We've started filling a small book case with reading matter for patrons of the Clissold Leisure Centre café; the books come from a domestic clear out and are startlingly diverse: browsers can learn about the fate of western missionaries in China during the Boxer Rebellion from a first edition of 'Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission with a Record of the Perils and Sufferings of Some Who Escaped', or about the 1930s origins of British Trotskyism in Reg Groves' history of the Balham Group. There's something unputdownable for everyone -- but do please put them down when you leave the café ..
Share our style secret
When we were briefly in Greenwich Market the manager bullied us into upgrading our rather scruffy presentation; salvation came from an amazing shop called Treasure Island in the Holloway Road which sold us a selection of Indian, Afghan and Moroccan rugs, throws and lamps that made us the toast of exotic East London. Last weekend we used them to enliven a large stall at the Lovebox Festival in Victoria Park. Treasure Island has Afghan roots -- the proprietor is a fan of Ahmad Shad Masoud, the mujahid leader murdered by al Qaida just before the 9-11 attacks, and many of the rugs feature naive images of Kalashnikov rifles and helicopters. The shop is suffering a little from the economic downturn but has some great bargains and should be visited soon and often.
Deep fried falafel are fine, we claim, and we have figures to ‘prove’ it …
At the weekend we had a stall at a health fair in Hammersmith where we were set to embarrass the organisers by offering deep fried food while advisers in our neighbouring stalls would be telling the punters to lay off chips etc. Our hosts very moderately asked us to come up with some nutritional information to support our belief that falafel wraps are quite good for you -- certainly better than most fast food. We haven't commissioned an analysis of our wraps, though we will do so before too long; we did though look up the calorie contents, total fats and saturated fats for our ingredients to get some feel for how fattening our wraps are. The figures show that if you have one of our very large large wraps with hummus you might want to stick to something light for your other main meal. However we're strikingly low in saturated fats and reasonable for total fats. Here are our figures:
The UK Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Safety recommend men eat a maximum of 2,500 calories a day, women 2,000 and children aged 5-10 1,800.
Our small wrap has 480 calories, or 530 with hummus. The large wrap is 670 calories, or 730 with hummus.
It's recommended that not more than 35% of energy should come from fat (maximum 11% saturated fat).
The proportions in our wraps are small wrap 21% (4% saturated), with hummus 25% (4.25%); large wrap 30% (4.7%), with hummus 32% (4.8%)
The Lady Varnishes
Cressida Bell and Sarah Burns have now finished painting the three columns in our cafe at Clissold Leisure Centre and have varnished the result to protect it from the younger customers. As we explained earlier the inspiration for these column comes from medieval French churches, but we think Cressida and Sarah have come up with something that's their own and entirely original.
Festival catering—nobody knows anything
At the time of writing we are half way though making falafels at a week-long Secret Cinema event; we nearly cried off because we couldn’t see how a successful outing last September, (near our café in London Fields), could translate into eight screenings in a single week. But Secret Cinema is an idea whose time has come, and though we’re still holding our breath, this looks like a triumph.
Events that looked promising to us in the past have included
• a ‘festival of creativity’ that a west London college put on in a local park. A few parents trickled in to support their shakepearean-attired sprogs. Later a band played, outnumbering its audience, while we contemplated a bank of rain-swept rhododendron bushes.
• A hug-a-tree gathering held on a short muddy day in November. Traders hopes of making back the £50 they had been charged were dashed by the organisers’ decision to offer free food to any comers. One of our guys ignominiously walked off leaving his colleague to struggle with taking the tent down in the rain.
When the sun shines and the queues lengthen we may seem smug; but be reassured that nemesis is a weather front away.
Hoxton Beach and Global Warming
Last summer we read the Met Office'forecast of a 'barbeque summer', punched the air and placed, but fortunately didn't finalise, an order for an ice cream cart to cater to the anticipated queues at London Fields Lido where we operate the café. We are more weather dependent than most businesses: -- should we buy a juicer or extra capacity for hot drinks? sign up for or pass on an outdoor catering opportunity ? -- and have just, for the first time, punted a a tiny amount of money on Piers Corbyn of Weather Action. This feels a little shameful, because it feels a little like running your business by astrology (Piers, brother of long-serving Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn, is an astrophysicist by background, but a maverick among conventional meteorologists). You wonder why Piers isn't he visibly richer ? (given that verifiably accurate month ahead forecasting would be as useful as the proverbial better mousetrap ). It's interesting because his reliability tends to influence his credibility as a hardline manmade climate change sceptic, arguing that our climate is driven by variations in the sun's activity and that CO2 levels don't matter. His delivery is anything but slick but so far I'd have to say his forecasts are precise, in a way that's unlike most horoscope writers, and several have seemed to be doing better than random guesswork. UPDATE: Corbyn was right about election day being quite pleasant (in a forecast written several weeks before the event). He and the Met Office give exactly opposite forecasts over the next decent spell -- I'll report who won ... FURTHER UPDATE: hmmm ... Corbyn is understandably sensitive about his forcecasts being quoted in the media or on the internet but perhaps we can reproduce his quote to the Daily Express that his tip for this summer was a a brolly, a stiff upper lip, and a ticket to some hot foreign place. If it seems unkind to point out when he gets it wrong, then maybe he should be less ready to dish it out to the Met Office when they are off beam.
Both sides now
We've just bought our third La Spaziale compact espresso machine. This one has just gone in in the kiosk on the pool side of London Fields Lido, meaning that swimmers and sunbathers no longer have to put up with filter coffee. It's a bargain:we'd asked our supplier for a second hand machine, but one of their staff dropped it from the work-bench, so we're getting a new one for only a little more than the price of a used one. People who only know a little about coffee are sniffy about these smallish machines, but our coffee roaster, the award-garlanded outfit Square Mile, are keen on La Spaziale, perhaps partly because Square Mile's boss, the former world champion barista James Hoffman (this is his blog) once used to work for La Spaziale's UK importers ...
Pillars of the Stoke Newington Community
We've been given the go ahead by our landlords GLL, so in a few weeks we will take our first steps towards changing the look of the cafe we operate at the Clissold Leisure Centre. This is a bright clean and functional space with a good wooden floor and practical furnishings for the many young families that use it, but is a little sterile. One feature of the whole centre is the use of columns and our idea is to decorate these, borrowing from the rather zany style of the (often heavily restored) Romanesque churches of Poitiers in West Central France. The work is going to be done by a dream team of the designers Sara Burns and Cressida Bell who has submitted the drawings that were approved by GLL. Why painted columns and why Romanesque? Two reasons are that it could look good and make a trip to the cafe feel more interesting and adventurous, and also that its a reference to Stoke N's own roots in the early middle ages.
Rabbit Food
Apologies to our customers at the Clissold Leisure Centre café who were displaced by the filming of a commercial for Innocent smoothies. The advance warning of a 'film crew' did poor justice to the spectacle of two focus pullers, two sparks, people from the ad agency, people from the client, people from the council, an animal handler, a vet, three runners, three live rabbits, one stuffed rabbit, a cast of fifteen fictional 'gym attendees', director, producer, asst director, prod manager, grip, location manager etc etc. Cafe customers listened in enforced silence to the refrain of 'reposition rabbit and keep running!". It was nice for a catering company like us to reflect that you can, if you play your cards right, get to be in a position to pony up on such an impressive scale, and we enjoyed serving breakfast to these pleasant and appreciative visitors.
fann ul-falafil
We are proud to feature in the Falafel Road project. The artists, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour, have seized on falafel's symbolism of the contested identity of Palestine (being first Palestinian, then given a new Israeli identity). Falafel Road consists of 20 meals: a kind of politically-engaged falafel-crawl, that takes in two of our outlets, including Whitecross Street which the snackers seem to have found inspiring. Hoxton Beach also supplied a large number of falafels as a kind of installation at the finale at Toynbee Studios. Historic note: we handed out leaflets describing our first ever sampling, in the now-defunct City/Old Street Fresh and Wild as 'fann ul falafel' -- Arabic for 'the art of falafel'.
Wine
There's a plan for a drinks licence at The Clissold Centre. GLL are in favour and it has gone to Hackney for consultation. The idea that we could offer a glass of wine to the many customers attracted by our chef Gigi Ogwuma's daily specials, especially after the tables have been mopped and put straight after the after-school rush. At least some of the wines will be bought directly from French small producers; we plan a buying trip to follow up leads discovered by Patrick Matthews in his rather scrappily produced guide to 'finding great wines off the beaten track' in Burgundy, and to celebrate will be offering some condensed recommendations shortly on this site.
Railway advertising
We've given travellers on the London Overground West London Line something to read as their Clapham Junction train trundles towards or away from Willesden Junction station, with a sign on the back wall of our production kitchen. The inspiration is Reading where travellers from Paddington used to be greeted by the advertisement for Huntley and Palmers Reading Biscuits as well as the fields of flowers of Sutton Seeds trial grounds (since moved to Paignton). We've gone for a sign saying simply that 'Behind This Wall is Hoxton Beach'; this phrase isn't consciously ripped off from the Situationists but may be their slogan that the 'beach is under the paving slabs' ('sous les pavés la plage') surfacing from a buried memory.
