Fresh is a small coffee shop on 2 floors right next to Whitechapel station. They sell a range of paninis and sandwiches as well as pies supplied form a farm in Dorset and cakes from the Heavenly Cake company in Hertfordshire. The coffee is good quality and, at under £2 a cup this is somewhat cheaper than the high street chains such as Starbucks and Costa.
I visited this shop twice in the last week and there is building work going on to extend the shop and provide a take away hatch at the front. There was no seating down stairs temporarily while this work went on but staff were happy to help me find a seat upstairs.
The pies sold by this coffee shop are of good quality and they come with mash and salad. At the time of writing, they warm the pies up in the microwave but the owner tells me that a pie oven is definitely on the list of things to get. That’s a good job as microwave ovens ruin pastry, making it soggy and greasy. I have recently had a beetroot and goat’s cheese pie which was unusual. Beetroot becomes sweeter when it is hot and this relatively simple pie filling tasted delicious. There was also a sausage roll which did have rather a lot of pastry for my taste though there was plenty of filling.
I rather like the bars they sell which are supplied by Heavenly Cakes. These are biscuit based and usually have chocolate on them. I’ve tried the cappuccino bar and the lemon meringue bar which were both absolutely deliciously overindulgent. There’s also a good range of unusual bottled and canned juices and fizzy drinks such as San Pellegrino and Snapple (which is owned by doctor pepper in fact).
The food outlets in this particularly deprived area of town is increasingly uniform and supplied by Bangladeshi chicken shop merchants who tend to all run with particular fads and trends. We are currently seeing the demise of shops selling ice creams and smoothies, probably because loads of people set up shops selling the same things at the same time so they cancelled each other out. this shop is somewhat different however and it really is a gem among some distinctly unappetising food outlets.
I give an overall mark of 7 out of 10. This would be at least 8.5 if they had a decent pie oven rather than just a microwave.
