Somers Town Coffee House, Chalton St February 27, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Cafes & Restaurants, Camden , trackbackI live in the part of Camden that’s called Somers Town. Its a tiny district of about one square kilometer, tucked in between Euston, Kings Cross and Crowndale Rd. Established in the 1820s, its always been thoroughly working class. Most of it is owned by Camden council, with a mix of tenants, leaseholders and housing association tenants. There’s not much gentrification, but nice flats are not cheap and many of us hold high hopes for the Kings Cross redevelopment. Some tenants have done well on the right to buy and sold on to people like me, keen to live close to town. There’s a friendly, well-established community which is very mixed but manages to muddle along together in a way that makes it a good place to live.
Most of the pubs are ordinary blokey and smoke filled places, not really my scene, so I was rather surprised when my sister suggested we meet at the Somers Town Coffee House for dinner, which she informed me had been converted to a gastro-pub. The last time I poked my head in there it was smokey, with a few old blokes sitting around nursing pints. Interesting old building, but probably not somewhere I’d spend much time.
Expecting ham and eggs, I turned up to find an elegantly refurbished French bistro, owned by two French sisters, with creme brulee on the menu, and a decent wine list. The food was good, though not extraordinary, but the ambience seemed pleasant and it strikes me as the kind of place I could happily spend time in. My sister had a pear and goats cheese tart (very good) followed by a plate of mussels (okay), and I had a steak with veges which was good enough. We finished off with an unusual lavender creme brulee - a little runny, but well torched.
What I find hard to understand is why. There are some excellent gastro-pubs up in Camden Town, and this place is a dark two hundred metres from a clutch of restaurants on the corner of Euston Rd. A quick google reveals that the new ownership is not without controversy, and regulars are unhappy because a number of them have been barred from it for trivial reasons. The new owners wouldn’t discuss this with the Camden New Journal.
I’m surely one of the people the new owners are trying to attract, but I don’t want that to be at the expense of those who’ve been here a lot longer than I have. The mix attracted me here (yes, alright, along with the relatively cheap prices and transport links), and I’d hate to see it turn into a yuppie-ville, though at the same time it would be good to have a pub that I feel comfortable in. If regular locals could keep on nursing their pints while I have a glass of NZ Sauvignon Blanc, wouldn’t we all be happier?? Tomorrow, at the tenants association meeting, I’ll see if anyone knows any more about this.
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If the Coffee House has been gentrified, that is surely the first time there has been any ‘mixing’ of classes in Somers Town! As you rightly point out, it has been ‘thoroughly working class’ for the best part of 200 years. That men in suits now dine at the Coffee House does not mean that there is nowhere for the working man to go. I could ring off a list as long as Chalton Street of all the ‘old man pubs’ around this area. Quite frankly, the Coffee House could be described as ‘a diamond in a sea of ____’.
In our immediate vicinity there is the Cock and the Eastnor, and, to my utter dismay, the Neptune as well.
If the Coffee House is a ‘diamond in a sea of ____’, then the Neptune, our long suffering local, can be described as a ‘____ covered diamond’. Personally, I would love to see this diamond cleaned up and sparkling again, and the punters of the Neptune put out onto the street. To be honest, it wouldn’t make much difference to them because they’re always out on the street, taking a lead role in the theatre of dysfunction that plays out before Cranleigh Street’s unwilling eyes, be it love triangles between single mums, complicated by their mutual chants of ’shlag!!’, or unshirted youths in baseball caps…