Nine months ago, the City of London Corporation told us that our challenge to a decision that threatened to put our company out of business was ‘hopeless’ and legally unarguable. So we have been pinching ourselves at the news that a High Court judge has ruled that four out of our five grounds for a legal claim are permissible. It is full steam ahead for a Judicial Review of the decision to award the three North London park cafés we have built up over more than eight years — at Queens Park, Parliament Hill Fields Lido, and Highgate Wood — to the Australian-themed Daisy Green café chain.

To jump this hurdle is a huge victory for our colleagues and their achievement in making the threatened cafés places that north Londoners wanted to defend, with a 25,000-signature petition and contributions to our legal fund. It is also a big tribute to the lawyers who rallied to help us, some taking minimal fees or working pro bono: Leigh Day solicitors in particular, and barristers Remi Reichhold and Gretta Schumacher.

Courts don’t decide whether public bodies make the ‘right’ decision. Instead, they rule narrowly on whether the rules have been followed. But outside a courtroom the big picture also counts.

In the case of the Heath and other park cafés, the City of London insists that major funding is required. ‘Bring in the grown-ups and let’s talk figures,’ sounds like common sense. It’s true the cafés need investment. But the Corporation is responsible for their structure; the money is for fit out. The assumption is the more spending the better, and, again, this might look like common sense. But there are caveats.

First, no one ploughs in money on a scale that dwarfs any corresponding increase in income unless the real aim is not to run a café but to engage in property speculation. Community assets should stay in the community, not become targets for investors. Just look at the water industry or the railway companies.

Also, money people are not always the best judges of public taste. The Medici were bankers, and cultivated ones: they spent their wealth on art that millions still travel to see in Florence. The City of London’s own 19th-century worthies were also rich, but only tiny fraction of tourists who visit the Uffizi will seek out the Guildhall Gallery to see what they chose to fund: works like (see below) The Lord Mayor Presenting An Address to His Majesty Louis-Philippe at Windsor Castle, Octover 1844 (apologies to Atkinson Grimshaw, James Tissot, John Millais, and some gems among the dross).

Up and down the country there is a ferment of interest in raising money locally to keep local assets in the hands of the community. It’s not too late for the Corporation to look up from their spreadsheets and consider alternatives to a world of financialisation and mutual back scratching.

We are ready to contribute time, to raise cash, and to build bridges.

During the summer, one of our colleagues was putting her own distinct spin on the business of international import-export.

A great French manufacturing name, Duralex—makers of the classic toughened glasses, bowls, and plates that defined 20th-century bistro life—found itself on the brink of bankruptcy and was clearing unique stock at distress prices. She grabbed everything she could lay her hands on to bring back to the Lido. To save time, the first batch arrived not via a commercial shipping broker, but packed tightly into hand luggage on a Ryanair flight out of Lyon. Under the intense pressure to save every available cubic centimeter, she very nearly boarded the plane without the small personal bag containing her passport…

Happily, all ended well. The passport was retrieved, security was navigated, and this unique tableware is now on sale at the Parliament Hill Lido Café (with further stock arriving as more conventional shipping routes are sorted out).

At a time when British high streets feel increasingly homogenized, we take a quiet pride in offering a somewhat more unpredictable retail experience. Where else, for instance, could you find authentic personalized Breton pottery bowls painted not with Michael, Andrew, or Katie, but with delightfully left-field names? (They were, in truth, hand-inscribed for exceptionally generous supporters of our legal campaign who vanished into the night before picking up their prizes—leaving us with a magnificent collection of uncollected homages).

Alongside the Duralex and the bowls, you will find pure essential oil of lavender at a very fair price, alongside heavy, fragrant blocks of traditional handmade Marseille soap.

It sounds like a completely random selection, but the retail corner of our cafés has proven surprisingly popular—stuff simply flies off the shelves. Inspired by our customers’ enthusiasm, we are doubling down. Our lodestar in this venture is one of Europe’s great retail shrines: France’s oldest and quirkiest hardware store, Maison Empéreur in Marseille. While standard retail chain models struggle, Maison Empéreur’s crammed aisles remain bustling, and they have recently taken their vast catalog online to cope with global demand.

With autumn moving in and Christmas on the horizon, we are doing exactly the same.

When you look at this picture (it is a close-up of some Lebanese turnip pickle) do you think ‘delicious’ or ‘that looks a bit dodgy — I wonder how they got that chemical-looking pink colour). Quite soon after we started Hoxton Beach we came down on the sceptical side and decided that rather than take chances we’d make our own turnip pickle — part of the formula for the classic Levantine falafel wrap.