Exmouth Market—a third lunchtime spot for fresh falafel
You can again find our falafel in Exmouth Market, made by the gifted couple Ivan and Sandy Lester (pictured, rather blurrily) who already make amazing salt beef sandwiches on their Jewish deli stall, and who have returned from their annual winter break. The deal is that we supply all the consumables (falafel mix, pickles, hummus etc) and they fry the falafel and make the wraps. Now, with our other stalls in Whitecross Street and Goodge Place you're in reach of our fresh falafel at lunchtimes in much of the City and West End.
Now you can be a self facilitating media node while eating our falafel
GLL, who operate the Clissold Leisure Centre, where we run the cafe, have agreed that we can offer wireless to customers for a trial period. We are delighted to be able to offer this service to those of our customers who in the words of the immortal Nathan Barley aspire to become self facilitating media nodes ...
Falafel into quince
Three years ago we were asked to cater at a student-organised climate change march and though we didn't mention it at the time they asked us to cater for several hundred more customers than we actually sold to. When this sort of thing happens we compost the unsold stock. One by product is a flourishing quince tree which has just produced its 2009 harvest. There are many historic recipes for preserving quinces but instead this year we invented a new way of making quince jam using a microwave. Customers at Clissold Leisure Centre and London Fields Lido can try this with their morning toast or croissants, and also compare the jam with a more traditional jelly we made from the same crop.
Hollies reunion outside London Fields Lido
The stalwarts who gather outside our café at London Fields Lido come rain or shine are being joined by two newcomers from Hampshire: a couple of hollies from Highfield Hollies of Liss that we chose out of the thousands in this extraordinary nursery and bussed up to London in a rented long wheelbase Ford Transit. Steve White from Hackney's park's department made raised beds for the hollies, which are now also planted up with wallflowers, some early daffodills, and with the white geraniums that Steve's colleague Paul Childs gave us during the summer. One holly -- which is on the right in the picture -- is a native Ilex aquifolium , a variety called Alaska, unusually tall, with lots of festive berries, and the other is a golden variegated Ilex altaclarensis called Golden King, pictured (below right) moments after being dug out from the row where it had grown up with its cloned siblings. Not everyone likes variegated plants, but this one has an inviting golden glow that we hope will draw customers to try our coffee and falafel even on the bleakest winter days. Meanwhile the autumn crocuses, which are sativus, the variety that produces saffron have just come into flower in the tubs with the roses: the saffron strands are clearly visible and the plants have a strong saffron scent.
Praise from Time Out and the Evening Standard
Time Out featured us in their recent street food supplement, with a mention of Rashid's dexterity. The same article reviewed some of our personal favourites, including our former neighbours in Greenwich Market, the awesomely professional Son of Pampa, and the amazing Moroccan fish place in Golbourne Road. We also drew favourable comments from the Standard's Charles Campion when his paper took a look at Whitecross Street.
Heading out West—more shops where you can find out products
From August we have begun selling to the three shops of As Nature Intended, in Balham, Ealing and Chiswick, from where it's a short hop across the river to deliver to Olivers Wholefoods outside Kew Gardens Station. We are also in the Sourced market that runs under the whole width of St Pancras International Station and did a sampling for commuters from destinations as diverse as Brussels and Elstree. It's an important break out for us to have gone beyond our traditional delivery areas in North, East and Central London, but in those we've added customers in Holloway with the enterprising Budgens that's become popular with students at nearby Byam Shaw Art School and in Belisize Park at Pomona, 179 Haverstock Hill, NW3 4QS
Our star of Whitecross Street is here to stay
Rashid, who has turned out Whitecross Street market stall into a lunchtime phenomenon, has been offered a work permit by the Home Office, meaning we can in future employ him full time to work his magic on other parts of the business. Here's a first fumbling attempt at using YouTube, but it gives some idea of how he manages to serve around 250 customers in a three hour period.
Baked Alaska on Lunchtime menu
Claudine Biggs, who served up coffee and pizza at our Clissold Café earlier this year, now has something else on the menu: a new play at the Kings Head Theatre in Upper Street, Islington, and she's coaxed a new composition out of falafel-eating rock legend Andy Gill of the Gang of Four. The play stars, among others, Maya Thomas, who when resting is also a Hoxton Beach star working this summer at London Fields Lido cafe. Claudine is now 19; No Entry, her previous play at the Kings Head, written when she was just 17, broke all lunchtime records there.
QUICK REVIEW AND UPDATE
The press release for Bunk says it's a play about teenage homelessness, which is semi-true but misleading. It's really a comedy, built on the strangeness of adults as seen by teenagers. Unlike many young writers Claudine isn't writing (much) about herself, but uses a gift for dialogue to create an instant gallery of grotesque hostel residents. It isn't like anything much on the stage: the closest analogy might be a picaresque narrative or story of a journey in which a naive main character meets a succession of oddballs: think Don Quixote or Alice in Wonderland ... It's a rough draft at times, but also very funny.
Reflected glory at Clissold, now officially London’s best leisure centre
For three days in early June we were on the fringes of the assessment process that officially confirmed the progress of the Clissold Leisure Centre, where we run the café, from costly white elephant to gleaming success story. Quest, the consultants charged by the Sports Council to grade leisure centres around the country. has now confirmed the centre's status as 'excellent', making it officially the best such centre in London. Our role was confined to giving lunch to the assesment team and facing some relaxed but surprisingly probing questioning. The suit-fest continued the following week when the new local government minister John Denham carried out his first public engagement in his new job (he took over from Hazel Blears on June 5) with a visit to London Fields Lido where he presented the results of a survey into peoples' satisfaction with their local councils and where his team and Hackney's Mayor drank our filter coffee and ate Portuguese Cakes under the shade of our plastic palm tree.
It's been sheer good luck that we've found ourselves under the wing of GLL, the social enterprise that runs Clissold and London Fields together with most of London's other leisure centres. It's an unlikely, but so far successful marriage. It's tempting to send up aspects of their target-driven managerial approach (we at one point contemplated making T-shirts claiming that we were 'Delivering Quality Solutions'). But before the GLL era too many London swimming pools and sports centres were badly run and filthy, and they're undoubtedly a good mentor.
Grief that Debra didn’t win The Apprentice
Because she showed great judgement and a sense of good value by choosing to buy a falafel from us in Greenwich market when they were filming the episode in which the teams had to sell random bric-a-brac. Debra ordered a wrap but sadly never took delivery, because, as she explained 'everything has to happen on camera' and the crew were on the other side of the market filming something less appetising. But falafel or no falafel she's obviously has the right stuff. Come and work for us instead Debra!
Elder abuse?
Soon we'll have our own elderflower cordial for sale at our market stalls and cafés after some trips around various patches of waste ground in Hackney and Wormwood Scrubs. These trees were protected in previous centuries by the belief that they were inhabited by a vengeful spirit. More recently elderberries have been credited with medical properties in treating flu. We're taking care only to take a few flowers from each plant: elder recipes are being published everywhere this frugal spring, and we don't want to take more than our fair share. If you want to try to make our recipe, we're using this one from Sophie Grigson.
Landscaping the Lido
For the past few weeks a plastic palm tree has graced the seating area on the park side of our café at London Fields Lido.
This is just the start of our plans to distinguish the café area from the surrounding bike park. In the next few weeks we will be bringing in six Victorian roses in containers, including the first ever Floribunda rose, 'Gruss an Aachen' (pictured) and the first Hybrid Tea, 'La France', all set beside the wall where they won't prickle inquisitive toddlers.
Our wish list also includes robust parasols and wooden furniture -- but please give us your suggestions through the contact page.
Meanwhile we're at last able to operate the fryer at the Clissold Leisure Centre café, so we're now serving falafel there freshly made, the way they should be.
Eat falafel this saturday and fight hunger (and also TB, HIV and malaria)
We're honoured to have been asked to to do the catering this Saturday (16 May) for a May Ball which will launch MaMa, a campaign to improve healthcare in Mandimba, a beautiful but poverty stricken district of Mozambique. Tickets are selling fast for the event, at the converted Methodist chapel at 176 Prince of Wales Road, Chalk Farm NW5, which stars singer/songwriter Gwyneth Herbert and the Italian acoustic guitar star Antonio Forcione. 50p from each wrap we sell on the night will go to MaMa.
T-shirts
Coming soon on sale at the London Fields Lido café, and in response to many requests: our t-shirts, featuring the image of the Hoxton Beach houri combined with a print from William Blake's Songs of Innocence. Blake seemed relevant because the name London Fields sounds like a Blake poem, and the trees in this image are reminiscent of London Fields' old and majestic London Planes. We produced the T shirts sulkily after we were told our staff had to wear uniform, but now we bask in customers' compliments. Next will be a Whitecross Street T shirt, which will probably use an image of Mary Frith, otherwise known as Moll Cut Purse or The Roaring Girl, who was one of the first ever women to appear on a London stage at the nearby Fortune Playhouse in the early 1600s.
