The Humble Bee Café. Stepney City Farm, Stepney Way, London E1 3DG. No bookings. All food £3.25 to £6.50
Lunch at the Humble Bee Café is a meal in a very happy place. It opened in July and occupies a simple hut on the edge of Stepney City Farm in London’s East End. There’s mismatched furniture, games of Jenga and Scrabble on the tables, and an awful lot of peace. I suspect it would be a calming space in which to linger in any circumstances, but chefs Alice Wilson and Matt Hall are busily providing a whole bunch of edible reasons for going there in the first place. The Humble Bee feels like a place where nothing bad can happen, and keep not happening.
The city-farm setting is key. So far, it’s providing just 15% of the ingredients, but will, in time, provide much more. There are those who will tell you that places like this are a solution to the apparent iniquities of Big Food Retail, with capital letters; of long supply chains, and concrete jungles so far from the fields; that we could all eat local if only we put our minds to it, and lifted the paving stones to find the dark fertile earth beneath. It’s a sweet fantasy, though a fantasy all the same. The proponents of practical urban farming always seem to underestimate the true scale of the demand for food in densely populated cities.
None of that should detract from the vital importance of places like this. Saying city farms have educational value is like saying a glass of water will quench your thirst. Of course they do. There are arts and training projects here for people with disabilities; regularly the paths throng with visits by schools. It is space in which the old skills are kept alive. But there are other less tangible virtues to do with simple wellbeing and an environment that has been nurtured into life for the past 40 years by the local community. The farm has returned the favour, by nurturing the community within which it sits.
On these three acres they grow giant pumpkins and broad beans, beetroots and garlic, redcurrants, rhubarb and so much more besides. There are farm animals, too, including pigs, sheep, ducks and geese, kept not as pets for children merely to coo over, although there is a bit of that. The animals are bred for market. It is a working farm with a purpose. On an early autumn day, with the warm sun now a little lower in the sky, and the foliage starting to sag with weight from a long, exhausting summer of frenetic growth, the rest of the city beyond the gates feels a very long way away.
Wilson and Hall, who have worked everywhere from high-end restaurants through community cafés to food banks, met at the Borough Market outpost of steak mavens Hawksmoor. There is a little meat on the menu here, some of it from the animals kept on the farm. Breakfasts do offer a bacon sandwich. But for the most part the menu scribbled on the blackboard goes the way of the vegetable. What defines it all is the attention to the fundamentals. Today for £6.50, there is a salad of both roasted and pickled fennel, with the caramelised, nutty bite of roasted Jerusalem artichokes, heaps of soft green lentils and cherry tomatoes bursting from their skins. For a dab of colour there are a few purple blooms. It’s a big, thoughtful bowl of the good things.
Most of the rest of the menu looks like a bunch of open sandwiches, each at a little over a fiver. Then they turn up and it becomes clear that the thick slice of sourdough underneath – from Rockstar Bakers in Herne Hill – while part of the offering, is essentially a platform, upon which the kitchen assembles its ideas. You can measure the depth of these “sandwiches” with a long ruler. One comes spread thickly with their own punchy hummus. On top are slabs of roasted butternut squash, like crescent suns, their bright orange set against the crimson of pickled beetroot. There are torn basil leaves and, for a salty kick, cairns of crumbled feta.
On another, feta is whipped to smooth and invited to play tag with dollops of spiced baba ganoush. Texture comes from roasted tomatoes and the peppery intent of watercress. Their take on egg mayonnaise is simply outrageous. The chickens must have worked overtime to stack this one serving. Rather than a blitzed mush, the eggs, cooked until soft rather than rubber-bullet hard, have been broken up and heaped one atop the other. There are a few thin discs of crisped chorizo.
On the counter there is a sausage roll as thick as a toddler’s arm, the rugged filling studded with the sweet burst of chopped apricots, the flaky pastry sprinkled with fennel seeds. Alongside there’s the cake of the day, a crumbly chocolate orange number with lots of zest and a chocolate buttercream frosting like your mum or dad would make. Or somebody else would make if your parents were rubbish at baking. You get the point. It is the virtue of the domestic. The coffee is good and strong.
I’m aware this is a review of a short menu in a café that, on weekdays, is only open from 8.30am to 4pm. Compared to some of the places I review, with their book blurb-length menu descriptions, it’s so simple it could be dismissed as a mere footnote. But the care taken over the food here matters. The kitchen is as sodden with rippling ambition as any populated by some crack white-jacketed brigade, with the glint of tweezers clipped to their lapels.
Indeed, I’d say the ambition, to bring seriously good food to a corner of the world that might otherwise be overlooked, is far greater. Yes, only a small percentage of the ingredients comes directly from outside the door at the moment. But a new farmer has just started, who will be planting to their orders. What’s more, a large plot of land, sequestered by the Crossrail project, is about to come back to Stepney City Farm, and they have major plans for it. Plus, they will be running supper clubs and an outside catering business. It’s a kitchen with a purpose. But more than anything else, it is just a lovely place to be. Is it a culinary destination? Perhaps not. It’s the sort of place you visit if you happen to be nearby. Now all you have to do is come up with a bloody good excuse to be nearby.
News bites
The Humble Bee could be twinned with the café at St Werburghs City Farm in Bristol, which also provides some of the ingredients for the menu. Others come from local allotment holders who can trade their surplus for meals. It’s open six days a week from 10am until 4pm. The ever-changing menu might include a pumpkin, black bean and goats cheese burrito, a smoked haddock chowder or a hot pot of beef shin with root vegetables. Dishes are rarely priced above £7.
To add to all the other Brexit-related food supply fears, there’s now concern about UK turkey supplies this Christmas. According to thecaterer.com, a quarter of all turkey eggs hatched here come from France, and the high summer temperatures have led to significant numbers being lost. Turkey egg supply is down 10%.
The flatsharing site spareroom along with the Campaign To End Loneliness has appointed Andrew Clarke as the first National Loneliness Chef. Clarke, head chef of London’s St Leonard’s restaurant, who is also a major campaigner on mental health issues in the catering industry, has created a set of recipes for sharing dishes, to help bring people together.
Jay Rayner’s book My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making is published by Guardian Faber at £16.99, buy it for £11.99 at guardianbookshop.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
This article was amended on 2 October to reflect the fact that the Humble Bee is in fact licensed.
