Grace Dent: Elliot’s Café is gastro heaven

Elliot’s Café in Borough Market came into my world via word of mouth and now I’m evangelical about it, too. Elliot’s mission is to serve ‘the best of Borough that day’, whatever grabs the owners’ attention as they scoot about the stalls – dishes such as griddled mortadella, pecorino with chestnut honey, and roast beef tartare with horseradish. The thick, stubby fingers of asparagus with butter-scrambled brown eggs have gone on to my ‘death-row last dinners’ list.

Elliot’s menu transforms daily – the sky (and the land and the sea) is the limit –served in a light, airy room overlooking the market, with chipper service and minimum fuss. I’ve lolloped about Borough’s lanes many mornings, under sensory bombardment from Britain’s finest foodie treasures, coming away two hours later holding one extra-large organic beefsteak worth £9, which came with its own CV, and a collection of spectacular, aqua-coloured cheeses made from animals I was pre-viously unaware produced milk.

So hooray for Elliot’s, which is prepared to shove a cold glass of Chablis in my hand and do the Clouseau work for me. On the menu when I went was exemplary Southern fried chicken served with a vibrant scarlet homemade hot sauce. The lamb loin slow-cooked with anchovy, vine tomatoes, wild garlic and peppers was remarkable. I’ve not tasted lamb cooked as orgasmically as this since I ate it in a remote corner of Greece, from the kitchen of an octa-genarian Kefalonian grandmother. And the chocolate cheesecake with an ever-so-salty peanut butter ice cream was so good I ate the entire plate, between swatting aggressively with my spoon at interlopers who wanted ‘just a spoonful’.

Several other things about Elliot’s made this a successful jaunt: they don’t do that painful perusal of the reservation book on arrival, or issue snooty time restraints on how long one can park one’s bum there; there are no hovering waiters, no superfluous chatter, no insistence on taking one’s coat and then losing it, no origami swan napkins, no theatrical removing and replacing of knives and forks, no whacking great service charge. I may have cuddled a waitress slightly as I left but then, I was a very happy person. Word of mouth said Elliot’s was ‘just very good food’. They weren’t lying.

ELLIOT'S CAFE

12 Stoney Street, SE1 (020 7403 7436)