Jimi Famurewa reviews Bright: A surreal thrill offering purr-inducing delights

Resilience has been the watchword of hospitality businesses throughout this sun-warmed garbage heap of a year. But if there is one thing that the partially confined holding pattern of last month’s lockdown reaffirmed for me — beyond the feeling that complaining loudly about the crowds in a park is now a national pastime — then it is that, really, London diners have proved just as durable.  

Yes, emotionally battered restaurateurs have nobly weathered multiple storms; pivoting and improvising with a dogged fervour that makes you suspect their response to a building razed by a meteorite would be some festoon lights and an improvised farmer’s market in the rubble. But we customers have proved just as adaptable. We have joined shivering distanced queues for click and collect mulled wines, necked oysters on park benches like itinerant aristocrats and traipsed to hatch windows doling out hypey sandwiches; all the while finding solace and silliness in a temporary mode of guerrilla, windburnt dining.

Which, I think, just about brings us to Bright: the Hackney restaurant that, thanks in large part to an Instagram-approved squid sandwich, seems, in this age of tiers, to have unlocked a new level of creative purpose and vigour. Its recent hot takeaway offering of forward-thinking, well-travelled comfort dishes truly is — or was — a thing of profound, purr-inducing delight and enthralling, centre-of-the-universe excitement.

Part of this, you suspect, is the specific social microclimate of London Fields. I did not personally get to visit during the high summer days that reportedly turned this patch of E8 into a kind of excessively horny, piss-scented Sodom and Gomorrah. But even as I rolled up on a Saturday afternoon, in the depths of locked-down late November, it was a scarcely believable scene worthy of the Pyramid Stage. Bins overflowed with carry-out boxes, the queue for Sonora Taquería’s buzzy stall stretched halfway down the road, parents pushed prams while cradling brimming pints and, on Broadway Market, a busker was plugging a guitar into an amp, as bundled-up NYE-level crowds drifted past.  

‘It’s like a giant holding pen,’ said my mate Joe as we met, traded incredulous looks and made for the relative sanctuary of Bright’s (still pretty mobbed) loading bay pick-up area. Thankfully, the food (once ordered and unwrapped at a parkside ledge beside other hardy picnickers) offered its own instant, edible solace.  

My chicken ‘sando’ was, in fact, a sort of Zinger burger of the gods; the sweet, comforting cushion of a brioche bun, loaded with a clump of chilli-flecked buttermilk slaw and a hefty piece of drippingly moist battered bird. Pumpkin and barley miso broth — a glassy, dimly funky ornamental pond choked with greens, root vegetables and chilli — was a subtler but no less impressive beast. Climactic sesame seed panna cotta had supernatural creaminess. And the feted squid sandwich, which Joe took the lead on, was wholly worth the fuss: an overflowing calamari bap, judiciously spiked with aioli and lemon, and potent enough to momentarily turn frigid east London into a sweltering Spanish plaza.

As things stand, the plan is to pause this takeaway menu and shift focus to reopening Bright with the maximum amount of unfurloughed staff. It’s a noble, sensible move (and a reminder that social media frothing does not necessarily pay the bills). But you wouldn’t discount the possibility that these hit dishes may return in some form. And if not? Well, then those of us who experienced this surreal thrill can always say we were there; standing in the biting chill, gazing out at an inadvertent pandemic-era festival and savouring a foil-wrapped reminder that emergency measures can still yield something magnificent.