Boom or bust, the best things in life are cheap
Last autumn a rival leisure centre caterer gave us a business tip: he said we should supersize our coffees (which increases our costs by a fraction) and charge customers a lot more.
It's advice that maybe works when people are flush with money, but not when hard times make them think twice about blowing an extra 50p on something that's not very nice (giant coffees must either be drowned in milk or contain a nerve-jarring triple espresso shot).
It's heartless to celebrate a recession, but one side-effect is to make our food philosophy look more like a strategy and less like lousy business sense. We've always over delivered on ingredients, like groundnut oil, Lebanese tahina, freshly-made pickles, etc, and accepted small margins.
But the result is that we've become very busy at our market stalls, which is where we can offer the best value. In Whitecross Street we've had to put up barriers to control the queues, and every week brings a new record for customers served. The cafés at London Fields Lido and the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington have also been doing well.
Meanwhile our wholesale business has been shrinking, according to a predictable pattern. Coffee@. which put on the biggest mark up, has gone out of business. At the other extreme, the Planet Organic shops, which add a modest margin, and who laboriously recalculate the order every day to maximise freshness, are doing a healthy trade with us. We're also delighted to be supplying the excellent Foyles Jazz Café with the falafel, pickles, tahina and bread to make falafel wraps.
In the autumn our bank invited us to a session at one of their branches where a small business guru asked the hard-pressed commercial customers to remove their shoes, rock backwards and forwards on their heels and massage their own kidneys (not easy). But among the new age motivational stuff was useful advice from his own experience as a fast food manager. In recessions you work harder and sell bigger volumes of your cheaper menu items. If this works for burgers, it even more true if, like Franco Manca in Brixton, or The Company Shed in Essex, or, dare we say it, like us, you're knocking out excellent stuff at a reasonable price.
Mean times in Greenwich; better times in Stokey
We've said a sad goodbye to Greenwich Market, although, for a few weeks, we were honoured with a great spot on the portico, for which our we plans included plastic palm trees (to match the real fronds on the flower stall opposite) which by now should have been festooned with Christmas lights. It's especially sad as Greewich is one of London's loveliest markets, with these days a brilliant selection of hot food and produce stalls.
The main reasons we pulled out:
* The weekend slot at Greenwich was offered at just the same time that we took over the Clissold Centre café in Stoke Newington. We were spread too thin.
* Greenwich is a very long way from our kitchens in NW10 or our nearest café in N16. This means that teething troubles turn into the equivalent of a raging abcess -- an ailing fryer takes days or weeks, not hours, to get fixed; a sick employee is much harder to replace at short notice, a forgotten falafel ingredient means a three hour round trip to replace.
It hurts to quit. We did though learn useful lessons, especially in how to use inexpensive ethnic bits and pieces to make the stall into an exotic fantasy, under the critical eye of Patrycja, the steely but sparky market manager.
Meanwhile Stoke Newington's been good to us. Even without the ability to make falafel from scratch there (the extractor fan, long promised, still isn't installed) the Clissold Centre café is a lot fuller than it was -- soon we think it will be famous as the UK's first ever all-weather sports 'n falafel facility.
From falafel to qahwa: our take on the Arab world’s other great export
We now make coffee at our cafés at London Fields Lido and the Clissold Leisure Centre and doing it well is important to us. When we began buying coffee from the brilliant Square Mile Coffee roasters, the co-founder James Hoffman, the 2007 world barista champion, gave us some tips which, he said, would ensure our coffee was better than around 95% of what's served elsewhere in London. We're passing them on, because now that can spoil ourselves, we'd like to get a better cup elsewhere.
1. Start with excellent coffee -- Square Mile's autumn espresso is a blend from a farm in Costa Rica and two in El Salvador. Their coffee is ethically traded which means that Square Mile, dealing directly with the producers, give them a higher price than than guaranteed by the Fair Trade Foundation.
2. Extract the coffee properly. If it's underextracted it will be acidic, if overextracted bitter. We time our shots and aim for the water at 92 degrees C to pass through the ground coffee in 26 second. We control the time by adjusting the grind: finer coffee takes longer, so is more extracted, coarser coffee takes less time, so is less extracted.
3. Don't drown the coffee in milk: an 8oz cup is quite big enough (Starbucks take note)
4. Keep the steam arm clean: it should be wiped as soon as the milk is foamed. Stale milk doesn't taste good.
5. Don't overheat the milk, unless a customer is very insistent on getting a superhot drink. Overhot milk smells of baby sick, as James inelegantly points out.
6. Take the trouble to work the foam, knocking out big bubbles and swirling to get a good tight texture.
7. Free-pour the milk, without using a spoon to hold the foam back, pouring first slowly, to get a nice coffee coloured mix, then quickly, so create the two-tone effect in the cup that gave rise to the word 'cappuccino' (named because of its resemblance to the two colours of the robes of Capuchin friars.
8. Ask if customers want cocoa powder: if the coffee's great you don't really need it.
9. Don't fret too much about creating a pattern in the coffee. It's a bonus, but much excellent coffee isn't decorated like this, and some coffee that is is rank-tasting.
10. Don't overcharge. The margins on coffee are generous, and customers are increasingly aware that £2+ coffee can be much worse than coffee costing much less.
Who invented falafel ?
The origins of falafel are getting an airing again with news stories about the Lebanese trying to get the same sort of rights over product names such as hummus and tabbouleh that the French have over champagne. What's not in doubt is that falafel, or taamiya if you're Egyptian or Sudanese, is an ancient Middle Eastern food that was adopted as an emblematic Israeli dish by recent arrivals with a very different food culture. The Israelis have also changed it. It's rather like the way the classic Naples pizza (marinara, topped with just oil, tomato, garlic and oregano, or margherita with mozzarella as well) has been transformed in America to be eaten with chicken or ham and pineapple. At Hoxton Beach we stay as close as we can to the classic Lebanese version, partly because it's hard to beat and partly because few customers have come across it before. The concession we make to the Israeli version on our market stalls is to offer hummus as well -- which they'd never do in an Arab country -- really just because people like it. But our top tip is to save the 50p extra we charge for hummus and try the real thing.
Putting a smile on the face of an ex-white elephant
From Friday October 10 we will be taking over the café at the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington after being invited to tender by GLL, our lovely landlords at London Fields Lido. The Clissold Centre became notorious when it was forced to close in 2003 after just one year of operation, reopening last December following four years of remedial works. We intend to try the same formula as at London Fields, with falafel and Lebanese vegan food, that we can make from scratch in the state-of-the-art kitchen, plus good coffee and extended opening hours. Other ideas include going for a drinks licence and serving our own range of wines from producers that don't use sulphur (which is the additive that can cause headaches). We'd like to bring a hedonistic note to this impressive, but still rather bleakly functional facility.
Shun burgers and save planet says UN chief
The problem with Dr Pachauri's comments is that they imply that switching to our amazing falafel involves some kind of sacrifice.
Do try this at home, kids
We're now in our fifth week trading on Wednesdays at Greenwich Market. One way in which the gain is at last starting to outweigh the pain is in being recognised from other places we trade. A customer who'd previously bought falafel from us at Whitecross Street Market asked why ours are better than the ones she makes at home. So it seems like the right moment to give away our trade secrets, garnered over four years of trial and error. To make good falafel at home you need a food processor, dried chickpeas, ideally also dried skinned broad beans, which you can find at some Turkish and all Lebanese shops, onion, garlic, fresh coriander and/or parsley and/or dill, and spices: we use a mixture of coriander, cumin and black and white pepper, but there are no rules. Plus salt. Soak but *do not cook* the chickpeas and beans, then grind them to a coarse sandy texture together with the onion garlic and herbs. You will have to chop the herbs before putting them in the blender, as otherwise they will go into stringy shreds. In a normal food blender you will have to add a little water to keep the blade turning, and anyway it will labour and strain, as chickpeas are tough even after soaking. If you've been able to find the skinned broad beans you won't need a binder. If you haven't use a little flour or, better, 'besan' (chickpea flour). Add a pinch or two of baking powder or bicarbonate of soda to make the little rissoles puff up when you fry them. Shape them into balls in your hands -- which is what Egyptians do -- or buy a specialised falafel tool. Suppliers include Damas Gate and al Abbas in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush, or Green Valley in the Arab stretch of the Edgware Road. Drop the falafel into oil at least a couple of inches deep in a wok or a chip fryer, trying to ensure the frying temperature is aournd 180 degrees centigrade. The balls will float to the top in a couple of minutes, and are cooked when they're a golden brown.
Where’s the boss ?
On the Italian Riviera, trying to cobble together a piece for American Food and Wine, while taking calls on his mobile from bickering staff. The next writing project has to be a book length history of Hoxton Beach, provisionally titled 'Falafel'. or rather 'Falafel!'
