Farringdon’s Quality Chop House Is Expanding With a New Café Next Door

Farringdon restaurant The Quality Chop House will extend its next-door retail space and include a new café when it opens in a fortnight’s time. The café will replace the wine shop currently operated by Noble Fine Liquor (the parent company of Clapton wine shop, bar and restaurant P. Franco.)

Since the end of last year, the retail space has been managed by Ballymaloe alumnus Joanna Hughes and chef Rich Bowman. The owners said that the extension of the retail arm is “really a case of not having enough space for what we currently sell or for the multitude of things that we are all excited about doing in the future.”

Will Lander, co-owner of Quality Chop House said:

“We’re very excited to say that our shop is expanding — both in space and product range — to include wine, cookbooks and a small cafe.

“Next door to our food shop, led by Joanna and her wonderful team you [will] find a small QCH cafe serving all our QCH shop products to sit down and enjoy. There’s papers and a selection of second hand food books to read while you make your way through your lunch and we’ll be serving Allpress coffee throughout the day too.”

Although the builders are currently working on readying the space, Lander said that the shop will sell “their favourite” food and wine books to take home. They will be “chosen by [co-owner] Daniel [Morgenthau], who can usually be found with his head in a cookbook when he’s not running our three restaurants [Portland and Clipstone are the other two in the group], it’s a very personal selection of things we love from our favourite writers.”

And despite the departure of Noble Fine Liquor, there will be wine, too. The selection will be curated by Erwan Gouiffes, head of wine at the restaurant, who used to run a wine shop in the Loire Valley. The promised list will be “a broad church, starting at £8.50 and going up to some very special stuff from Gouiffe’s spiritual home of Burgundy. He’s even discovered they make good wine outside France and there’s some of that too!” Lander said.

On Thursday and Friday mornings the shop is known best for its hot bacon sandwiches on fat-enriched rolls, while at weekday lunchtimes soups, salads, sausage rolls, and hot roast meat sandwiches are served, to take away. A range of cakes, tarts, brownies, biscuits and chocolates are also freshly baked each day.

As well as daily provisions and elite groceries, such as home-baked bread, cheese, milk, eggs, and seasonal fruit and vegetables and chocolates, the Quality Chop shop has an in-house butcher’s shop, selling rare breed meat, poultry and game. It also offers a selection of the dishes which are served in the restaurant to take away — including pies, terrines, mince on dripping toast, confit potatoes, whipped cod’s roe and chicken liver parfait.

It is widely considered to be one of the capital’s best food shops.