Kahaila Café

135 Brick Lane

Tower Hamlets

E1 6SB

Tea & Oreo Cookie Cake: £6.50*

A big bank holiday shout out the Kahaila Café, Brick Lane, where I am currently writing and stealing their electricity for my own nefarious purposes (charging my laptop battery and updating Facebook with more pledges from my manifesto for when I finally rise to power). It is national Repeats-Of-Bond-From-The-Roger-Moore-Period Day, so I have chosen to meander around my spiritual home of the East End, home of Spitalfields market and £4 bowls of cereal and men growing beards as a full time occupation.

I do like a good slice of cake though, and a huge, wheel-shaped Oreo dessert sitting in a window is a beacon luring me over to the dark side. I also have unlimited Wi-Fi and a wall socket at my disposal, so all the elements are in place for me to set up an unofficial office / squat on the premises for the next few hours.

The cake is lovely. Moist and filling and served on a warm plate. Whether this is intentional or because they have been stacked next to the panini toaster I have no idea. I am slightly disappointed that for reasons I can only attribute to cost cutting I seem to have a third of a Oreo poking out of the Oreo icing, rather than the full, circular cookie I had expected to find nestled beneath the frosting  (Seriously, why would you cut a Oreo into sections? That someone somewhere is deliberately breaking biscuits up to deprive me of my rightful share is baffling and really rather sad).

I’m also maddened by the trend certain cafés have of removing the teabag from the pot before it has reached the table. Now, personally I like my tea so weak that it can barely climb up the spout, and I know that if I asked they would tell me it was to safeguard the integrity of the blend and allow the leaves to breathe or some such brewtopian bum-fodder, but I’m not so sure. A teabag allows scope for extra hot water. Extra hot water means people sitting longer to drink it. People sitting longer with the same drink means no room for new customers. No room for new customers means new customers walk out, and, as we all know, customers who walk out means DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Of course, cafés don’t tell you this is the reason. Naturally they want to promote the idea of a home away from home where you can lounge on Chesterfield sofas and use the internet and pretend you couldn’t have made the exact same thing at home for a faction of the price and needn’t have bothered to soil a new pair of pants in the process, but generally a tiny pot of tea or, in those most terrifying of cases, a single cup that is already lukewarm before you have added the milk, suggests lollygagging isn’t welcome. Plus – and I hate to point this out as you probably think you are doing your customers a favour – I don’t want people I don’t know anticipating how I should drink the beverage I have paid over the odds for because they have read what the brew time is on the packet and I – incompetent peasant that I am – would ruin the delicate flavour if I had to decide for myself when it was best to remove the teabag.

Plus they are selling socks in a can for £10. I don’t understand why the people of Brick Lane need their socks to come packaged in a can, but this is taking quirkiness a step too far into the realms of insanity.

Verdict: A few niggles but cannot deny the cake is amazing. Also, as I’ve been plugged into the mains for nearly two hours I’ve made back at least £0.12p powering my laptop. Result!

*Prices correct as of 2.5.16

Feel free to share stories, views and tips in the comments section below. Always fun to hear from fellow teaholics xx