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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Rowan Moore's rating
Reader rating
Phone: 020 7287 7490
Open: Mon-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm.
Hearts and minds: Rosie Lovell, owner and chef of Rosie’s Deli Café
Rosie Lovell is the latest advocate of the Nigella Lawson school of cookery writing. Pert and flirty, her new book is called — nudge, nudge — Spooning With Rosie, and pursues the Nigella theme of food as seduction, food as sex.
Inside it has headings like Lovesome Tonight and Frozen Berries And Grapes To Fumble Over. It is liberally scattered with little hearts and references to Rosie eating oysters with “my boy”.
The recipes typically go for zing and tang — balsamic vinegar, chilli, cinammon, chorizo, lemon, cardamon — and for glamorised comfort food: cottage pie, “Mum’s piping popovers”, and “Far-out Eton mess”, which includes mangoes.
It draws on a full range of influences: Vietnamese, Moroccan, Spanish, Korean, Indian, Tuscan, Chinese and the nurseries of England. The book is based on her work at Rosie’s Deli Café, her five-year-old spot in the covered part of Brixton Market.
The market is as cities are supposed to be, and as they are reported in novels and plays but rarely are. People of multiple races, age, income and profession intersect and overlap without discrimination. There are musicians, housewives, students, hookers, people doing nothing in particular and old men in suits and hats who look like they’ve just got off the Windrush. There is noise, scent and gaudiness. There are plastic flowers for sale, pigs’ tails dyed lurid red, Obama posters, and a shop selling kitsch clocks with images of crosses on some and Mecca on others.
Not everyone is perfectly nice, and an oldish denizen of the market, his white chest hairs on display, pauses to hurl some not-quite-friendly banter at Rosie. But there is a tolerance and looseness to the place, also a slowness. In the milky light filtering from the glass roof, time moves differently. A communal universe is created like the street life in VS Naipaul’s stories of the Caribbean, or in Louis Aragon’s description of a Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant.
Rosie’s Deli Café is cute and busy-looking but neater and sprucer than most of its neighbours. There are more hearts, and postcards, and packages of paprika and torrone daintily arranged. The place is tiny, with a few tables inside and a few more out under the glass roof.
The menu is written up on a blackboard and offers “generous salads” such as capocollo and aubergine, or fennel, salami and artichoke hearts. There are taleggio and tomato ciabattas, and, for breakfast, sausage sandwiches and mackerel pâté on toast. For afters there is cake and Bakewell tart, which escapes its usual fate of death-by-industrial-jam.
Book and deli, but especially the book, are a teeny-weeny bit too winsome for my taste. I’d like less stuff about Rosie’s dates and mates and hangovers and dear sweet Granny, on my way to the recipes, and fewer of those bloody hearts. But the food is tasty and well done, without lifting itself above similar delis like Leila’s in Shoreditch. And the combination of nice food with the miraculous place that is Brixton Market means that, although this is far from my own stamping grounds, I’ll be back.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
