Elliot's Café, SE1 - review

Fire & Knives is a quarterly publication that has food as its springboard. Contributors are writers established in the field, newcomers and those taking a break from other subjects to consider the implications of eating, mostly in a UK context. There is no payment for previously unpublished texts and the result is a rich stew - such a submission would doubtless be thrown out for inability to resist clichés - that has already attracted various writing awards.

Fire & Knives' editor Tim Hayward recently made the sensible observation that "...we can't really claim a grown-up food culture until we improve the everyday". I couldn't agree more, but because I had visited Elliot's Café a few days before reading it, this too rarely stated glimpse of the obvious had particular resonance.

Elliot's Café in Borough Market has been started by Brett Redman and Rob Green, who together also run Pavilion Café in Victoria Park. Green used to run a tea stall in Borough Market. Redman came to London from Australia, apparently on a whim, in 2005. It's sort of annoying in terms of the theme that he is not British, but never mind, I think there must be a by-law that after six years you qualify.

Their new café, which spills onto the street, trades throughout the day and evening, and menus are to a large extent shaped by what is available from suppliers to the market. No bookings are taken (the telephone number above will get you through to Pavilion Café) and in style and content Elliot's faithfully delivers what Tim Hayward described as "good food, cheerfully prepared and served on all those days when we just want to nip round the corner for a decent plate of nosh in a friendly place" - only it is even better than that sounds.

It's better because the daily changing menu has an air of the informed improvisational - making the best of what is on hand and coming up with enticing combos of, for example, homemade potato crisps served with anchovy mayo or sliced brined pickles heaped in the centre of a plate covered by circles of that lascivious sausage, mortadella.

Nearby affineurs of artisan cheeses can offer a list such as the one last Wednesday of Mull Cheddar, Stichelton (an unpasteurised blue cheese made in Nottinghamshire) and L'Edel de Cleron (similar to Vacherin). An in-house bakery supplies a range of breads including a soda bread so alluring in its dreams of oats and treacle that we asked to buy a loaf to take home.

Dukkah, the Egyptian mix of herbs, nuts and spices, is presumably sold in the market and here in a clever touch is added to a spirited pairing of squid and aioli. The blushing strawberry scented flesh of Discovery apples, now in their short season, is transformed into sorbet.

A market on the doorstep, even one where the relationship between management and traders is currently, to put it politely, strained, is an obvious huge asset in creating a vivacious informal eating place, but the food is almost as nothing without the appropriate attitude. Staff at Elliot's, led by the lovely Beata, who used to work around the corner at her mother's Swedish restaurant Glas (now closed), stay merry and bright even under the pressure of punters piling in. The feeling of them and us between waiters and customers just isn't there.

We found a place at one end of the cast-iron communal table that was apparently made to order in an east London foundry. Brick walls, bare wood and strings of market lights help emphasise the elemental nature of the design - and also ratchet up the noise level, sometimes to "What did you say?" levels.

As well as the crisps and mortadella we ordered tomatoes à la Grecque, shoestring fries, cured sea trout with cucumber and soda bread, cold roast beef rump with beets and horseradish, roast chicken leg with chanterelles and broad beans and slow-cooked lamb with braised summer beans. Well, there were three of us and we were egged on by prices ranging between £3.50 and £14 for the lamb (the most expensive dish).

The beef assembly, with its snowfall of freshly grated horseradish and sweet beets, was terrific, as was the quality of the lamb in its natural gravy. Not everything was faultless. There seemed nothing very à la Grecque about the sliced tomato salad; green beans with the lamb were on the tough side but the four stars above are for vindication of the aim of raising the bar by improving, and in some cases perfecting, the everyday.

Other details such as free jugs of filtered water on the tables, a coffee "flight" in the mornings, homemade tomato ketchup for an ace breakfast bacon sandwich, the presence of London-brewed beers and all wines from the relatively short, fluid list being offered by the glass play their part. Hooray for Elliot's - fire and knives put to beneficial use.

Elliot’s Café
12 Stoney Street, Borough Market, SE1