Review | Red Nails and Teacups

I’ve toyed long and hard with a preamble for this post. I’ve written three, on various emails (all to myself: we will gloss over this rather weird drafting process) and at various times (bleary eyed on the train to work; drunk on the train home; in my head) and it’s just not coming. So rather than force it, I propose this: I’ll just get on the task in hand. Which. more precisely, is reviewing Speakeasy Espresso and Brew Bar, one of London’s hot new coffee shops.

It may have bypassed you (no biggie) but these hot new coffee shops are popping out of the snow like daisies. Prufrock Coffee opened earlier this year to great fanfare – Gwilym Davies, who runs it, is an ex-World Champion barista – and further up Leather Lane is the marvellously-named Department of Coffee and Social Affairs. Speakeasy is in excellent local company too: north of Oxford Street is Kaffeine and Store Street Espresso – spitting distance from where I work on the Tottenham Court Road – does some of the greatest flat whites you will ever, ever order this side of the equator. The bar has certainly been set high, but as yet, the market doesn’t seem to be saturated – Speakeasy opened only four weeks ago and seems to be doing a roaring trade.

I can see why (I loved it). Surprisingly spacious for a place off Carnaby Street, slightly Scandi, and entirely peaceful, the place was to iPad-wielding, bespectacled hipsters what Wembley surely is to football fans and came complete with tattooed baristas and kids with neon trainers, perhaps to prove that you could escape the claustrophobic crush of people milling around Oxford Circus.

We headed downstairs to the brew bar for a pour-over which we were taught to do ourselves, in what must be one of the greatest marketing tricks a good coffee shop has ever worked. Though our attempt was pronounced a little too acidic it still made for a great cup of coffee – and in a second, brilliant marketing move we were made a fresh pot to enjoy. There was no end of swanky, perspex equipment on show (I’ll say it now: I’m a fiend for perspex utensils) and the food – though I idiotically didn’t wrap my face round one of their homemade brownies – looked delicious. The general hubbub of dimmed voices only added to the easy friendliness of the place. I’ll be heading back sharpish.

{Upstairs counter and takeaway bar}