As many Greater Kenningtonains spend a few days working from home, we thought we would up our lunchtime review game by checking out Oval staple ‘Cable Café’ at the top of Brixton Rd. By all the brick a brac you might think you’ve stumbled into dear Aunt Flo’s house clearance after she refused to let anybody in for 40 years, but what you’re getting is a mighty fine and eclectic café.
The daytime trade consists primarily of people popping in for hot drinks and working on their laptops (menu below), and the atmosphere is laid back and quiet. We stopped in for lunch, and the specialty is the bang on trend sourdough toastie. Your scribe had it with tuna, and Karen from finance had hers with onions. The sourdough was crisp and with sharp and abundant cheese (£6.50) . These were accompanied by two homemade lemonades, one with rhubarb. Very tart and zingy. We also had our eyes on the homemade pastries, sharing boards, and smoothies.
What Cable does ingenuously is transform itself from a lunchtime sandwich/coffee bar to an evening cocktail and beer joint. The transition happens during the 3-5 happy hour when laptops and chargers give way to candles and, on Wednesday and Saturday live jazz. There is a full bar on hand (cocktails £9) in addition to wines both bottled and draft (they’re a thing). A good alternative to the at times chaotic pubs of Greater Kennington.
Cable Café is open from 9:30 to 23:00 (midnight weekends) and is even available to hire out for parties. We need to keep independent places like this or they may go the same way as Cable Bakery, which hs sadly gone to that big flour mill in the sky. More importantly, we need to keep it going to prevent it descending to the hellish netherworld that is the ‘bottomless drag brunch’. Because we’ve been there, dear reader, and it’s a very dark place.
