EL&N Café

42 Hans Crescent

Knightsbridge

SW1X 0LZ

Tel: 020 7052 0130

https://www.elnlondon.co.uk/

Pink Ribbon Pasta with Crumbles Feta: £11.00*

Coconut & Guava Cake: £6.95*

Selection of EL&N London Tea: £3.50 per pot*

EL&N is a girly pink, Instagram hip café/restaurant/posing palace in the heart of over-privileged, overpriced and over-the-top Knightsbridge. Sound like your kind of place? No? Great, me neither. I am however very attracted to colourful things and always delude myself that if people are queuing for something then that something must be good. It isn’t possible that people would queue for nothing, or because they are prone to hype, or because they are just a little bit thick. Yet the people queuing before me in the line for EL&N looked like they had come for a purpose, even if that purpose had nothing to do with food and everything to do with social media acceptance. Queuing because you have a reason to be somewhere is one thing. Joining a queue for no other reason than you have seen lots of other people queuing makes you a pillock. I am that pillock, and that is a polite assessment.

In all fairness, there is nothing actually wrong with EL&N, improper use of an ampersand aside (though its name is quite annoying to type. Spelling error squiggly lines everywhere and autocorrect adamant that I should change it to read Helen. I don’t know any bloody Helen’s. Stop telling me to write what you think I should be writing! It’s like my GCSE coursework all over again. I’m sure Hamlet’s father would have called Gertrude ‘Gertie’ in their more intimate moments) Yes, there is a lengthy wait depending on when you choose to pay a visit (chucking out time at Harrods next door on a Sunday evening probably didn’t help in my case), and yes, there is a time limit of 45 minutes on how long they would like you to occupy a table (yeah, right. Like that was going to happen), but it is clean and the staff are friendly and the place is highly photogenic, even if it is in that predatory way cafés have when they aim to attract a snap-happy audience on the basis of floral decoration and reconditioned fairground tat. I eventually secured a table having decided in the long, long, painfully long wait to indulge in a plate of pink ribbon pasta and one of the cakes beginning to droop in the display window. If I’m going to stand for 40 minutes ducking out of the way of selfie-sticks I’m going to have a proper experience. A cup of tea and a lone macaron does not a lifetime of memories make.

The pasta – warm linguine ribbons in a red pepper and sundried tomato sauce – is not that ribbon-like and is a deep red colour rather than a pale baby pink, facts that could see the dish fall foul of the trade descriptions act. Pink pasta has more of a cosy, alliterative ring to it. Blood-red wormy things sprinkled with cheese doesn’t sound quite so appealing (to me that would be an intriguing challenge but I am very much in the minority on this one). The addition of the feta does give the dish a savoury kick, and once I have removed all the petals and flowery nonsense that contributes nothing to the taste the pasta proves to be well cooked, bursting with flavour and really rather lovely, proving that behind the garish exterior there is some substance to be found.

Then we come to the cake. It was not my first option. That would have been the hazelnut and chocolate roulade, but by 19:15 that was out of stock. Then I decided on a lemon curd and meringue cake, something else that had sold out just after they opened at 09:00. Then I settled on a carrot cake with tonka beans because I like saying tonka beans. You can probably guess where this is going so lets just say that after making further selections and timing how long it would take the waiter to tell me they were out of stock I decided to ask just what they DID have left, a question that saved a lot of time as they pretty much had bugger all, so we were able to race through the options very quickly. I opted for the coconut and guava cake, wondering if guava was a fruit or the techincal name for bat droppings. It sounded like something I’d heard whilst watching ‘Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls’, and you don’t want to be reminded of filthy flying weasels or a mechanical rhino giving birth to Jim Carrey whilst ordering a pudding (turns out I was confusing guava with guano, a mistake anyone couldn’t make). It is fine. Sitting out of a fridge under hot lights doesn’t generally enhance the taste or texture of anything, and there was a crunch to the cake that I suspect wouldn’t have been there when it was first put out on display, but the fruity tang of the guava and the sweet, creamy taste of the coconut made for a pleasant accompaniment to my pot of lukewarm, rather stewed tea.

All in all EL&N is a nice, perfectly decent café serving nice, perfectly decent if not especially exciting food. That its hype as a Insta-friendly hotspot exsist solely on the basis of image rather than a marginally above-average menu will be a source of irritation for true foodies. Yes, we want lovely and unusal surroundings, but we don’t want the neon lights or fizzy love heart set dressing to be the only thing we take away with us once the bill has been settled. Pictures are great, but a belly bulging with excellent food is a far more rewarding experience 🍨

*Prices/information correct as of January 2020

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