Fifteen years since it opened along a stretch of Regent’s Canal, Towpath is as embedded within the landscape of Hackney as Columbia Road and the Bethnal Green Gasholders, Broadway Market and London Fields Lido. The likes of Keira Knightley and Peter Doig are among the London residents to congregate outside the café’s waterfront kiosks when it opens each March, its wooden tables laden with jam jars of daffodils and its blackboard menu loaded with poached rhubarb and wild garlic dishes. Many in the Towpath community, as founders Lori De Mori and Laura Jackson like to call their regulars, make a second special pilgrimage before it closes for winter on Bonfire Night, too.
Its farewell-for-now parties have been known to include copious amounts of natural wine and a chorus of lamentations about having to wait until spring to order a caffè sospesi from Lori or eat Laura’s Fried Eggs with Caramelised Sage and Chilli Butter again. Together with De Mori, Jackson tried to lesson the sting of their four-month seasonal closure by releasing the cookbook Towpath: Recipes and Stories in 2020. And in 2024? She’s offering “Tray Days” from the beginning of November: appointed dates when the Towpath community can order and collect enamel trays of cosy, warming dishes for the second year running.
“Lori and I are really anti-takeaway because of all the disposable packaging it involves,” Laura explains, “so this is the Towpath alternative, with customers paying a small deposit.