The Clementine café Islington opening has a date: 3 October, when Anna Higham will unlock the doors of her new all-day café at 190 New North Road, directly opposite the Quince Bakery that has made this particular stretch of N1 worth the detour since early 2024.
The new 20-cover room will trade Wednesday to Sunday, from 8am to 4pm, according to The Upcoming. Breakfast and brunch run into a short, considered lunch, then the shutters go down. It is a rhythm that suits the neighbourhood: unhurried, locally rooted, done by teatime.
From River Cafe to Islington: the chef behind Clementine
Higham is a Scottish ex-River Cafe pastry chef, Broadsheet reports, and her track record at Quince has been hard to ignore. Just months after the bakery opened, it picked up a Muddy Stilettos award for best local food and drink producer, and La Liste, the guide to the best restaurants and hotels in the world, named it among London’s best bakeries. The bakery also supplies bread to Oula, which has since been officially named the best coffee shop in London. Higham’s crusty baguettes, it seems, have a habit of landing in the right hands.
Clementine is the next step. Named for the fruit, it carries the warmth and informality of the bakery across the road into a sit-down space where a full, seasonally rotating menu built around British produce can unfold properly.
What to expect on the Clementine café Islington menu
The breakfast list reads like a cold-morning daydream. Porridge comes topped with cream, panela sugar and apple compote. Tattie scones arrive with scrambled eggs. Scotch pancakes are served with butter and poached plums. The signature sausage sarnie is made on Quince Bakery’s own batch bread, dressed with in-house brown sauce.
Among the dishes flagged by The Upcoming are Staffordshire Oatcakes with Gothelney Farm Bacon and Appleby’s Cheshire Cheese, a combination that signals exactly where Higham’s sourcing instincts lie: producers with names and postcodes, ingredients that carry a story before they reach the plate.
Lunch moves the dial slightly. Cheddar toasties, a chicken and tarragon pie, a late summer vegetable soup and a Ploughman’s lunch cover the range from quick and melted to properly satisfying. The menu rotates with the seasons, so what appears in October will shift through autumn and into winter as British produce dictates.
Drinks have been thought through with equal care. Coffee comes from Allpress and Red Bank. A rotating seasonal cordial list takes in flavours such as fragola grape and damson, and peach and fig leaf. Clementine will also have its own signature tea blend, developed in collaboration with Postcard Teas.
A crowdfunded opening for the Clementine café
Ahead of opening, Higham launched a crowdfunding campaign to fit out the new space. It raised over £30,000. That kind of community backing, from people willing to put money behind a neighbourhood café before a single coffee has been poured, says something about how Quince has embedded itself in Islington over the past two years.
The Clementine café Islington opening on 3 October marks a considered expansion rather than a leap into new territory. Same street, same sourcing principles, same baker, a little more room to sit down. For residents of N1, the question now is simply which side of the road to stand on first.