Category: Uncategorised

Special events this weekend June 5 and 6 at Queens Park and Highgate Wood cafés: there is jazz at Highgate on both days at 2pm, (with contributions welcomed for the Musicians’ Coronavirus Fund). On Saturday it’s Donovan Haffer and Harry Pearce and on Sunday Helena Kay (sax), Will Arnold-Forster (guitar) and Dario di’Lecce (double bass). On Sunday at Queens Park we are very pleased to have been invited to have a stall at the first Into The Park festival put on by Kilburn State of Mind. There will be music on the bandstand and we will be selling cakes, cherries, our own elderflower and some plants .

The Hoxton Beach café in Clissold Leisure Centre Stoke Newington had planned to reopen on Monday 31 May but this has been delayed again. The reason is delays in servicing equipment and upgrading electricity. At the moment children’s swimming classes are using the café space to assemble before lessons. Before Covid 19, which closed us for a year, we were basking in the praise of a rival leisure centre operator who called us the ‘best leisure centre café in Britain by a long way’. Post-Covid we expect to be less busy but will be working on eliminating queuing. This will be by going card only, with two card machines, and with the new coffee machine which with an extra group head (the bid the coffee comes out of) will mean people no longer have to wait for their Square Mile coffee.

Our falafel stall is back at Chatsworth Road sunday market and on other days we are as usual frying falafel outside our cafe and bakery Doree at 17 Chatsworth Road.

We will be trading for the last time at Nags Head Market this Friday March 26. This has been a hard decision to make given the support of some very loyal and appreciative customers. Also we pay tribute to our colleagues who have worked there and in particular Mohamed Bahraoui who built up a dedicated following and who is currently in Morocco following a family tragedy. We are still have a local presence with our cafés at Parliament Hill Lido and (soon reopening) at the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington. The closure is for business reasons, which means that it costs more to stay open than to close, but we think the model of a covered market stall is a good one and we hope to revive it in future.

During last year’s first lockdown we sold all the tomato seedlings we could grow so we are doing the same this spring. This year we will re-offer the same varieties that were a hit last time: noire de crimée (black krim), sungold, green zebra and pêche vilmorin plus this year red zebra and stupice. We will list them on the individual cafés sales websites as soon as they get a little bigger — probably the start of April