Greedy Cow, Mile End

Yep, we’ve all overdone it. My birthday proceeded Christmas preceded skiing proceeded Jonah’s birthday, this weekend. It’s the final hurrah before we go back to eating brown rice and bortorlli beans and wearing hair shirts. Just kidding. I don’t do denial in general, although wheat has proved my nemesis, but I have been trying to reset the balance of the kids (and my) diet after a month and a half of excess and too many chicken nuggets a la ketchup.

It’s been a joyous time – my Facebook newsfeed proves it with a montage of photos of family feasts, glowing kiddies and a slightly more rounded jawline, but me being difficult, I’m uncomfortable with too much fun, and it’s with a degree of relief I can cast off the shackles of jollity and go back to the virtues of everyday life where I feel a bit sticky if I watch too much TV, don’t use my limbs as god intended and don’t start the day with a rousing shot of kefir. I know. I’m a right barrel of laughs, but that’s, ordinarily, how I like I like it.

But we still had the weekend to get through, and that meant more party food. Tom’s baking is the stuff of legends, so that’s at least two pats of butter and half a ton of sugar in cake alone to be distributed among us over the next few days, complete with pantones of royal icing in Minecraft green. And we’d eaten so many steak haches and fondue in the mountains in France, that it was with a degree of trepidation that on Friday, I was facing yet another burger at Jonah’s choice of birthday restaurant, Greedy Cow, up the road from us in Mile End.

Generally, it’s a popular choice amongst our offspring. We’ve celebrated at least two birthdays there, as well as enjoyed a couple of nights a deux without the smalls. It’s a moment’s walk from Mile End station, and as a local independent, it’s hard not to be in favour.

As its name suggests, the restaurants specialty is a wide range of burger products, with a range of classic patties served well done, regardless of how you choose to have them cooked, with some random meats available to the more adventurous – think kangaroo and ostrich. Personally, I prefer my meat on the bovine side, so ordinarily I go for a classic burger served bunless with cheese and avocado, which comes, in stark contrast to that served by our counterparts across the Channel where vegetables are largely illegal on a complimentary bed of greenery; but this time, well and truly steaked out, I went for chicken burger with halloumi, with truly epic onion rings on the side – it’s a thing of wonder to me how they get them so big and so round yet light and crispy.

As always the restaurant was pretty chilly – the door (which doesn’t seem to latch) opens straight into a small dining room that can get pretty crowded on weekends. We hadn’t booked, so we went early for a pre-Cubs supper at 5 p.m. but this meant we were seated in the unreserved section next to the bar, right in the draft’s slipstream. It meant my food, which had been sat under the hot lamps for a little while until it was served to us, (I could see into the kitchen from my seat) got cold pretty quickly. As always, though, the food was tasty and reasonably prompt. The kids had great value, crowd pleasing burgers and chips, which for £4.50 were as big as the adult burgers which, to Tom’s critical eye,  only differed in price and that they are served with an endive.

Poncy East London pop-up fetish burger fare this ain’t  – you’ll find no brioche buns or pulled pork slider here. But it’s good quality fun food, well presented and cooked to perfection – if slightly on the chilly side on this occasion for my liking. The kids washed theirs down with a homemade lemonade – a not so subtle attempt by me to introduce some vitamin c into their diets, and on any other occasion we would have got stuck into the pudding menu (on previous visits, the kids have been presented with lurid blue bubblegum ice cream as a freebie, which to my abject relief was not forthcoming last night. In any case, the boy, who’d been excited all day having been cruelly made to wait to open his presents till he got home from school, was finally feeling the pain from two weeks of s the straw that broke the camel’s back (also available as a burger I believe), and we forced him to walk it off back home, but didn’t make him go to cubs. After all, tomorrow, we had a party to organise, and cupboards stocked with crisps and sweets that I was ready to unleash on a bunch of nine years old boys and their hapless parents. Sometimes, a little reverse psychology does the trick on kids and I rather suspect that by Monday, the kids will be begging me for porridge, fruit and homemade stew. And I will be more than delighted to give it to them.cant fibre and a diet largely based around french fries.

This burger, it seemed was the straw that broke the camel’s (also available served on a bun, I believe) back, and we gently forced him to walk it off back home, but didn’t, in the end, make him go to Cubs. After all, we had a party to organise, and cupboards stocked with crisps and sweets to unleash on a bunch of nine years olds and their hapless parents. Sometimes, a little reverse psychology does the trick on kids and I rather suspect that by Monday, the kids will be begging me for porridge, fruit and homemade stew. And I will be more than delighted to give it to them.

But, for anyone who is in need of an antidote to dry January virtue and miserable weather, then Greedy Cow offers quality comfort food for a bargain, the option to try something a little different, and warm service. Especially if you go wearing a jumper.

 

Update – we went back in high summer as a treat after Jonah had blood tests for Celiac, ironically eating a bready bun with his kids’ burger and chips – probably for the last time unless they offer a gluten-free version. I, as usual, and now on GAPS, chose my usual breadless skinny, and an interesting dish of butter nut squash, Camembert, which Tom ate, and onions. Both were tasty, and served to us by the friendly owner guy. No blue ice cream for the kids this time  (although they both chose bubblegum flavour from the ice cream van the next day in retaliation – but as Jonah discovered he had bright green poo the next day, it’s fairly safe to say he won’t go there again.)

But as far as Greedy Cow is concerned, always good, always tasty. Still breezy with the door open (please get a curtain!)