Like many people, I was a fan of Robin and Sarah Gill's The Dairy in Clapham, but I didn't make it over there often enough, which filled me with huge regret when it closed permanently this summer. But to my pleasure, it has now reopened in a new location in Bermondsey. I'd actually been running past its new home, inside the attractive new Bermonds Locke aparthotel on Tower Bridge Road, while it was being created and jumped at the chance to take advantage of its soft launch.
If you were looking for good coffee while in Bankside, you used to have to head to Borough, but the arrival of branches of Caravan and Origin Coffee has filled in a few Southwark speciality coffee gaps. And the latest addition, Saint Nine Coffee, is rather special too.
By all accounts, 2020 has been a terrible year, but one upshot was that I finally got a bike and started cycling around London while the locked-down streets were much quieter than usual. Another positive was that without having to rely on convoluted public transport routes, I was finally able to visit Amoret Coffee's Notting Hill roastery cafe, which had been on my to-visit list for an embarrassingly long time.
Shad Thames, a historic Bermondsey street one block from the Thames and just east of Tower Bridge, is on my regular running route and I often walk through on my way to or from the river. Earlier this year, I'd spotted a new Italian restaurant in the Cardamom Building — which used to house a branch of Watch House until it moved a few doors down — but kept forgetting to look it up when I got home. By the time I found Legare online, London had gone into lockdown.
There's something about a multi-course brunch that I reminds me of some of the extended, high-end brunches I've enjoyed in Paris. In London, it's often a more casual affair, but in these COVID-19 times, why wouldn't I want to linger over two brunch courses plus speciality coffee from Difference Coffee? And brand-new cafe–bar Queens of Mayfair is a beautiful setting to do just that.
One of my favourite things to do — on my travels and at home in London — is to eat out at different restaurants, new-to-me or old familiars. What with one thing and another, this has been from difficult to impossible over the past six months, but as London eateries begin to take those first steps towards that elusive 'new normal', I too have now dined out a few times.
