Easygoing Borough Market Restaurant Elliot’s Opens in Hackney

Easygoing Borough Market restaurant Elliot’s has opened a second site in Hackney, at 120 — 123 Mare Street. It takes over the site formerly earmarked by baker Claire Ptak for her esteemed operation, Violet, which had to cancel its plans because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

For now, the new restaurant is a takeaway pizza operation, using a wood oven to throw out pies topped with taleggio, sage, and brown butter; beef ragù, pancetta, and parmesan; and Palourde clams with yellow tomatoes and garlic. A small range of antipasti, two desserts — including tiramisû, natch — and natural wines round out the offer, which will broaden its horizons like its Borough Market sibling when restaurants are allowed to emerge from tier three coronavirus restrictions — and when the build is finished, in 2021.

Elliot’s opened in 2011, with chef Brett Redman and Rob Green, who is also behind Pavilion’s range of bakeries and cafes. It was originally designed as a Borough Market, market restaurant — at a time when its surrounding competitors weren’t known for using the produce that in turn surrounded them. Before that, Redman had opened an identically named cafe in Bethnal Green, with the move to east London heralded as “coming back to where it all began.”