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Modern Hackney Wick has a working overground station, several reformer pilates studios and, since the middle of last year, a new-build courtyard where Inis, an Irish-influenced bistro, serves thick chunks of Guinness cake and bowls of potato scallops with dainty silver jugs of curry sauce. Eat at Inis, then walk back via the artisan fromagerie and the padel court.
The Wick was not always thus, especially for diners. Those who knew the place in the noughties, before its decimation and reconstruction for the 2012 London Olympics, may well lament those bygone days. At one point circa 2005, Forman’s fish restaurant, which boasted a “view of the canal”, was one of the – cough – sole options round these parts. Back then, the canal, where these days young things frolic, was a swamp of shopping trolleys and sad-looking swans, and your salmon en croute might be accompanied by the spectacle of dehydrated ravers trying to find home two days after Friday’s squat party. Gentrification has come at a price, though, with stratospheric rents, in particular, but there are now also street art tours, sourdough pizzas and a great many places where you can buy terrible pre-mixed cocktails.
None of that is anything quite like Inis, which is open for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner, and owned and run by Lynsey Coughlan, formerly of the Ginger Pig butcher, and ex-art director Lindsay Lewis, alongside head chef Craig Johnson. Inis, from the offset, seemed determined to treat its clientele as grownups and its postcode as a proper community in need of a nice, neighbourhood restaurant. The place clearly wanted to be somewhere to come and come again, and to take your parents to whenever they were in town. There’s alfresco dining, though that’s possibly advisable only if you’re keen on Lime bikes, joggers and enjoying the cleaner, fresher canal. Oh, and importantly, especially if, like me, you only really like five people and two of those are Irish wolfhounds, it’s dog-friendly, too.
Inis is Irish in spirit, but it isn’t Irish-themed. Yes, you can expect Guinness on draft, of course, and Irish breads all rich with treacle and rye, oysters from the west coast of Ireland, Sunday roasts and mince on toast. Irish people who miss their mother’s cooking might go for the house-glazed ham with coleslaw, the Ogleshield cheese pastries or the chicken fillet rolls inspired by days frittered away on Pearse Street in Dublin. At night, however, the dinner menu reaches for deliciously lofty moments when rare duck and cucumber meet tahini and sweet, punchy hoisin, when a tranche of Cornish turbot comes festooned with sea vegetables, when elegant house martinis match with delicate watermelon salads, and when hunks of rare onglet come piled with excellent, al dente bobby beans and assertive homemade horseradish.
The style is fresh, hyper-seasonal and absolutely homemade. It’s this that draws me back here time and again, the from-scratch element of the cakes and breads, in particular, because that’s as rare as hen’s teeth in British casual dining. On my first visit to Inis in its opening weeks, I popped by for a mid-morning coffee and maybe some soda bread with raspberry jam, and perhaps even a bowl of hot smoked trout on new potatoes, but I was immediately seduced by a fearsome and glistening lump of fine-looking Guinness cake that seemed to wink at me from under its glass cloche. “Is it freshly made?” I asked Coughlan. She assured me that chef had only recently tipped this majestic beauty out of its tin, and that it would be on that evening’s dinner menu and served with custard. At that exact point, my love affair with Inis was born.
Since then, the place has gone from strength to strength, serving fantastic fresh potato farls at breakfast with pots of strong tea, and good, wobbly french toast, but in some ways Inis is just as cheffy as fellow local canal-side dining spot Cafe Cecilia, where it’s pretty much impossible to get a table these days. It is a little patch of sanity in a postcode that, despite the constant hammering and cement-flinging, will never truly feel finished or functional. The welcome is always warm and the food reliably wonderful. Yes, it might take you three or four tries to find it, and your GPS might ask you to wade through the canal and walk through Westfield Stratford to get there. And, yes, it will be at least half-filled by Hackney Wick people with perplexing hairstyles and sore-looking piercings. But, as far as gentrification goes, this slice of it comes laced with Guinness and has a thick layer of cream cheese icing. And that’s really as good as it gets.
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Inis 13 Rookwood Way, Fish Island, London E3, 07850 400920. Open Weds 8am-3pm, Thurs & Fri 8am-11pm, Sat 8-11.30am & 1-11pm, Sun 8-11.30am & 1-6pm. Lunch from £9.50-plus, dinner from about £40 a head for three courses, all plus drinks and service
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The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 2 September – listen to it here.
