Our team

Peter and Kay Sinden
Owners

Catherine Sinden
General Manager

Theo Stokes
Head Chef

Lily Southin
Floor Manager

Phillip Olney
Bar Manager

“the traditional British kitchen is justly popular and capable of precise and delicate flavours”

I've heard it said that you can't make a restaurant without backers. Look about you, in any high street or parade of shops, at premises cloned and duplicated by big business and corporate players throughout the land, and you can be forgiven for thinking this maxim is surely true.

I beg to differ. Kay and I made our restaurant from scratch, without input from investors and bankers and their clipboard-wielding flunkies. Instead we did it all ourselves. Our motivation was passion for good food and wine in an elegant and agreeable setting. We collaborated with gifted artisans, craftsmen and technicians to make a characterful bar and restaurant in our own historic Wren-period building, the oldest in Spitalfields, spread over three floors with a fantastic modern kitchen purpose-built in a new basement. We trusted our own instincts and made something beautiful.

Restaurants evolved from coffee houses and taverns and first appeared in Paris in the eighteenth century in something like the form we now know. Bouillon, or meat broth, was first served there as a restorative (“restaurateur”). Eventually a variety of expertly prepared dishes were offered in elegant rooms supplemented by a fine cellar. The highly fashionable “Café Anglais” near Opéra, was a superlative and long-lived example, renowned as “lieu de rendez-vous pour tout Paris”. These attributes became the sine qua non fundamentals of a good restaurant, just as they are today. Sitting down to break bread together is as old as life itself. We’re privileged to have the opportunity of hosting such hospitality in London.

There is a further desideratum for any good restaurant. It is a meeting place, a hub, a vital aid to community cohesion. Our restaurant stands on a sort of promontory that looks out over one of London’s most iconic urban compositions: Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in its setting of Spitalfields Market. We feel ourselves at the heart of things here. We practise multi-tasking, and seek to make our business attractive to all. We are open early till late, serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between. Our origins as the Market Coffee House, first opening on 10 September 2001 (the day before 9/11, a day etched in all our memories), are still reflected in the high quality coffee and loose-leaf teas we serve from our pitch pine-panelled, informal bar area. Likewise our beers are a satisfying departure from the humdrum and everyday. We only stock the finest examples of small independent craft brewers in the UK, in addition to certain better quality and more sought-after imports from the Continent sourced by our beer merchant, James Clay.

We are especially proud of our wines. With our own import license, we ship (and sometimes go and fetch) some 10,000 bottles of French wine every year just for this restaurant. We avoid UK wine merchants. Over half the wine consumed in this country now is bulk wine, mass produced and shipped in vast containers to be bottled here in order to keep costs low. It is not conducive to an interesting or characterful product. We are proud to buy estate bottled wines from little independent (in the main) family producers who we regularly visit at their wineries. In this manner we know intimately each of our wines, their attributes and vintages, and can vouch for their quality.

Our restaurant has many interesting and attractive spaces, though not so many as the old Café Anglais, with its 22 private rooms and lounges! Our ground floor dining room, with booths and oak-panelled walls, is supplemented by a large, open dining area on the first floor, which is popular with bigger groups for both sit-down dining and canapé receptions. Our jewel in the crown is the private room. Our building is listed for this room’s floor to ceiling, raised and fielded panelling dating from 1670. A George III mahogany table seats 16, and an open fire is sometimes lit in winter. We make no supplementary charge to hire this space.

We operate a serious and ambitious kitchen. We proceed on the basis that the traditional British kitchen is justly popular and capable of precise and delicate flavours. Its fall from grace in more modern times is the consequence of a lamentable absence of formerly commonplace skills among professional chefs. But a renaissance in British cooking is underway, and people are beginning to notice. We like grilled and roasted meats supplied from a livestock farmer in Sussex, vegetables in season from the London markets, fresh fish, oysters and seafood delivered daily for specials from our South Coast supplier with his own day boats, English puddings and game. We use bones for stock, the base for sauces which are fundamental to superior cooking in any serious restaurant. We have a culture of knowledge, skill and integrity in our kitchen, cooking always and only from fresh ingredients. This is sadly becoming less and less evident in the world today.

So that is our restaurant, in a little more than the 500 words my daughter, who is compiling this website, set as a limit. Apologies for my prolixity, but my heart is full here, and it takes me some effort to contain it.

Do please come and visit us.

Peter Sinden