To supersize or not? The debate rages
Rashid, our falafel wizard and hearthrob of Whitecross Street Market, has started making a 'large' falafel sandwich with no fewer than five falafel inside a 10" khubz bread. They're wildly popular, even though he's been asked to make it clear that the regular £3.00 (£3.50 with hummus) sandwich is our standard product. But Hassan, his saturnine, reflective counterpart in Goodge Place Market has little time for this innovation. 'If you give a customer too much food they'll get sick of it and next time they won't come again.' Rashid hits back: 'Plenty of people like to buy two wraps and eat them both: if you offer them a bigger wrap for £4.50 you're saving them money and doing them a service.' Meanwhile we hope no-one tells Morgan Spurlock.
London Fields Lido: please give us your feedback
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We took over the catering at London Field Lido on July 14, when we signed a management contract with the present contractor. London Fields is unique among the various Lidos in London that have been a new lease of life and a return to fashionable status. It was squatted for a long time, then expensively renovated and reopened after a long campaign, and it is the only Lido in London to have a heated pool (Olympic size) and consequently it's open all the year round. After a slow first week, when the skies were grey, the school holidays started and we underwent our baptism of fire. We've done some good things, and also seen where we can improve. The coffee, from Square Mile coffee, a local (Bethnal Green) outfit recently started by two internationally feted and award winning coffee guys, has been appreciated, and we're giving our budding baristas further training to see if we can match the standard set by Climpsons on Broadway Market. Our new ice creams from Taywell Ice Cream, the farm involved with the (losing) team on the last series of The Apprentice have gone down well. We have been vindicated in carrying on with the bright blue and red slush puppies while also offering own lemonade and hibiscus drinks. We weren't expected to sell large amounts of our own falafel, but we have, though we aren't yet frying it from scratch on site. So where could we do better? a) by learning the art of managing queues and communicating to them that they won't have to wait forever b) by getting our pricing sorted out: we've generally cut prices since we took over, but we need to make the price list definitive, printed and posted everywhere c) we need to cater to customers who *don't* want falafel, toasted sandwichies, or the amazing sausage rolls from M Moen and Sons of Clapham that we've recently started bring in. Tell us what you think -- if necessary via the contact page while we sort out a bug on the comment box below.
Our seasonal summer dish has arrived at last
This is called Ful Akhdar (broad beans) and it's small broad beans in their pods cooked with garlic and coriander. It's a staple of Lebanese meze and is often eaten to accompany arak, the ouzo-like drink. Several of the shops we sell to are now taking it, but it depends on getting fresh beans direct from a farmer. Our supplier is Kingcup Farm, who are just inside the M25 in Denham.
Now we’re in Whitecross Street market as well as Goodge Place
Whitecross Street Market is the up and coming London street market, and we're over the moon to have been given a licence by Islington Council. We are reportedly the very last hot food stall licence to be granted. Whitecross Street is just to the north of the Barbican, north east of Smithfield, and is a short walk from our longtime customers at Friends of the Earth and from our original home in Hoxton Square. We feel sure that Wilson, Keppel and Betty (see below) are celebrating with us in spirit.
We've had many nice reactions to our new falafel stand in Goodge Place, but one of the most perceptive was from a Syrian guy who did something of a double-take, and said: 'This place could be back home.' In fact a falafel stand in Damascus (by Bab Touma) was the model for Hoxton Beach; it's surprising though that we've managed to stay close in style to the original given the years that passed since the original inspiration. Anyway please come and see us soon.
According to reports, FBI agents in California's Bay Area monitored falafel sales in 2005 and 2006 in the belief that a sudden spike might show the presence of an Iranian cell. Couldn't happen here? Better be safe than sorry, and minimise the chances of a one way trip to HMP Belmarsh. So please enjoy our products in moderation, folks !
Why has the taste of the falafel changed ?
To celebrate the move to the new kitchen we've changed the recipe. Instead of just using chickpeas we've gone over to half organic chickpeas and half dried and skinned broad beans (ful in Arabic). Different countries use different proportions: some Sudanese and Israelis use all chickpeas; the Lebanese use a mixture; Egyptians use all ful. Please let us know what you think.
The psychogeography* of Willesden Junction
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We've just moved to a new production kitchen in Willesden Junction, on a triangle of land bounded by railway lines, the old Great Western and its Old Oak Common depot, the West Coast Main Line, and the Grand Union Canal. The reason there are so many railway lines is that in the 1830s, when it was planned, the Great Western was going to join up with the London and Birmingham Railway at this point and run into Euston. Our neighbours are the Willesden Junction Waste Depot and Car Giant, who sell second hand cars on the former production site of Rolls Royce's defunct Mulliner Park Ward division. Willesden Junction is the terminus of the odd but useful direct three-coach train from Clapham Junction, which winds its way through Car Giant's endless lots and out-buildings.
This image shows the scene five miles further down the line in to London in the late 1830s. The London and Birmingham Railway's first terminus was planned to be at Chalk Farm. When the land to run the trains in to Euston became available, it involved a gradient that was too steep for the first generation of steam locomotives to climb. So a fixed steam engine, whose chimneys you see in the engraving, was built at Chalk Farm, running a continuous cable running at 20 miles an hour that drew the largely open carriages up the slope for a little more than a mile where they were coupled to a locomotive. On the way down the trains freewheeled into Euston, their speed controlled by an operator in a brake car.
*psychogeography: this word is a showy way of saying 'local history' but also can mean the effect of a place on your mood and the way we personally map places according to how we use them .
Lunchtime fun
If you're in Islington any lunchtime from Weds 20th to Sunday 24th February, check out No Entry at the legendary Kings Head theatre pub in Upper Street. This is a short (40 minutes) new play written by 17 year old Claudine Biggs who also acts and co-directs. It's about angsty adolescent stuff -- feeling excluded and taking refuge in crap relationships -- but written with a verve and wit that's attracted praise from the likes of Juliet Stevenson. There may be free falafel, and yes, there is a family connection between the production and Hoxton Beach. **Update after seeing the first performance** its .. actually .. really .. good ...
Real food vs robofood
We're talking to the excellent Food Machinery Company about getting various bits of food preparation equipment -- vegetable cutters, and possibly a continuous fryer -- but almost certainly stopping short of a device to make the falafel or cut the parsley automatically. Why not? New Chinese machinery is much more sophisticated than what was on offer even a year or two ago. But there's a simple way to decide. If you can use technology without changing the recipe, fine. But if you have to make your falafel mix drier than you'd like just in order to accomodate the machine, or accept mushy parsley because that's the way a bowl-cutter leaves it, you should stick to doing it by hand. Try looking at different examples of ethnic foods on the market and see if you agree with us.
On the move
By the end of February we'll have left our production kitchen in North Finchley for a new home in unit 11-12 Enterprise Way, which is a Hammersmith Council industrial estate just off Scrubs Lane, beyond Car Giant. This is a big, well equipped kitchen, which at least trebles our walk-in fridge space, and with such essential kit as blast-chillers. Strangely, we're now almost immediate neighbours of Mediterranean Foods, who make many of the same products we do, and with whom we share fridges in several London shops.
Another reason falafel should make you feel good
Here's a link to an interesting piece in the New York Times, written by a non-vegetarian, on the impossibility of a world in which everyone ate meat three times a day. Best quote, from Prof Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist: “The good of people’s bodies and the good of the planet are more or less perfectly aligned.”
Now! With Lemon Freshness
Why not just use citric acid in the hummus? Even the best professional Lebanese cooks find it eccentric that we insist on actual lemon juice; even some of the best brands of shop-bought hummus use the stuff (look at the ingredients on the label). But we've always used real juice. Even so, we're now going one better. We have replaced the bought-in lemon juice we previously used for our hummus with freshly lemons squeezed on a ferociously powerful Santos juicer. Why not just go with 'lemon dressing' ( mixture of some lemon and citric acid)? The sentimental answer it's a white powder supplied by the chemical industry (boo, hiss). More relevant is the fact that acidity that comes from citric acid replaces the nutritionally valuable ascorbic acid/Vitamin C found in real lemons, and especially abundantly when they're freshly squeezed. Most important of all: fresh lemon juice tastes much much better.
Christmas came early for Hoxton Beach. Camden Council's Street Markets committee have decided to give us a spot in the new and successful food market in Goodge Place, the cobbled street leading into Goodge Street near the Middlesex Hospital. For the first time in three and a half years we'll have the opportunity to sell the world's greatest street food, the freshly made falafel wrap, directly to our customers. We hope to be up and running early in the new year.
Veg oil in diesels: a cautionary note
We're sorry to have missed the lunchtime rush at Bristol Fresh and Wild when we went to do a sampling there on Thursday 6 December. We limped into Bristol an hour late and spent a extra hour in the car park at Staples, at the roundabout at the end of the M32 waiting while an AA guy bought and fitted a new fuel filtre.
