Saturday 3 December 2011

The Long Table

There's been a lot of hype about The Long Table since the massive queues spread word like wild-fire that this is THE place to be on a Friday night in London.  The Street Food craze is just starting to take off in London and The Long Table is nurturing the concept in the best of ways.  Held in a disused parking lot up in the "Hipster" north of London, some of the coolest/tastiest vendors have joined together to create this awesome hang-out.  Live music (including funky strings), local beers and cocktails (with bubbles!), big open bonfires to keep everyone warm and last but not least, Long Tables to sit at to soak it all in.

I'd read that we need to be there by 6.30pm if we had any chance of getting in without queueing - we arrived at 6.20pm and turns out we were a bit late, the queue was already snaking down the lane and around the corner.  Turns out it opened a bit late, so once we moved, we were in pretty quickly.  (However, I can't say the same for the even longer queue that was still there when we left 2 hours later!)

We walked straight into the queue (yes, there's still lots of queueing once inside), for a Yum Bun - a steamed bun stuffed with pork belly, cucumber and hoisin (a cross between duck pancakes and pork buns), and vegetarian option for Ben using mushroom.  We both agreed these were amazing and almost walked straight back to the end of the queue for seconds.

BUT we forced ourselves to keep exploring - we munched on Caribbean vegetable pancakes (OMG, the surprise of the night, tasted a bit like a flat spring roll - delish!), Shoo Foo Doh (japanese pancake), Meatballs from my beloved The Bowler (who's hopefully going to grace us with a vegetarian option in 2012!), and finished off with a slice of fresh-out-of-the-portable-wood-oven Pizza slice.

Honestly, I could have stayed all night, but my stomach was begging otherwise and we had friends to meet, so we reluctantly left the cool kids to their evening and left hoping with all hope that The Long Table becomes a permanent event long after it's expected xmas final date.

ps - please excuse the terribly grainy, night-time, iPhone photo's...














4 comments:

  1. Dalston is East London, not North. Deary me...

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  2. Thanks for the comment Anonymous - for anyone wanting to know exactly where Dalston is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalston (wiki refers to it as North-East London)

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  3. Didn't mean to be pedantic - was typing in a rush, the "deary me" was was meant to be a preface to "bloody queues!"

    We tried almost everything on the night - highlights were most definitely the hotdogs and YumBuns!

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  4. That looks so fun and the food sounds amazing!

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