Anna Higham opens Clementine, an all-day café in Islington
The Quince bakery founder has opened a 20-seat café opposite her own bakery on New North Road, serving breakfast, brunch and lunch through the week.
Anna Higham opened Clementine Islington on 3 October at 190 New North Road, an all-day café that sits directly across the street from Quince, the bakery she founded in the same stretch of north London.
Higham, a former executive pastry chef at the River Café, built Quince's reputation on British seasonal produce before raising the Clementine build-out partly through crowdfunding, the same route she used for Quince, which brought in more than £30,000 earlier this year. Dan Wilson Studio, the firm behind Quince's interiors, designed the new room too, keeping the same pared-back, wood-heavy look across both addresses.
A short menu built around one street
A short, seasonal menu that keeps the new café tied to the bakery across the road.
Clementine Islington seats about 20 and runs Wednesday to Sunday, with breakfast giving way to lunch at midday until 2.30pm. Early dishes include tattie scones with scrambled Cacklebean eggs and Scotch pancakes with Abbey Farm butter in the morning, and a chicken and tarragon pie at lunch. A sausage sandwich uses a bespoke Stella's sausage served on Quince's own Batch bread, tying the new café back to the bakery across the road rather than building a separate identity from scratch.
Head chef Marcus Westlake joins from Forno, the Peckham restaurant, and previously worked at Brawn in east London. The pairing extends Quince's produce-first approach into a sit-down format, after the bakery itself outgrew its original compact site and started turning away regulars at busy weekend hours.
A second address for a one-shop operation
Islington has filled with openings this October, and Clementine lands into a city still working out what to eat in London beyond its best-known addresses, with a menu that reads closer to a neighbourhood kitchen than a bakery spin-off. Higham has said little about further expansion, and Clementine's hours stay deliberately short: no dinner service, and a kitchen that closes well before the evening rush starts elsewhere in Islington.
For a bakery that built its name on queues for sourdough and pastries, the bet behind Clementine Islington is that regulars will cross the road for a sit-down pie just as readily as they already do for a loaf under their arm.