There's a lot of debate about the wisdom of recycyling used frying oil in diesel engines. After the new filter was fitted the Citroen Despatch van was as good as new, or better, so the use, in summer months, of a proportion of old groundnut oil doesn't seem incompatible with a modern diesel engine.
But even after being strained through an impressively sized filter supplied by Goat Industries the oil is pretty mucky, to judge by the inky residue on the filter. If you want to try this, change and check the engine's filter regularly and investigate to see whether the vehicle's fuel tank is getting full of gunk (especially if you're planning on handing it over to an unsuspecting colleague who's about to try to make an appointment at the other end of the M4.)
The fruits of our rubbish
Every week we produce sackloads of rubbish: parsley stalks especially and cardboard vegetable boxes. For some time we've composted a proportion of this, with the help of an active worm population, and so been able to give lots of extra nourishment to a quince tree in Kentish Town.
This has cropped so abundantly that we've made jelly and sold it to an acclaimed restaurant in Kings Cross called Konstam which specialises in locally sourced ingredients.
If you want to taste the end product of a chain that stretches to Italy, where the parsley grew and Norway or wherever the cardboard originally came from, go to Konstam and ask for the the Quince Tart.
Next year we'll be putting the quinces in our own middle eastern style ice cream.
Westward Ho! Bringing falafel to Bristol
We've begun sending three deliveries a week to Bristol Fresh and Wild, carried by the Langridge Organics lorry which leaves New Covent Garden in the small hours. To catch the van we make the Bristol wraps at the start of our nightly production run, and combine the drop-off with vegetable buying. Other new suppliers: our first Budgens -- the independently-owned Crouch End store that's exceptionally large, for this chain, and also exceptionally well-stocked, and BBC TV masterchef winner Julie Friend's two Flavours food shops in Tufnell Park and Kentish Town.
Ramadan: can you cook food if you’re not allowed to taste it ?
We've just launched two new dishes -- Dal Vada, or Indian 'falafel', and our Bengali beans-and-potatoes-in-Mustard oil -- and reworked another (the 'makhlouta' mixed veg -- really the Turkish 'turlu' under another name) -- all during the holy month of fasting, when our chefs aren't allowed to taste food.
Muslims eat more in Ramadan than at any other time, and food shops and restaurants do a roaring trade for the 'Iftar' -- when it's too dark to see a black thread without a lamp, and night means the end of the day's fast. So the pre-prepared food will have been cooked untasted, relying on folk beliefs such as that you can check salt levels using only the sense of smell.
Hoxton Beach set itself the challenge of teaching staff new dishes in an unfamiliar style when they weren't allowed to taste them. And during Ramadan, even the tasting that's finally allowed, at around 6.45pm, can be problematic, when you bring a sample batch. After a twelve hours fast, the chefs are unanimous that it's delicious, and wolf it down. Please let us know if our new products are benefitting from the month's 'baraka' (blessing), or whether the special conditions have caused our judgement to slip ...
Mustard oil—a hot topic
We've just launched our first non-Middle Eastern product -- a Bengali dish called Aloo Sem, or potatoes with green beans. This gets much of its flavour by being first fried in mustard oil. This is an unusual cooking medium -- an oil that comes ready-flavoured with the chemical responsible for the hot taste of mustard, horseradish and wasabi. To tame it we take the lead of Bengali cooks in heating it before use, liberating a pungent steam.
Indians regard mustard oil as uniquely healthy: it has the highest levels of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats of any of the cooking oils, and is also high in alpha linolenic acid. This may be why a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition associated mustard oil with a lower rate of heart attacks than among those who cook with sunflower oil.
The European Union is concerned about mustard oil's high levels of erucic acid. This has not been shown to be toxic to human, but rats given erucid acid have been shown to develop cardiac lesions.
So mustard oil appears to be good for human consumers but bad for rats. For the legal position we went to the Food Standards Agency, for guidance. A member of their chemical risks assesment unit told us in a fascinating and scholarly email that while mustard oil is legal in Britain, there's an obligation here to keep the total level of erucic acid below 5% of the total volume of the product. At its highest the erucic acid content of mustard oil is 50%; in our Aloo Sem oil makes up four percent, or one twenty fifth of the product. But to ensure we're well within the limits we are cooking in a 50-50 groundnut and mustard oil mixture, making the maximum possible erucic acid level one per cent.
Some authors such as Vandana Shiva argue that the controversy around mustard oil was whipped up to promote western agricultural interests. There certainly seems to be more evidence that mustard oil is healthy than that it's harmful. In any case we are staying well within statutory limits. But quite apart from the health issue, a dab of mustard oil, with fried garlic and turmeric gives our beans and potatoes a slight but unmistakable and, we hope, irresistible tang.
More stockists
We're now in Planet Organic's three London shops, just off the Tottenham Court Road near Heal's in Torrington Place, in Fulham Broadway (Effie Road) and in Ladbroke Grove. Coincidentally, both Planet Organic and Hoxton Beach were started by wine writers who've gone into the food business.
You can also now find us in the Cafe Gossip in Broadway Market near London Fields. Broadway Market has become a kind of out-station of Borough Market, with it's wildly successful Saturday market. Magdalena, who runs the cafe, deserves a special mention for her quirky generosity in dishing out unlimited free custard creams with her excellent coffee. And most recently of all we have begun supplying Friends Organic in Roman Road, Bethnal Green, which is the health food shopped linked to the London Buddhist Centre.
An undertaking of great advantage
In Dorothy Sayers' 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise, her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey has a eureka-moment in the book's closing pages: after solving the murder, in a further stroke of inspiration, he originates a promotional campaign for 'Whifflets' cigarettes with the slogan 'Whiffle Your Way Round Britain'.
Sayers was perhaps drawing on her own experience as an advertising copywriter during which she came up with the Guinness Toucan and the phrase 'It Pays to Advertise'.
We've had a similar eureka moment. But we're also convinced that it's such a good idea that if we put it on the website a multinational food processor will steal it from Hoxton Beach. So for the moment, it will go in our business plan, which you're welcome to view if a serious potential investor subject to the usual confidentiality requirements. For now, you may be reminded of the notorious business proposal from the period of the South Sea Bubble, for 'Carrying On an Undertaking of Great Advantage, but Nobody to Know What It Is'.
Why the price of our wraps has gone up
We're sorry that we've had to raise the prices of our wraps to £2.75 for the falafel, pickles, salad and tahina wrap, £3.15 for the falafel feast wrap with aubergine and £2.95 for the falafel and seasonal baked vegetables (makhlouta). One factor's been the rise in the cost of groundnut oil. Like other cooking oils this has seen a big price hike, as an unexpected consequence of the worldwide rise of biofuels.
How do you set a fair price for a product? There's the approach of adding up your costs and putting on a margin. There's also market pricing, based on looking at what your competitors are up to. Business advisers will tell you that a common failing in new businesses is underpricing, or as Alan Sugar said in the first series of The Apprentice, 'anyone calls sell a tenner for £9'. If it's any consolation, looking at competitors such as Pret with their £3.50 falafel wrap, we're still probably committing that elementary error.
A question of size
In the end, it came down to getting out the tape measure. 'Six inches, not more' said our chef. And diameter? 'Two centimetres, three centimetres at most'.
Hoxton Beach is probably the only outfit in Britain to make its own version of the turnip and cucumber pickles that always accompany falafel in Arab countries. But Langridge, our organic vegetable suppliers, had bad news: no more pickling cucumbers. Because of the heat wave in Italy and Egypt, shipments had stopped, probably till the late autumn.
The rival Choice Organics said they had small ridge cucumbers, from a UK farmer. But they weren't small enough to pickle. A quick phone call followed to the kitchen, with reference to tape measures. The farmer's now agreed to pick a special batch for us early. Caveat: ridge cucumbers aren't exactly the same as gherkin varieties, and there's concern they may be too watery. But this is the closest we've got to a direct relationship with growers, and it feels like something to celebrate: our very own Man from Del Monte moment.
We’re now in three London lidos
First Brockwell, then London Fields, and now Parliament Hill Lido. Everyone loves lidos these days, it seems (Julie Burchill, Tracy Emin..) though not it seems God, who this summer has tipped downpour after downpour on our new customers at these fabulous 1930s institutions, revived and refurbished over the last five years.
In her introduction to Janet Smith's Liquid Assets , a history of Britain's lidos, Tracy Emin calls her local lido 'just so exotic. It made Margate seem like the Mediterranean'. What lidos do for Brixton, Hampstead or Hackney, Hoxton Beach tries to do for poolside snacking; and given that 'lido' means 'beach' (or more accurately a strip of land that separates a lagoon from the wider sea, as in the Venice Lido ) we hope our name turns out to be auspicious.
Lidos pictured: 1. Brockwell (opened July 1937; photographed in the early 1960s) 2. London Fields (opened April 1932, refurbished with 25C heated pool last year) and 3. Parliament Hill (opened August 1938).
Hoxton Beach gives falafel to Heathrow Climate Campers
As a mark of solidarity and environmental awareness, Hoxton Beach has donated £100 worth of falafel wraps to the kitchen at the Heathrow Camp for Climate Action.
