EMBASSY ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES & COFFEE CAFE: TWO TREATS ON COMPTON ST

A little over a year ago, I posted about Embassy Electrical Supplies, a small shop on Compton St, where, alongside fuses, wires and plugs for Clerkenwell’s handymen, Memhet Murat sells olive oil sourced from his own groves in Turkey and Cyprus. It is some of the best I have tasted in a long time, fresh and green, just the way I like it.

I popped in to see Memhet again earlier this week and came away with a bottle of his latest Turkish oil and a bottle of his Cypriot oil along with some rather lovely olives, which he recommended I rinse, drizzle with oil, lemon juice and a few chilli flakes.

It is people like Memhet who are the real food heroes of the U.K, unassuming, and dedicated to producing the best oils and olives he can, it is impossible to leave the shop without being given a taste of everything and almost as impossible to get him to take money from you. Well worth a visit.

Further along Compton St, towards The Goswell Road, is another unassuming little treasure. The Coffee Café may look like A N Other Sandwich shop, but one glimpse at their blackboard shows you that all is not as it seems. The owner is from Sao Paulo and, as well as offering the usual “something in a toasted ciabatta” The Coffee Café serves Brazilian pastries, a wide range of Brazilian juices and a very passable stab at a fejoida.

This being Clerkenwell, the only slaves are of the middle class wage kind, so the fejoida is lacking in the hooves, lips and assholes of the original dish and it needed the added punch of hot pepper sauce from a bottle on the table. But, it has the correct beans plumped out with meaty chunks of pork and bacon in a suitably rich sauce. It comes with rice, greens and farofa, toasted matioc flour, and for £4.50 is very good value for money particularly when, after ingesting all those carbs, supper will be unnecessary.

With a tall glass of Surinam cherry juice and a tip, the bill was £7 including a bottle of water.

Places like Embassy Electrical Supplies and Coffee Café are well worth supporting. Honest and good value for money, which in these times of credit crunch is all too rare.

EMBASSY ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES

ENGLAND’S BEST OLIVE OIL?: STRAIGHT OUT OF COMPTON ST

Well, don’t take my word for it, but New York Magazine recently announced that the best olive oil in England was to be found in the unlikely setting of the Embassy Electrical Supply Shop on Compton St in Clerkenwell.

Bearing in mind the tiresome American craving for absolutes

“squeal, where is the absolute best poppy seed bagel between 93rd and 96th St on Amsterdam, squeal?”

and the fact that the very same magazine announced that The River Café was following on in the London tradition of classical French restaurants, ahem, you can take this announcement with as many shovels full of salt as you can imagine.

However, what is certainly without question is that this small store selling fuse wire, cutters and all manner of goods of the electronic variety is home to some of the finest olive oil I have tried in a very long time and, on top of which, a rather splendid pomegranate molasses.

How? Why? What the hell? What gives?

Well, the owner, Memhet is of Turkish Cypriot extraction (see what I did there, olives, extraction? Please yourselves) and inherited olive groves from his parent’s small farm in Lurigina. He started selling the oil and olives from his shop under the name Murat Du Carta and it took off

Last year he brought in nearly two tonnes of the stuff and, this year, thanks to the New York magazine, he will bring in over three tonnes of single estate first cold pressing along side Heaven knows how many tonnes of black olives.

He has been so successful that he has now purchased another property in Turkey and has planted a grove of a further two thousand trees.

The new batch was picked last November and is on the water as we speak and due to arrive on the 25th June. Memhet gave me a taste of the last batch, it was still beautifully fresh and lawny with slight citrus undertones.

Memhet sells the oil in 1ltr or 2.5ltr containers and, if he likes you and your bottles are clean and to his satisfaction, he will even decant in your own glassware overnight

He is doing a special offer of a litre of oil with half a kilo of black olives for £8 to celebrate the arrival of the new batch. I suspect, as he has done before, he will sell out very quickly, so it is worth seeking out for something a little bit different.

I have no idea if it is the best in England. But, squeal, I do know that it is absolutely the best, squeal, in Clerkenwell, between St John St and The Goswell Rd, squeal.