Rather than feeling like a traditional “festival”, the whole thing lands more like Hackney doing what Hackney does best: excellent food, excellent restaurants, and just enough accessibility to make spontaneity viable again.
Take Acme Fire Cult, for instance. Already known for its fire-led cooking and Dalston cool-kid credentials, the restaurant has casually reinvented itself for winter as a curry house – because why merely adjust a menu when you can shift an entire mood? The result is a line-up of bold, warming dishes that feel tailor-made for February survival: Lamb chop railway curry, Pigs head vindaloo, Vadouvan monkfish skewers, Venison sheekh kebab. Food designed less for restraint and more for leaning in.
Elsewhere, the festival provides the perfect nudge toward those restaurants you’ve been “meaning to try” for months. Corrochio’s, Dalston’s cult Mexican taqueria and cocktail bar, is one such example. A place that exists somewhere between neighbourhood favourite and Instagram folklore, its Vampiros, tacos, and unapologetically punchy margaritas have earned a following that borders on evangelical. Add a basement agave bar into the mix, and suddenly dinner has a habit of becoming a night out.
Then there’s Big Night, currently dialling up the energy with Chef Joe Lippman’s limited residency. Here, the menu leans refined but unfussy – Porthilly oysters with blue rhubarb, wild bass crudo, octopus carpaccio – balanced against fire-cooked favourites that anchor the whole thing firmly in pleasure territory. It’s the sort of cooking that feels considered without ever feeling precious, which is a balance Hackney tends to appreciate.
And that’s before you even glance at the wider line-up. From Dalston institution Mangal 2, to neighbourhood stalwarts like Albers, wine-led favourites Sune, dumpling specialists My Neighbours the Dumplings, pasta purists Tom’s Pasta, Malaysian flavour merchants, Mambow and British dining rooms Marksman Public House, the festival reads less like a niche event and more like a borough-wide reminder of just how absurdly well Hackney eats.
Perhaps the most appealing part, though, is the lack of fuss. No awkward vouchers, no complicated bookings, no ceremonial hoop-jumping.
Download EatClub, see what’s available, walk in, pay via the app. Done.