Er, actually, as a lack of complete 'transparency' has recently been causing certain ethical retailers to come a bit unstuck, perhaps we should elaborate..
In fact we turned up uninvited at the camp inspired by our success at last year's Climate Change March in London, hoping to sell the wraps; but as the camp had voted to keep profit-making ventures (who? us?) off the site, we unloaded them as a goodwill gesture.
Further total disclosure: at least one of our team is an aviation fan and will take control of a light aircraft given the slightest encouragement.
Do get down to the camp though if you can (until August 21). One bonus is just being in a field in the lost county of Middlesex, a fragment of the plains that were London's market gardens before the coming of the Great West Road, the airport mini-city, the Radisson Edwardian, etc, with the hedgerows full of sloes and blackberries, and a view of descending jets to satisfy any plane spotter.
Shocking pink? The new labels ..
Our new labels are at last in the shops, thanks to Nick Clark, our brilliant designer and a lot of sweating over a keyboard with Tony Martins, the engineer from Norprint.
One potential shop customer is not convinced. 'I don't like to say this, as I know you've put so much work into them,' she said. 'But the lady seems more suitable to a fashion product like cosmetics than to food. And olive greens and earth colours go with food, not pale blue and bright pink.'
She's certainly right that restrained graphics, and colours like oatmeals, khaki and brown are the fashion in food branding (take a look at the new shops planned by Tesco in the western United States).
I could say that we were inspired by the wrappings of sandwiches in Tunisian delis in Paris, or Cairo's tiled and neon-lit cafes, or talk about design classics like the old Camp coffee label, or 1920s Turkish cigarettes, or date boxes ... (And now that even McDonalds is going into olive drab, fun colours are up for grabs: why should the devil have all the good tunes? )
But really it's what you think that counts, and it would be great to have your feedback.
Where Hoxton Beach is going next
This idea is so new that we're posting it as a statement of intent and as a form of self-motivation: if you announce it, you have a strong incentive to follow through.
It's to give Hoxton Beach a permanent training role in giving its staff new skills in the English Language, catering and marketing. We intend to build training into day-to-day production, rather along the lines of this Islington Council project.
Background and overview: food in Britain has been transformed by a series of waves of immigration which have given us the Chinese takeaway, the Tandoori restaurant, the Kebab shop ... South China, Bangladesh and Turkey have great food traditions; however the version that appears on our high streets tends to get stuck in a rut, limited by small entrepreneurs' desire to play it safe and go for the cheap end of the market.
The war in Iraq, the tragedy of Palestine, the stunted economies of North Africa, have produced a fresh wave of migration, from countries with a street food culture that has great potential appeal in Britain, which is jaded with the equivalent offerings of corporate America. The appeal of this cuisine is shown by the success of Lebanese restaurants at the top end of the market.
But immigrants who work in the low paid food sector get stuck. They tend not to move outside the grey economy, they have little understanding of food trends in Britain, and they find it hard to move upwards and sideways into the more affluent sectors which demands good languages skills and qualifications.
Because without these skills it's hard to offer anything more ambitious than a greasy kebab and chips.
Hoxton Beach wants to expand, both as a food wholesaler, and providing freshly made falafel and other authentic vegan street food from our own outlets. For this to work we'll need well-trained staff who can work autonomously and communicate well with customers face to face. By building on-site training into everything we do, we hope that both the company and its staff will get long term benefits.
Our ‘contemporary’ vegetables: the In and Out list
We've finally given Iceberg Lettuce its P45; for some reason the great cookery writer Jane Grigson championed this tasteless and nutrient-free vegetable, and our chef Kassem had some regard for it, but we've finally banished it from our falafel wraps, which are now accompanied by tahina, our pickles and tomatoes and a lot of parsley -- the classic Levantine garnish.
Celeriac is also history, at least for the next six months. Its place in our organic Makhlouta (seasonal Lebanese-style baked vegetables) has been taken by Fennel for the moment. Later in the summer this will become more like Ratatouille when Peppers and Aubergines are in full season.
'Contemporary' vegetables was my slip of the tongue for 'seasonal', when I was in Friends of the Earth trying to persuade a sceptical staff member to try our Makhlouta and Falafel wrap. 'We've dropped the celeriac as it's out of season now, but we're replaced it with fennel'. 'Yuk,' she said. 'I can't stand either of them. Have you got one with plain salad?'
Please let us know your own vegetable preferences and we'll try to accommodate them ...
Meanwhile here's our visual guide for quick reference.
IN:
OUT:
Our new weirdly named salads
Fattoush? Mujaddarah?? From first reactions, customers at branches of Fresh and Wild have found our new salads as acceptable as staff have found them unpronouncable. Unlike our existing range these are on the salad counter, and unpackaged, so all you have to do is point, rather than ask for them by name.
Mudaddarah is a surprise hit. This is a spiced brown lentil and basmati rice mixture, topped with caramelised onions -- known as the 'food of the poor' in the Middle East. Fattoush is a mixed salad, with toasted bread added (late on, so it doesn't become too soggy). We also plan to offer one or two Moroccan salads, which are characteristically sweet-sour: a sugary cooked carrot salad, and another with oranges and olives.
Please let us know what you think. Last week these only existed as trial runs, and we're still tweaking.
Swine Fever
The Indian Mutiny was supposedly triggered by rumours that paper cartridges given to Muslim troops were greased with lard. Just now Stoke Newington seems to be gripped by the rumour that we put pork slices in our falafel wraps (at least two customers have returned theirs and complained.) It would be an original marketing idea, risking offence to both our customers and staff (who are 4/5 Muslim), and rather expensive too. The culprit seems to be the beetroot that we use to colour our pickled turnip slices a succulent pink. So sorry to anyone who's been concerned or misled. Our premises are currently all-vegan (but a Turkey Twizzler falafel wrap ? ... hmmm ...)
Hello (again) Hoxton !
It's good to be back. Two years after we were moved on from Hoxton Square we're back, a stone's throw from the place, in Kingsland High Road at The Grocery. It's especially satisfying as we look forward to meeting the unmet demand for falafel wraps that's blighted the area since the much lamented closure of Old Street Fresh and Wild last summer. (We used to be in the car park beside the White Cube gallery, just off to the right of the first picture, selling falafel hot from the fryer ).
Going (partly) organic
Over the last few months we've started making a number of dishes from entirely organic ingredients, and we've now put in our application to the Soil Association to have these certified. So far our baba ghanouj, pickles and makhlouta are all-organic, and we're planning all-organic versions of our two falafel meals, the one with hummus, and the one with baba ghanouj (aubergine dip) which is currently on sale at the Coffee@ cafes and at Earth, the new shop in Kentish Town, but not yet at Fresh and Wild.
Intuitively it feels right to be 100% organic. The problems, which we're working on are
1. that no one makes an organic version of the essential Arab khubz bread wrap. We can offer pitta, and probably will, but it's not the same. The excellent Paul's Bakery have offered to make a certified organic version of Lebanese tannour bread, but it won't be cheap.
2. falafel have to be fried; we don't like the main organic frying oil (sunflower), and we're not sure anyone will pay for us to use organic groundnut or rapeseed, which work well, but are astronomically expensive. So the bulk of our falafel will have to stay conventional, with perhaps a speciality organic range.
3. parsley. We think we make the only acceptable tabbouleh outside Lebanese restaurants; tabbouleh has to be largely parsley (rather than bulgur wheat flecked with parsley) to be authentic. This depends on bulk supplies of parsley, which importers bring in for Greek and Turkish restaurants and greengrocers. But these aren't organic customers. By contrast organic parsley is priced as a herb, or cooking ingredient, rather than as a mainstream vegetable. So an affordable tabbouleh will have to stay conventional, though again we can offer a necessarily rather dear niche product alongside it.
This all sounds like theological hair-splitting of the kind Oliver Walston attacks in this Guardian piece. But when I grow tomatoes or brocolli I'd be ashamed to douse them with chemicals, and I can't see why our customers should expect anything different.
Tabbouleh
Ingredients: parsley, tomato, spring onion, burghul, mint, olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt
This came in orange cellophane till recently; soon we're going to be wrapping it in different coloured paper to distinguish it from the £2.25 wrap. The important points of difference are that it's bigger, with more falafel; it has fried aubergine, making it a bit richer and meatier (adding aubergine is a Palestinian tradition), and it has parsley instead of lettuce.
This came in orange cellophane till recently; soon we're going to be wrapping it in different coloured paper to distinguish it from the basic wrap. The important points of difference are that it's bigger, with more falafel; it has fried aubergine, making it a bit richer and meatier (adding aubergine is a Palestinian tradition), and it has parsley instead of lettuce.
Till recently this was a short stubby wrap, half of a supersize wrap made with Dina bakery's 12 inch bread, with a diagonal cut showing off the contents. To hold together it was wrapped in clingfilm. We had doubts about clingfilm, so the new version is in a single 'handy' bread, wrapped in cellophane, and is longer and leaner than the old version.
