Grace Dent reviews The Bonneville
A few years ago I used to frequent a café so resolutely East London hip that I began to think the owners were teasing me. A surly and feckless manchild in a pink singlet with matted armpit hair manned the coffee machine, clanking out espressos slowly — four per hour maximum — before omitting to deliver them to your reclaimed school bench. Loud Four Tet blared from 8am onwards and the ‘bespoke’ flapjack was so expensive it surely had to contain God’s actual teeth.
There were regular sales of staggeringly unappealing conceptual art and slam poetry functions where women in Minnie Mouse ears treated us to gruelling freeform gibberish on the theme of their polycystic ovaries. The whole place made me furious, but I was powerless — nay, compelled — to return time and again to give them £11 for scrambled egg and a Teapigs chai. If I hated the hipster clientele and the staff, it was a barely concealed form of self-loathing. Also, hipster bars haven’t, despite all the ‘down with regeneration’ whining, formed a monopoly in London. The high streets of every London postcode are still littered with old-fashioned, totally crap, independently owned, local cafés and bistros that no one flocks to as the food is barely passable and the vibe negligible.
I was thinking about the ever-rising tide against hip when I was dispatched to The Bonneville, a dark but tealight-festooned brasserie serving chateaubriand and blanquette de lapin on the Lower Clapton Road. Here one can behold hip in all its many manners: the walls lovingly stripped of wallpaper, the crockery the dated flowery faff your great-gran served potted meat on in the 1970s. There is taxidermy on the walls. The male staff wear braces, facial hair is in abundance. There is a dry-ice machine at work in the basement corridor to the toilet, giving one’s trip for a wee a real London Dungeon vibe. It’s very seriously cool and therefore almost hysterically silly. The Bonneville ran into trouble in its first weeks after someone made a slightly tasteless Twitter comment about a police incident, provoking an endless echo chamber of righteous quack from people who seemingly never have or will say anything remotely dark or daft. None of this seems to have hurt The Bonneville’s business at all. In fact, the night I was there the place was rammed. I sat beside a loud 40th birthday party table, filled with the sort of people who looked likely to have circus skills on their CVs. There may have been white people with dreadlocks. I bet there was a ‘didge’ at their after-party.
I ordered a Twinkle — Prosecco, vodka and elderflower — to begin, which wasn’t remotely bubbly. It’s twinkle had been quashed. It should have been called ‘a Dud’. We ordered a board of perfectly passable charcuterie, rillettes, cornichons and toasted sourdough and a bottle of organic house red. Service was delightful; cheerful and diligent. The sharing plate for two people of chicken on a bed of cabbage and bacon was beautifully moreish — we could have eaten twice the amount. I only counted one leg and half a breast. Two people can easily eat a full chicken; if anyone wants proof of this, I’ll meet them at Chicken Shop, Whitechapel.
The milk chocolate pudding was an unmitigated disaster. It resembled how a M&S melting-middle pudding might look if placed in a microwave and blasted for three minutes too long — steaming yet dry as a bone. This is one of the prevalent features of hipster dining. In the café I used to go to I was often presented with food so bad thatI could only assume the staff were inhaling nitrous and doing group selfies in the kitchen. But as the great philosopher Neil Tennant once said about hip young things: ‘They were never being boring.’ I’ll always admire the spirit of places like The Bonneville. Whether you’re hip or square, this town is big enough for all of us.
The Bonneville
43 Lower Clapton Road, E5 (020 8533 3301; thebonneville.co.uk)
2 Twinkle £16
1 bottle Organic Rouge £17.50
1 bottle Organic Blanc £17.50
1 charcuterie board £10
1 fennel gratin £10
2 roast chicken £26
2 pommes frites £7
1 chocolate moelleux £7
TOTAL £111