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| Busy Cardigan Club |
It's close to my Kentish Town home but I had to see what this new little Viet-Franco street food cafe was serving up.
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| Interior: child's cardigans hang everywhere |
Entering the café is like walking into a playroom, complete with doll’s house and a pastel colour palette. Small rusting tins are dotted around the walls, a touch an interiors blog would go wild for. Tiny child’s cardigans hang everywhere, a nod to the name, which was inspired by the warming story of smiley owner Minhchi’s seamster parents. They came to Mile End as immigrants from Vietnam when she was a child and worked in a factory making cardigans. At lunch, they would all huddle in the Vietnamese café, the heart of their community.
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| Interior: Breezy French café |
It sounds a bit cutesie but the twee is stamped out by an over-riding breezy French café feel, with peeling paint solid wood chairs and tables. The girliness is clearly not putting the guys off who sat around hunched over their big bowls of curries and noodles.
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| Riviera Sun with groggy shavings of peppered beef |
The menu is suitably simple, with four dishes to choose from.
We ordered ‘The Riviera Sun’, which was a fairly standard bowl of vermicelli noodle salad with groggy shavings of peppered beef, which curled up at the ends because it was pretty well done. The noodles sat in a slightly too sweet dressing and the volume felt like a bit of a chore to get through, so we didn’t and dug into our Keeno salad with sweet chilli chicken instead.
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| Keeno salad - flavour explosion! |
Cue flavour explosion. Strips of crunchy sweet pepper and fiery radish were tossed in quinoa and a honey mustard dressing, the sweetness perfectly setting off the savoury crispy but tender sweet chilli chicken. It’s been a week now and when I think back to that chicken, I go all glassy-eyed and mouth-watery. All these tasty textures were made even more interesting with a blob of zingy Asian take on salsa verde and a sprinkling of lightly fried ginger.
Our forks fighting for the final mouthfuls, my dining partner and I both agreed we haven’t tasted something as good as the this salad for a long time. It encompasses all that The Cardigan Club is doing well and differently; hearty home cooking made healthy. We washed our lunch down with two refreshing pressed juices, apple and ginger and orange, carrot and ginger.
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| One woman Kitchen |
Minhchi is enjoying the challenge of sourcing local produce. The quinoa hails from Whole Foods, the fruit and veg bought from Fam, across the road and the meat; free range and organic from Peckham.
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| Street view |
It’s difficult to fault The Cardigan Club, the authentic Vietnamese flavours with a European twist is exactly what locals will love about this place. Coffee boffs can pop another tick in the box as the café boasts beans from artisan Bristol based caffein mongers, Extract.
I really couldn’t get that chicken out of my head, so I popped back on Saturday and ordered the Japanese curry with chicken to take away. The chicken was cooked in the thick sauce, and wasn’t as memorably or crispy as my first experience, but the curry was fragrant with cardamon and extremely moreish to the point where I found myself licking the carton clean.
So show up at lunch or it’s BYOB for dinner and support this fledgling café, because if it is cooking up these tastes already, I’m salivating at its future flavours.
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