Why the name ‘Hoxton Beach’?
James 'Hoxton' Beach (1839 to 1894) was a leading member of a group of Anglo-Catholic social reformers who campaigned to improve the material and spiritual conditions of inhabitants of the East End (a term Beach was among the first to popularise). A younger son of a family of Dundee Jute merchants he was influenced at Oxford by the teachings of John Henry Newman and in collaboration with the Revd Armitage Shanks founded the Hoxton Settlement in 1871, with its associated church of St Cuthberts, Slop Street. A plaque illustrating his activities among the 'weaker sisterhood' can be seen on the one of the walls of the 'Slop Bar' which now occupies part of the former church.
(well ... perhaps ... or, for a different theory of the origin of 'Hoxton Beach' see the article Chickpeas and Queues)
Scenes from our sampling at Notting Hill Fresh and Wild
Our last sampling on Saturday Dec 9 at Notting Hill Fresh and Wild drew the usual queues, despite a late start after our chef failed to pack any tahina.
This was the first time customers had the opportunity to try our new home made pickles -- probably the first time cider vinegar has been used in Lebanese cuisine
They aren't flight attendants -- they're from the vintage clothes shop round the corner, and they swapped perfume samples for falafel samples.
Special thanks to the F&W customer who drew our attention to the recent Economist piece attacking organic food, food miles, Fair Trade etc. Is one answer that while no one's going to change the world purely by shopping, it's a good thing if buying a snack can raise people's awareness in the same way as buying a book does .... er, or something .... ?
We jump on the cider band-wagon
2006 was the year that cider makers saw their business boom. Perhaps in tune with the zeitgeist we've started making our own pickles, to a time honoured Lebanese formula, but using organic English cider vinegar. Cider vinegar has attracted various odd nutritional claims, but our reason for using it is that the results are stunningly delicious, winning over even people who were sure they didn't like pickles. The new pickles are going in our falafel wraps and, as a mixed organic winter vegetable pickle, coloured pink with beetroot, into our new meals, together with organic baba ghanouj (aubergine dip)
And the falafel themselves have been changing: recently we did a trial of English cold-pressed rape seed oil as an alternative to groundnut for frying. We decided to stick with groundnut, but the exercise made us take a long hard look at the way we do things. We made two decisions: the first was to stop using baking powder to puff up the falafel -- instead we've gone over to Bicarbonate of Soda. This is baking powder minus the Tartaric Acid and starch. The result has been that the falafel cook more thoroughly and are more crunchy. Secondly we've found a more efficient way to dry the falafel when they come out of the fryer. Please let us know if you like the new style.
News Pages Summary Text
Are we nuts to fry in groundnut oil?
The truthful answer has to be yes. Groundnut oil is hideously expensive. With some dramatic price rises recently it now sells for at least £28 for a 15 litre drum, compared to less than half that for the same amount of standard cooking oil. Chefs use it to make mayonnaise and salad dressings: it's rarely if ever used in inexpensive fast food.
For the falafel we sell as wholesalers we use 50% groundnut, which but after trials (thank you KTC Oils) we now blend with 50% rapeseed oil, which has the same (in fact a slightly better) proportion of mono-unsaturated fats. We find that using half groundnut gives very nearly the same appetising smell and taste.
We began using groundnut because of the reek created by standard cooking oil. When we were selling straight to the public in Hoxton Square it was important to draw people in with an appetising smell. Now that we again sell directly to the public we find the same advantage, so at our two direct outlets we use 100% groundnut.
We are hooked on it, because a little research showed that groundnut oil, which like olive oil is high in monounsaturated fats, has health advantages over alternatives such as sunflower and corn oil. By the way refined groundnut oil does not cause allergy problems.
Does the clean, nutty taste of groundnut oil have a significant influence on the final flavour of the falafel when they're rolled in a wrap with other ingredients? We like to think it makes a difference -- but let us know what you think. At any rate our kitchen smells delicious.
Hoxton Beach at the Climate Change March
Did you see us in Malet Street at the start of the Climate Change Campaign march, courtesy of People and Planet, or in Trafalgar Square, courtesy of, er, the security guy who didn't actually chuck us out? Thanks to everyone who bought the special edition wrap, the samosas and bhajis supplied by Rosh, and the chocolate (well, Green and Blacks is owned by Cadbury's but what are you going to do?)
Thanks too for the query about whether the bottled water we were selling was 'Penguin Friendly'. Although mystified by this at the time, we've now discovered it's a campaign on the analogy of dolphin friendly tuna which refers to the climate impact of a product. Hmmm .. we think we are fairly penguin friendly; chickpeas arrive by sea and as they're dried are quite energy efficient to transport. Meanwhile we're investing in a machine that will enable us to run our delivery van -- partly at least -- on used cooking oil.
New website—a work in progress
We've at last updated the website. We hope you like the look and find it easy to find your way around. We're still catching up with the changes that have happened over the last year -- please bear with us and tell us what you think
Thank You
For your enquiry, we will be back in touch soon.
Contact
Kitchen: Hoxton Beach, 11-12 Enterprise Way, Triangle Business Centre, Salter Street, London NW10 6UG
London Fields Lido Café, LB Hackney London Fields Lido, London Fields West Side, London E8 3EU
Goodge Place Market (Monday to Friday lunchtimes), Goodge Place, London W1T (nearest tube Goodge Street)
Whitecross Street Market (Monday to Friday lunchtimes) Whitecross Street London EC1Y (nearest tubes Barbican and Old Street)
Admin: 21 Gillies Street, Kentish Town, London NW5 4DN
Office deliveries:
falafel wraps £2.50, with or without our home made chili sauce With fried aubergine, an extra 50p each
(Office customers get *free* and *unlimited* marinated chillis, to add as much burn as they like. We can also offer the rest of the range supplied to our retail customers by request.)
In development:
Recently I had the best falafel wrap I've ever tasted: falafel, plus our new home made pickled cucumber, plus a helping of makholouta. The problem in making it to sell would be the cooking juices from the vegetables in the makhlouta making the bread soggy. We're working on it.
Batata harra. Just potatoes fried in groundnut oil with red and greed peppers, coriander, garlic and chili pepper. Kassem makes this brilliantly.
Ingredients
The following whimsical photo-essay will soon be updated. Two of our major suppliers are Langridge, who supply our organic vegetables, and Community Foods, who sell us our Turkish organic chickpeas and vegan organic mayonnaise (though we plan soon to make this ourselves).
Our falafel wraps are packed with...
organic chickpeas, cumin, garlic, dill, parsley, tahina (sesame paste), salted pickles, parsley lettuce, tomato and an optional slathering of our own-make chilli sauce.
Organic chickpeas are grown by conscientious farmers..
harvested, then dried....
minced with cumin....
....garlic
...dill
..and parsley.
Once the falafel has been made, we nestle it up snug in Khubz bread...
tuck it up with fresh salad....
...and give it a light drizzle of lemony tahina sauce
...not forgetting, of course, to tuck in our Bekaa valley salted pickles as well
...somehow, it all magically comes together, producing...
THIS! A marvellous Hoxton Beach falafel wrap!
I smile the smile of the contented
when I see my customers satisfied
PS: In the Bekaa Valley, vegetables are grown without pesticides irrigated by meltwater from the snow capped Lebanon mountain range
Our Team
Patrick Matthews has wanted to popularise falafel since he discovered them in Damascus when he was studying Arabic at university. He has written books on wine ('The Wild Bunch' was the 1998 Glenfiddich Awards Drink Book of the Year) and also made television features on food. Any caption suggestions for the pic on the right will be gratefully received.
This is a fragmentary image of Kassem, our chef. Kassem used to make falafel at the legendary Solly's in Golders Green. He has since worked tirelessly on the formula for the perfect falafel. Kassem has resisted various attempts to mechanise his hands-on approach, though he has recently handed over the actual rolling of the sandwich wraps.
This is now done by Barbara, who works the night shift from midnight to 5am to make sure the sandwiches are fresh.
The best falafel in London
Why falafel? They're in supermarkets, in kebab shops, on television.. because they're one of the world's great snacks. They've been enjoyed for thousands of years; chickpeas, their main ingredient, have qualities that intrigue modern clinical nutritionalists
But they have to be done right, and if you've ever struggled with a couple of dry bean rissoles in a pitta bread, you should try our version.
Hoxton Beach falafel sandwiches are rolled tight, (in the Middle East they often eat and hold a car's steering wheel with the other hand); they're the real thing, as enjoyed in Damascus, Cairo, Beirut (and at risk to both vendor and customer in Baghdad ) and are made freshly with salad, tahina and our home made organic pickles -- all for around £3
Our falafel are part of a growing range of healthy and delicious Lebanese vegan food, which we supply to London shops including Fresh and Wild and deliver at lunch time to staff at Friends of the Earth. We also cater for conferences and private parties.
