For a decade now, Hackney’s Broadway Market, which stretches from London Fields to the Regent’s Canal, has been a catwalk for the cool, a row of old newsagents, pie and mash cafes, fruit and veg shops interspersed with new-wave cafes, first-wave sourdough pizzerias, hair salons, fishmongers, trendy pubs, and places selling ornaments, expensive magazines, and nice smelling items. It has gone from being — in 2008 — a kind of unobvious hangout for the hippest early adopters to a perfectly plausible location for Aesop and Haeckels boutiques in 2022. Still hip, but now dripping in money.
Similarly, its restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars — both those on Broadway Market itself and on its surrounding streets — have evolved too, and not necessarily along the same sometimes cynically commercial trajectory. Yes, the one pie and mash shop may now be boarded up into the declining history of an East End staple, but one of the city’s best Japanese restaurant groups has opened a location here; arguably the hottest opening of 2021 arrived; and not one but two of the standout pandemic success stories falls within a natural, if unscientific, catchment of this iconic Victorian market street.
Here’s Eater London’s selection of 15 places, winter 2023.
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