Historically the pink colour comes from marinating the turnips with some beetroot in dilute vinegar (the brand we’ve always used has been Aspall’s Organic Cyder Vinegar, which was, as it happens, the first product ever to be endorsed by the Soil Association when this body became a certifying body in 1973. We’ve always been proud of this point of difference. In fact when we were trying to persuade Camden Council’s Markets Department a few years ago that we were different from most falafel outfits we brought samples of our turnip pickle to a meeting in the civic centre and unfortunately spilt the pink juice everywhere. At the time we thought making our own pickle was a nice extra touch. Only this week did we catch up with the news that by doing so we had been protecting our customer from a potential health hazard. In 2017 Lebanese Food Safety inspectors tested the luridly coloured pickles and found that every single sample contained ‘catastrophic’ levels of a banned substance, according to a report in the Saudi daily al-Sharq al-Awsat. Rhodamine B is a dye used for leather and plastic, but isn’t cleared for food use and is a suspected carginogen. Since then the Lebanese producers are reported to have got their act together, and the UK authorities have also also done spot check to make sure imported pickles are either coloured with beetroot or with approved E numbers. Last year we were getting a proportion of our turnips direct from a grower in Kent. This story has given us even more of an appetite for knowing the precise origin of everything we sell.

If you have a quince tree in North London you get used to people helping themselves to the fruit. They think they’re pears and they will have a disappointment when they find they don’t ripen or soften but stay hard, grainy and inedibly sour. The point of quinces is their flavour; when they’re cooking they perfume the air, they are the classic fruit in Moroccan lamb tagines and adding even a little transforms any cooked apple dish.

They arrive in greengrocers and fruiterers about now, but they are hardly affordable — as much as £2 for a big Turkish quince. For some years we have been planting trees whenever possible — from Amersham to Dalston — and the payoff is being able to use them in ways that would normally be uneconomic, from stewed in honey syrup for breakfast with muesli and sheeps yogurt to making quince jelly and jam. We would also like to make the delicious quince cheese or paste called Membrillo, but it is literally a safety hazard, exploding as it boils throwing blobs of scalding material around the kitchen like a fragmentation weapon.

There are recipes for quince jam but they mostly don’t work. The problem is that if you make it like a normal jam, combining cut up pieces of quince with water, sugar and lemon juice, the quince flesh will dissolve and produce a less good version of membrillo (you get membrillo by carrying on cooking until all the water has been driven off). Or you can make a syrup and add quince pieces to it. But you then lose control of the process; the raw quince pieces will shed liquid into the syrup and it won’t set.

Our solution is to make a syrup using the skin and cores of the quinces. Meanwhile we cook the pieces of quince till they are just soft, then put them in the boiling syrup. The quince pieces will keep their shape, being preserved in the syrup, but being already softened they won’t go rock hard. Tiptree sell a quince jam quite like ours, so they must be using a similar technique, but it doesn’t seem to appear in any written recipes.

Something you quickly learn in the hospitality business is that cooks and chefs have quite different skills. You can be a gifted cook but have no idea how to run a professional kitchen. Conversely, there are plenty of chefs who can, at best, follow an assembly instruction sheet, but don’t have a clue about real cooking.

We are very lucky to have people on our team with the sixth sense that makes dishes work. This isn’t about ‘little touches’ or far-fetched, trendy ingredients. It’s about seemingly simple things: how you cut an onion; how slowly you sweat those onions (the foundational starting point for so many cultures); making a perfect hard-boiled egg—just set and rich orange in the middle, never pale or chalky; or getting jams and preserves to set without being cloyingly sweet.

True cooks are so rare today that it has become an open secret in France that a vast number of high-street bistros no longer do any real cooking—instead buying in pre-assembled, vacuum-packed menus from industrial catering suppliers. The acid test for any kitchen today is whether, alongside standard options like a croque monsieur, they offer a genuine plat du jour made entirely from scratch.

We are proud to pass that test every day.

Being in London, we draw on a rich tapestry of nationalities to work with cooks who know intuitively what a Provençal daube, a Moroccan tagine, or a Southeast Asian laksa should actually taste like. It is reminiscent of Robert Carrier’s grand 1960s vision in Great Dishes of the World—only made with lived heritage and memory rather than pulled from a recipe book.

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