Rogues

If eccentric Hackney small plates restaurants and signposted orange wine jokes are your kind of schtick, then Rogues may just be the post-ironic dinner spot of your dreams. The Cambridge Heath restaurant specialises in an infuriating kind of self-appointed eccentricity—so-so small plates, cigarette-prioritising service, awkward jokes, the lot. The majority of the space is occupied by hanging lamps and people who worship Michelin for things other than tyres. Dates play with madeleines that are chocolate in name but not in flavour, while friends of the restaurant pitch up at the bar. The food falls into the relentless London speciality of ‘stuff’. Sink your fork into too-soft bobby beans in an XO mushroom sauce at the bar, fail to work out who is a customer and who is staff, and then consider wonderfully tender chicken in a beer butter sauce, or stick with sourdough and Bovril butter. None of it is bad, but nor is anything about the entire place particularly good.