Eat Here: Heist Bank, PaddingtonBy Claudine Levy
Paddington isn’t exactly the go-to-destination of the season, but, if you know where to look you’ll find a treasure hidden away from the madding crowd.
Heist Bank: The Lowdown
In our fair city you can consider yourself lucky to find a coffee shop open past 7pm. We so severely lack any cafes, bars and restaurants with a slow day-to-night vibe. Heist Bank is the kind of place London needs – a place to bring your laptop to do some work, come for coffee with friends, read your book on one of the comfy sofas downstairs, shoot some pool, sing some karaoke with colleagues, and eat.
The space is vast, and you can easily spend hours hanging out in various corners, as we did. Starting off the evening with a glass of fruity Riesling on the terrace outside, we made our way indoors to the stripped-back warehouse-y restaurant. The place feels dynamic without being too loud about it – the walls are festooned with kooky art which wouldn’t look out of place in a New York loft, while random corners are plastered in graffiti clad concrete.
Heist Bank: The Food
It sells itself short by calling itself a pizza and beer place. Sure, the craft beers on tap are plentiful and delicious (12 local brews on draft) and the woodfire pizzas are far from your bog-standard Pizza Express jobby – with a plethora of unusual toppings like lamb, preserved lemon, feta and rocket and smoked sausage; hispi cabbage, chilli and smoked mozzarella… but Heist Bank is so much more.
The small plates. These little morsels are ludicrously good, and include cheese curd and olive doughnuts (everything you could hope for in a deep-fried melting salty carb), watermelon with labneh, Nduja croquettes (exploding with molten meaty béchamel). The larger plates are just as good, and we’d recommend opting for the lamb leg steak, with spring beans and peas and salsa verde.
For pud, all you need to know about is the chocolate and raspberry pizza – a dough base slathered with melted dark chocolate and studded with ruby bursts of sweet, tart raspberry.
Heist Bank: The Verdict
If you find yourself in Paddington, check out Heist Bank. Even if you’re not in Paddington, we’d suggest you seek out this delicious morsel.
