This week’s review (the first for over a month which I have not begun by grumbling that I have no kitchen at the moment) is of a restaurant in Hackney. I do not know that I have ever reviewed in Hackney before. Possibly once or twice, but nothing that sticks in the mind.

I do not go to Hackney much. I have no call to. I live in North London and visit the rest of the city only for specific reasons: I go to Central London for work, for example, West London for fun, and South London if I’m on the way to France. But what is east? The docks, I suppose. But I was never much of a one for boats.

I do frequently encounter people who live in Hackney, though. You can tell who they are because Hackney is all they ever talk about. They climb off their bicycle (painted in anti-theft paint), curse all car drivers, curse centralised government, curse Margaret Thatcher (even 20 years on), roll a cigarette, flick a crumb of spelt from their raggy jumper, and then they say something about Hackney.

They’ll tell you how marvellous the restaurants are, for example, or the street life, cycle routes, urban music scene, affordable Victorian townhouses, or recycling and composting schemes. They might even boast that it is the murder capital of London. And then they tell you that the Underground will be extended there soon. And then, generally, they ask to borrow a tenner.

People from Hackney are always fiercely loyal to it. Loyal with that bulging-eyed positivity you see in people from Croxteth and Possil and Serbia. And I’m afraid I am generally wary of places about which the locals feel the need to be quite so loyal.

But an old friend suggested lunch at a place there called Little Georgia Café, where she promised hearty food served by a “severe Georgian beauty”, and, as I don’t have a kitchen and would otherwise have gone hungry, I thought what the hell.

I drove to Hackney on the first hot day of spring, and a haze hung over it so that it seemed another city altogether from the one I had driven out of 15 minutes before. It was all big, square, crumbly buildings, rubble, concrete and dust. The sort of place you’d expect to find Tim Sebastian. I took a wrong turn thanks to a slightly panicked Sat-Nav (who had never been so far out of her comfort zone) and ended up driving down a one-track, high-curbed lane between a housing estate and some sort of canal or sewer system.

There were not many cars around. Just a lot of young men on weeny stunt bicycles, riding with their knees round their ears, wearing three hoods over a baseball cap, and spitting a lot.

Sat-Nav said, in her usual calm voice: “After 100 metres, turn around. Go home. There is nothing for you here.” I turned the car stereo to Radio 3, to try to calm her (and myself) with a bit of Handel, and pressed on.

I arrived at a place called Broadway Market, where I had been instructed to wait for my lunch guest, and parked up. I locked Sat-Nav in the glovebox along with her sticky window-mount, 73p in small change I had in the drink holder, a roll of Sellotape, half a ring-bound A-Z from 1987 and two Biros. For all I knew such things could be traded for food in these parts, and might prove too tempting for passers-by to resist.

A sign said, “Pay at machine,” but it didn’t say which currency I would have to use, and I couldn’t find a machine. Had it been stolen?

To be fair, this “Broadway Market” didn’t look so bad. There was a grocer, a bookshop, coffee joints with people outside drinking cappuccinos, even one man in a tie. An oasis of bourgeois aspiration in a land that didn’t care. And then also a pie and mash shop – not for people actually to go into, but for people to say they live near, to complete the Ealing comedy caricature of a London community to which the street aspires.

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