m primed to love raw fish. My heart was an open shell, its face turned to the sun. I’d heard about oysters, of course. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’d heard of them. Most seafood is on my radar, in some way. It’s an astrological thing.

My brother fired a warning shot by way of drenching the plate in lime juice. I stood back from the table and the faux-Bavarian comfort of Camden Hells. Wasting no time, I downed the weirdest shot I’ve ever done. I closed my eyes as I was dunked underwater and then sprinkled with shallots and shandy vinegar. Borough Market became a Mediterranean trip: I came to, only to say “Oh my days. Oh my days.” – or something to that effect. And then I went straight back in again. Insatiable, I scraped the remaining diced shallots from the shell.

The swig of Hells immediately after kept me on this wave. I’m delighted to report that the two pair beautifully. Still – I was in no rush to chase away the aftertaste. Even in the throes of my hangover the next day, I had those oysters on my mind. It would have been insulting to turn down the experience in a meaningless pursuit of odourless hands. In Borough Market, enveloped by all these people enjoying their food, enjoying life generally, revelling in my family’s banter … I was content to get a bit briny. It means I remember the day.

III

One more round of oysters. Three more of Hells. Mathematics. Next stop: Rambutan.

Here’s where things get a bit shaky, and I have to work hard to plug fine details back into the equation. The cumulative effect of my scattered memories is positive, but the whole purpose of a blog post is, often, to say: You had to be there.

A blinding Mother’s Day meal in 2024 made coming back here a no-brainer. Rambutan is a really cool Sri Lankan restaurant. It’s still relatively new as I’m writing this. Its interior is simple and warmly lit, but not too warm. You walk in, and the kitchen is right there. There’s an option to dine from a stool at the counter. That’s on my bucket list, if I am lucky enough to come back here for a third time.

We ordered a round of their “Rambutang” cocktail for the table. Apart from the massive chili pepper speared through the rim, the Rambutang is a deceptively understated pale pink. You can sense that it would blush if you looked at it for too long, except nothing about this drink is timid. Luckily for me, I love cocktails that are in-your-face spice. Ideally, this is refreshing heat – I want it to be overpowering, but also whilst giving me something else to work with. I loved my Rambutang so much that I finished the rest of my mum’s, too – massive error. I had already been pretty well watered at the Porter. Now, I was about to be fed. I had to keep my cool.

My brother handled all the ordering. He did well – his choices told a good story, which is often what you need with small(er) plates.

The butter roti was perfect. I remember how good they felt in my hands, and how I was greedy about scooping from all the plates on the table. I had a second cocktail, which was such a dense shade of green that it looked like a video game asset rendered into reality. Unfortunately, I lacked the journalistic foresight (and general faculties) to make a note of its name.  We went nuts for the navel orange and tangelo acharu, which was like slightly-spicy-slightly-pickled candy. Kind of like me, but more edible.

Obviously I was going to love the grilled mackerel. But I like to be surprised. Hand on heart: my favourite dish on the table was the pineapple and red mustard seed curry. Pineapple is never my first choice of fruit, and I’m unsure if it ever will be. In this context, I was head over heels for it. I would alternate between massive handfuls of this curry and refreshing bites of the green mango, lime, daikon and coconut sambol. We were having so much fun reaching over each other, enthusing about all the combinations, just unabashedly enjoying really good food. That’s what it’s all about, that’s why we’re here. Rambutan has a great cookbook too, which I strongly recommend if you’re unlikely to be in Borough Market.

As our table was being cleared, I’d texted my friend Maddy. This was quite the feat: I’m told I was half-hiccup, half-woman by this point. Put it this way: I was a walking testament to a really good day. Let’s go back to the pub, said the picture of composure and sobriety. A Hells appeared in my hand, which tends to happen. Then Maddy appeared, and we laughed and laughed and laughed until the lights came up on my childhood bedroom in Leigh-on-sea, Essex.

Perhaps it was God’s plan. Something fiercely percussive was happening in my skull. Was my hedonism being punished? Naturally, I panicked: I was “supposed” to be in Bristol, and here I was, inducing my cat’s concern at four in the morning, 200 odd miles away from my flat and my laptop. Somehow, I’d slipped into a different time zone entirely. At a point, you just have to laugh. Or laugh and point, I don’t know. I probably deserve it.

“Did I ruin Mother’s Day?” I asked, after a very difficult shower that left me feeling like cold, sloppy oats. I may have had clean skin, but my brain was full of sludge, and I felt terribly guilty.

Miraculously – no. Having secured all the reassurance I needed, I had to get the hell out. My Bristol stuff was haphazardly shoved into my classy red London bag. I struggled through a bowl of yoghurt and had my sensible younger brother drop me at the station. There was a train waiting for me, which was busy, which was fine. I’m often surprisingly functional, given the magnitude of my hangovers. The cold, hard window felt lush against my clammy cheek. All I could think about was sherry vinegar, and a beautiful dream.

As Neil Young’s Country Girl harmonica rang out over the Estuary steppe, a wave of sunlit clarity struck my aching head. I am lucky to be alive, to drink Orangina, to clean my plate with roti, to stare at the great Tilbury cranes across the way. I could love anywhere in the world, but I’m happy to wait: there are oysters at the roadside.