This is a restaurant review (you delightful perverts)

There’s a moment in Pretty Woman where Vivian and Richard are in the bath together (because let’s all, just for a moment, believe the lies peddled by ’90s films and the bubble bath barons, and pretend that being half-submerged in lukewarm water with another human being isn’t a faintly appalling and distressingly unhygienic proposition). Immersed in this broth of deception (just go with it), she informs him that her legs are 44 inches from hip to toe, with the takeaway being that he had 88 inches of therapy wrapped around him for the bargain price of three thousand dollars.

My legs are categorically not 44 inches from hip to toe. I’m not even convinced they’re 44 inches from hip to toe, across to other toe and up to hip again. I have also never bathed with Richard Gere, but that is a grievance to be aired another day. My point is that as someone who edges on Borrower proportions, stools — or in fact any kind of elevated seating device — are something of a foe. They don’t guarantee my non-attendance, I just try to warn dining companions that there may be rather more clambering, dangling and sliding than they might otherwise have anticipated. Or not.

This is a rather roundabout way of warning any acrophobic readers out there (hot tip: never Google ‘fear of stools’): Peg is full of them. Irredeemably and unavoidably so, and in fact with good reason, since the restaurant occupies what can only be described as a compact chevron of real estate on Hackney’s Morning Lane. You don’t need to be reigning Classic Tetris World Champion Joseph Saelee to know that in lean square footage situations such as this, space cannot be frittered away on anything so squat as a conventional chair.

I can’t deny that the stools, and the small plates format, and the economically worded pegboard menu, and the counters made from compressed recycled yoghurt pots, and the Farrow & Ball Elephant’s Breath walls (same colour as the website, for those keeping track), and the sustainable Who Gives A Crap loo roll in the bathrooms, are low-hanging fruit for anyone still bemoaning the proliferation of ‘hipster’ influences in London restaurants. And bemoan still they do. Side note: are we really still doing this? It’s been at least eight years since Peak Hipster, surely it’s time for us to collectively move on; to take the bull by the ironic horns and recognise that hipster-bashing is kind of done.

But here’s the thing: even if you wanted to hate Peg — if the glory of its Dalstonic mien is lost on you — I’m not sure you could. It would take a resolve of steel (or perhaps compressed recycled yoghurt pots) not to instantly fall just a little bit in love with this place. It’s something I realised almost the minute we walked in the door. We were early: embarrassingly, anxiously early. We live in a time of wildfire word of mouth buzz, no reservations policies and Brexit: of course we’re anxious. We were the kind of early where if it was a party you’d be greeted with the poorly disguised rictus of a host you suspected was faintly resentful of your punctuality (and you’d be right).

But it’s hard to maintain even a semblance of anxiety when you’re swept inside, installed at a table and furnished with a restorative glass of Claus Preisinger Kalkundkiesel before you can say “Well, October 31st is the new final cutoff date but who knows really…”. Our server was our esteemed confidante, our trusted advisor, soothing our jangled nerves with calmly spoken platitudes like “Well, if there’s five of you, you can probably just order everything. I can let the kitchen know what you’d need two of, so no one misses out,” and “This bottle’s almost finished. Would you like another of the same, or I can recommend another if you’d like to move on to something else?”. It was what I imagine it might be like to be hypnotised; or horse whispering, for jaded millennials. I would have handed her complete control of all my financial and personal affairs without a second thought. By this point, I’d even stopped worrying about the stools.

Anyway, order everything we did. The menu is Japanese influenced, executed with the light touch we’ve come to expect from the team behind Hackney favourites P. Franco, Bright and Noble Fine Liquor — and well priced, with plates ranging from around £4 to £9. A cabbage salad, unassuming in name and appearance, delivers the first hit of umami: it’s fresh, it’s crispy, it’s accompanied by a sesame dressing that we agreed we’d probably baptise our first born with. We settle on ordering two more portions.

The Agedashi tofu felt like an exercise in textural tension: the crispy/soft dichotomy is a familiar one in the tofu oeuvre, but this was something new entirely. Dense yet light, silky yet robust, it prompted a respectful hush to fall over our group as we pondered it. Then we ordered another round. Crab chawanmushi, a savoury egg custard, was subtle in the precise way you’d want it to be: mild, but not insipid. Hackney’s take on comfort food.

One benefit of small plates is that you can throw caution to the wind where a larger portion may give one pause, so it was game on with chicken hearts. Served pierced on a skewer (a recently single member of our party took a moment to rhapsodise on the symbolism), they were, we decided, smaller than we’d expected. Grilled to be slightly rare in the middle, they were intensely savoury without being overpowering. Chicken thighs come similarly cooked, teetering on the brink of pink in the middle, but distraction was immediate and complete thanks to a green chilli and jalapeño sauce (the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, and all that).

Our journey through the natural wine list was characterised by the scant heed for protocol that typifies the impulse drinker, jumping from the opening orange to an Alsatian red to a La Batossay white, before finishing with a yuzu sake to accompany a dessert of rhubarb and vanilla ice cream — I don’t regret a moment of it (plus our server suggested all of it, so at that point our hands were tied).

Much could, and in fact has, been said about the direction that food is taking in the capital; that a preoccupation with small plates, large egos and short attention spans is nudging us towards a scene that can only described thus, a kind of inhospitable hospitality that always leaves us wanting more. And perhaps for some people, that’s true. All I know is that when we walked out of Peg some three hours after arriving, we felt content. All was right with the world, and if only for a very brief moment, we wanted for nothing.

Especially not a bath.