“Let me start by telling you what we haven’t got.” It’s the Tuesday after the bank holiday and the smiling server reels off two thirds of the menu. There’s no butter chicken. No Szechuan beef. And no egg fried rice mayo. My hopes are — briefly — dashed.
Welcome to Earl’s, the latest incumbent of the Cann Hall Road skate park cafe in E11. It’s the second opening from Tim Vincent, enterprising owner of Leytonstone’s Back To Ours, the popular artisan cafe tucked away in Good Shepherd Studios. While that’s a somewhat scenic spot, its terrace overlooking a blossoming garden and pond, this new site is altogether more urban.
Within its fox-red interior (very apt), an open kitchen takes centre stage. This is where head chef Wahab is “slinging sandwiches of substance, made with very carefully selected produce,” Tim told me before the launch.
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Last week, after glimpsing the intriguing menu, I predicted that Earl’s would become “the area’s hottest eating spot within days”. And that already appears to be the case. Wahab divulges that they shifted 200 sandwiches in the first hour on Saturday, the queue stretching right out onto the pavement. And then they did another 250 on Sunday, and a further 200 on Monday, selling out each day.
So what’s all the fuss about? The cafe’s tagline is “sandwiches of distinction” — instantly, of course, creating a pressure to deliver. But the elevated menu truly is a delight to read, from spice poached chicken breast with ghee mayo and kachi-cumber to meat-feast The Earl, stuffed with coppa, mortadella, ham and lardo. Weekly specials include tempura fish fingers on “fry-days” and a bloody mary breakfast sando at the weekend. Mouth watering yet?
From the four remaining options (out of nine) including BLT and an “anti antipasto” roast veg and tapenade number — I settle on the Aubergine Parma-Ganoush. As it’s vegan, I think to myself, this will be the ultimate test on whether Earl’s can deliver flavour to a hungry flexitarian like me.
I needn’t have worried: as you can see above, it proves one hell of a tower. Laying the plate on the table, Wahab talks me through each ingredient — the focaccia is from Hackney’s Snapery East, incidentally — as he did at Back To Ours (see the recent review here).
Alongside fat slices of roasted aubergine, there’s a rich smear of tahini, crunchy fattoush, crispy fried aubergine, herbs, tangy sumac and paprika oil, not to mention an unctuous tomato sauce, oozing out of the focaccia. There may have been a sprinkling of the titular “parma” (parmesan), but if there was, I missed it. No matter: it’s as texturally interesting as it is layered with flavour, each bite delivering its own hit — although too eagerly I sink my teeth into the piping hot aubergine, which nearly burns my mouth.
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If you’re not so keen on public displays of glistening, oily fingers, the other option is to gobble it in the privacy of your own home. But one thing’s for sure: this mighty £7 sarnie (they’re all priced between £7-11) suggests that the queue for Earl’s is only just beginning. @thisisearls
This is a much shorter version of the full story first published last month on Substack. To read it and loads more like it, delivered every week to your inbox, and long before the stories appear online here, please subscribe to the newsletter. In doing so you help to sustain Leytonstoner’s existence. Only one in ten stories is now published on this site and every story we publish goes on the newsletter first here.
