It's mean more than four years since I first visited Red Lion Coffee Co. in New Cross, and now Chris McKie and the team have opened a second coffee shop at the base of The Scalpel in the heart of the City of London. It's been open a little while and although it's a fairly recent discovery for me, I've already visited a couple of times.
Sadly, Pedler Good Fortune is permanently closed.
One of my all-time favourite meals in London was the first time my friends and I visited the original Pedler on Peckham Rye. We were there for the neighbourhood eatery's soft launch in 2014, and with 50% off food and five of us present, we got to make that wonderful order: "We'll take one of everything." As predicted, we all returned regularly, celebrating birthdays, babies and boozy brunches, usually featuring a Little Bird gin cocktail (they're owned by the same people). But although the restaurant was beautifully designed, it could feel crowded even in the beforetimes, and unfortunately, after one lockdown too many, Pedler closed its doors for good.
Luckily, however, it has now reopened as Pedler Good Fortune (CLOSED) in a new location on Queens Road, still in Peckham but a mile northeast. The delicious food, great décor and excellent service remain the same, but when I visited one evening last week, there were some exciting changes too.
I've been visiting The Missing Bean in Oxford's Turl Street for over a decade and was delighted when they opened their own roastery in East Oxford a few years later. Now Missing Bean is expanding further, with two new cafés in Abingdon and Banbury, and another to come later in the summer at the West Way Square development in Botley. While visiting my parents at the weekend, I stopped by the Abingdon coffee shop, which opened in late May.
Midway through a long bike ride around west London, I found myself not in a dark forest, but in Hammersmith, where I was born. You can't go home again, according to Thomas Wolfe's novel of the same name, but in my case, I don't return often enough. Owning a bike makes the journey from Bermondsey easier, though, and knowing there was an excellent coffee stop, in the form of Carbon Kopi, helped me stay on track as I meandered along the Thames-side cycle route.
While cycling through Fulham recently, I overheard a woman describing a restaurant as "a combination of my two favourite cuisines, Italian and Japanese." I knew exactly where she was talking about because I was going to the same place, Angelina in Dalston, a few days later for a belated birthday dinner with my brother.
UPDATE: Lantern Coffee has now closed permanently.
While working from home during the past year, I've sought solace in my lunch-break strolls around Bermondsey and Borough, often stopping for food or coffee. Bermondsey has an abundance of specialty coffee shops and roasters including Monmouth and Watch House are based here (Pact too, although you can't normally visit).
One of my regular lunchtime haunts was Black Swan Yard, but upsettingly, it was recently shut down by the landlord with almost no notice. I hope they'll be back but in the meantime, I found myself on Mill Street, down by the Thames, where I happened upon Lantern Coffee.
I was looking forward to reading Zakiya Dalila Harris's debut novel for many weeks, and I raced through it in a couple of evenings. In the novel, Nella is a 26-year-old editorial assistant working at a New York publishing house. She works hard, gets on well with her editor and hopes she is on track for a promotion in the not-too-distant future.