We work six days a week and supply our freshly made food from refrigerated vans. Our staff work in the early morning in our kitchen unit in Willesden Junction so that we can deliver as soon as the food is prepared. We also make and sell freshly made falafel wraps on weekday lunchtimes at our market stalls in Goodge Place, W1, and Whitecross Street, London EC1.
We've started filling a small book case with reading matter for patrons of the 
When we were briefly in 
At the time of writing we are half way though making falafels at a week-long 
Last summer we read the 
We've just bought our third La Spaziale compact espresso machine. This one has just gone in in the kiosk on the pool side of 
We've been given the go ahead by our landlords 
Apologies to our customers at the 
We are proud to feature in the 
There's a plan for a drinks licence at 
We've given travellers on the 
You can again find our falafel in 
Three years ago we were asked to cater at a 
The stalwarts who gather outside our café at 
and bussed up to London in a rented long wheelbase Ford Transit. Steve White from Hackney's park's department made raised beds for the hollies, which are now also planted up with wallflowers, some early daffodills, and with the white geraniums that Steve's colleague Paul Childs gave us during the summer. One holly -- which is on the right in the picture -- is a native 
Time Out featured us in their recent 
From August we have begun selling to the three shops of 
For three days in early June we were on the fringes of the assessment process that officially confirmed the progress of the 
Because she showed great judgement and a sense of good value by choosing to buy a falafel from us in 
Soon we'll have our own elderflower cordial for sale at our market stalls and cafés after some trips around various patches of waste ground in Hackney and Wormwood Scrubs. These trees were protected in previous centuries by the belief that they were inhabited by a 
For the past few weeks a plastic palm tree has graced the seating area on the park side of our café at 
We're honoured to have been asked to to do the catering this Saturday (16 May) for a 
Coming soon on sale at the 
Last autumn a rival leisure centre caterer gave us a business tip: he said we should supersize our coffees (which increases our costs by a fraction) and charge customers a lot more. 
We now make coffee at our cafés at 
The 
From Friday October 10 we will be taking over the café at the 
The problem with 
We're now in our fifth week trading on Wednesdays at 
On the Italian Riviera, trying to cobble together 
>
We took over the catering at 
This is called Ful Akhdar (broad beans) and it's small broad beans in their pods cooked with garlic and coriander. It's a staple of Lebanese meze and is often eaten to accompany arak, the ouzo-like drink. Several of the shops we sell to are now taking it, but it depends on getting fresh beans direct from a farmer. Our supplier is 
We've had many nice reactions to our new falafel stand in Goodge Place, but one of the most perceptive was from a Syrian guy who did something of a double-take, and said: 'This place could be back home.' In fact a falafel stand in Damascus (by 
According to 
To celebrate the move to the new kitchen we've changed the recipe. Instead of just using chickpeas we've gone over to half organic chickpeas and half dried and skinned broad beans (ful in Arabic). Different countries use different proportions: some Sudanese and Israelis use all chickpeas; the Lebanese use a mixture; Egyptians use all ful. Please let us know what you think.
When the land to run the trains in to Euston became available, it involved a gradient that was too steep for the first generation of steam locomotives to climb. So a fixed steam engine, whose chimneys you see in the engraving, was built at Chalk Farm, running a continuous cable running at 20 miles an hour that drew the largely open carriages up the slope for a little more than a mile where they were coupled to a locomotive. On the way down the trains freewheeled into Euston, their speed controlled by an operator in a brake car. 
If you're in Islington any lunchtime from Weds 20th to Sunday 24th February, check out 
We're talking to the excellent 
Here's a link to an 
Why not just use citric acid in the hummus? Even the best professional Lebanese cooks find it eccentric that we insist on actual lemon juice; even some of the best brands of shop-bought hummus use the stuff (look at the ingredients on the label). But we've always used real juice. Even so, we're now going one better. We have replaced the bought-in lemon juice we previously used for our hummus with freshly lemons squeezed on a ferociously powerful Santos juicer. Why not just go with 'lemon dressing' ( mixture of some lemon and citric acid)? The sentimental answer it's a white powder supplied by the chemical industry (boo, hiss). More relevant is the fact that acidity that comes from citric acid replaces the nutritionally valuable ascorbic acid/Vitamin C found in real lemons, and especially abundantly when they're freshly squeezed. Most important of all: fresh lemon juice tastes much much better.
This has cropped so abundantly that we've made jelly and sold it to an acclaimed restaurant in Kings Cross called 
We've begun sending three deliveries a week to 
We've just launched two new dishes -- Dal Vada, or Indian 'falafel', and our Bengali beans-and-potatoes-in-Mustard oil -- and reworked another (the 'makhlouta' mixed veg -- really the Turkish 'turlu' under another name) -- all during the holy month of fasting, when our chefs aren't allowed to taste food. 
We've just launched our first non-Middle Eastern product -- a Bengali dish called Aloo Sem, or potatoes with green beans. This gets much of its flavour by being first fried in 
We're now in 
We're sorry that we've had to raise the prices of our wraps to £2.75 for the falafel, pickles, salad and tahina wrap, £3.15 for the falafel feast wrap with aubergine and £2.95 for the falafel and seasonal baked vegetables (makhlouta). One factor's been the rise in the cost of groundnut oil. Like other cooking oils this has seen a big price hike, as an unexpected consequence of the 
In the end, it came down to getting out the tape measure. 'Six inches, not more' said our chef. And diameter? 'Two centimetres, three centimetres at most'.
and now 
Smith's 
As a mark of solidarity and environmental awareness, Hoxton Beach has donated £100 worth of falafel wraps to the kitchen at the 
Our new labels are at last in the shops, thanks to Nick Clark, our brilliant designer and a lot of sweating over a keyboard with Tony Martins, the engineer from 
The 
It's good to be back. Two years after we were 
closure of Old Street Fresh and Wild last summer. (We used to be in the car park beside the White Cube gallery, just off to the right of the first picture, selling falafel hot from the fryer ).
Ingredients: parsley, tomato, spring onion, burghul, mint, olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt
Ingredients: falafel: organic chickpeas, dried broad beans, shallots, garlic, parsley, coriander, chickpea flour, coriander seed, cumin seed, sea salt, dried red pepper, sodium bicarbonate, ground nut oil (for frying); tabbouleh: parsley, tomato, spring onion, bulgur (cracked wheat), fresh mint, olive oil lemon juice salt; hummus: chickpeas tahina (sesame paste) lemon garlic
Ingredients: Falafel: organic chickpeas, dried broad beans, onion, garlic, parsley, coriander, chickpea flour, spices, sea salt, sodium bicarbonate, ground nut oil (for frying); Vegetables (all organic) potato, onion, tomato and, according to seasonal availability: celeriac, courgette, peas, turnip, brocolli, coriander. Bread: unbleached flour, yeast, sugar, salt.
Ingredients: Falafel: organic chickpeas, dried broad beans, onion, garlic, parsley, coriander, chickpea flour, spices, sea salt, sodium bicarbonate, ground nut oil (for frying); Baba ghanouj: organic aubergine, organic vegan mayonnaise; Pickles: (all organic) white cabbage, cauliflower, carrot, garlic, beetroot, organic cider vinegar. 
Ingredients: Falafel (35%) organic chickpeas, dried broad beans, onion , coriander, chick pea flour, spices, sea salt, sodium bicarbonate, Bread (15%) unbleached flour, water, sugar, yeast, salt; Tahina sauce: tahina, lemon juice, groundnut oil, sea salt; pickled cucumbers and turnips, tomato, lettuce. 
James 'Hoxton' Beach (1839 to 1894) was a leading member of a group of Anglo-Catholic social reformers who campaigned to improve the material and spiritual conditions of inhabitants of the East End (a term Beach was among the first to popularise). A younger son of a family of Dundee Jute merchants he was influenced at Oxford by the teachings of 
2006 was the year that cider makers saw their business boom. Perhaps in tune with the zeitgeist we've started making our own pickles, to a time honoured Lebanese formula, but using organic English cider vinegar. Cider vinegar has attracted various odd nutritional claims, but our reason for using it is that the results are stunningly delicious, winning over even people who were sure they didn't like pickles. The new pickles are going in our falafel wraps and, as a mixed organic winter vegetable pickle, coloured pink with beetroot, into our new meals, together with organic baba ghanouj (aubergine dip)
The truthful answer has to be yes. Groundnut oil is hideously expensive. With some dramatic price rises recently it now sells for at least £28 for a 15 litre drum, compared to less than half that for the same amount of standard cooking oil. Chefs use it to make mayonnaise and salad dressings: it's rarely if ever used in inexpensive fast food.
Did you see us in Malet Street at the start of the 
Patrick Matthews has wanted to popularise falafel since he discovered them in Damascus when he was studying Arabic at university. He has written books on wine ('The Wild Bunch' was the 1998 
Why falafel? They're in supermarkets, in kebab shops, on television.. because they're one of the world's great snacks. They've been enjoyed for thousands of years; chickpeas, their main ingredient, have qualities that intrigue 
