🇬🇧🥖🍯Would you like to try legs restaurant?🍯🥖🇬🇧

Price: Mid-range

When to go: When you want good times, good wine and great food.

What to have: Dishes change with the seasons, but the potatoes with cod roe – crunchy chunks with delicately oniony crème fraiche plus roe and nasturtium leaves – is typical of the style: simple yet stunning.

A tiny restaurant and wine bar in Hackney’s fashion district.

Don’t like wine? Don’t worry. Legs, despite the in-joke-for-oenophiles name (the ‘legs’ are the vinous streaks down the inside of your glass), is so much more than a neighbourhood wine bar. It’s also a terrific place to eat, with a compact menu of small plates, each more brilliant than the last. At the helm is heavily tattoed, blonde-hair-pulled-into-a-scruffy-ponytail Magnus Reid: more surfer dude than chef and owner. If you can, sit one of the four stools of the ‘kitchen bar’, and ask for advice on the short but appealing wine list – his laid-back appearance belies the extent of his expertise and enthusiasm – then watch him work.

Every dish is a delightful tumble of texture and taste: superficially simple but using bold, bright combinations that elevate them well past the ordinary. The peas – fat, fresh garden beauties over a verdant purée – shimmer alongside roasted pistachios, while extra depth comes from a parmesan nut butter and a final flurry of finely grated extra cheese that settles, like fresh snow, for a fleeting moment before melting away. There was a bowl of crunchy deep-fried potatoes with a foamy, crème fraîche with faintly chivey notes (it’s actually puréed burnt scallions), a hint of salt from plump pearls of cod roe and pepper from nasturtium leaves. It’s pretty much a signature dish: do order it.

But the stand-out dish of the night – perhaps because it was during that rarest of British things, a balmy summer’s eve – was a dessert billed merely as ‘melon, olive oil, salt’. Cubes of gleaming, intensely sweet, intensely cold honeydew melon drizzled with a fruity, fragrant olive oil (thus bringing out the melon’s flavour), rock salt (ditto that) and shavings of glacial melon granita. Who knew melon could be this good? I mean, seriously. Who knew?

But the charm of Legs isn’t limited to the food, the sense of community (with locals waving as they walk past) or even the cuteness of the bright little 24-seat space (14 of which are at counters). The final nod goes to the staff, who, when they’re not poking fun at each other’s music tastes (the soundtrack is a shared playlist: anything goes), come fizzing with passion for the food and a genuine love for their customers.

When Legs, the restaurant, stirred to life on Morning Lane, Hackney, around a year ago, I watched its arrival like a timeworn village elder.

Chef Magnus Reid seemed like a force of nature. His interviews were bouyant with a lack of damns given and an obsession with simple produce, often veg, presented uniquely. Reid also had an air of Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy on a beach holiday, which beguiled food writers, and he was a tub-thumper for natural wines. Still, he was opening Legs where all previous fancy-dining places had failed to flourish.

‘You’re doomed,’ I wanted to shout through his letterbox, pouring cold water on his vision to sell Shishito peppers and clams with cured egg yolk from a spot beside a traffic jam, near the world’s worst big Tesco.

Blatantly Reid knew better. Legs would go on to be a vital cog in the bold new era of Morning Lane. We’d watched with puzzlement as Pringle and Aquascutum appeared, some years back. Now a Nike factory store, Matches Fashion outlet and a Temple of Seitan vegan ‘fried chicken’ shop have appeared. As a local, I feel gentrified’ fails to nail Morning Lane’s new era. I prefer ‘transmogrification’, like in Calvin and Hobbes when Calvin climbs inside a carboard box as a tiny boy and transmogrifies into a 100lb drooling space-lizard.

To give Reid full credit, in interviews he has always seemed thoroughly respectful of the space he was filling. He knew by opening Legs he’d be a magnet for fashion fops, yes, but he’d also inherit Morning Lane’s terrific, and sometime terrifying, locals. Reid would make this whole thing work. He’d sell vivid orange trout roe on crème fraîche addled roast potatoes for £9 a plate in an area populated by tramps, trust-fund kids and traffic wardens, and something nice would come of the nonsense.

Dining in Legs, one year on, I’m delighted to say he pulled the whole thing off. It’s one of London’s shining lights. It’s a plain but darkly pretty single room, with an open kitchen and a perky but unobtrusive soundtrack of The Doors, Spiritualized, Skip Spence: whatever the kitchen is channelling that evening. It has warm, prompt, intelligent front of house staff who could probably talk your head off about sustainable vineyard practice, but choose not to. The menu changes frequently but prods and dares with oddness like hollowed-out artichoke filled with Parmesan custard, fresh no-faff radishes with wild honey and seeping duck yolks over vibrant fresh asparagus atop toasted soda bread. Reid, like most great chefs, is a glorious contradiction. It takes a lot of precise care, practice and thought to give as few f***s as he claims to over food.

A plate of burrata with burnt onion, basil and bottarga was marvellous. We fought to mop and dredge at the scraps with fresh sourdough. The panzanella of Marinda tomatoes was bright and delicious. I drank a glass of Rond Vert Olivier Cohen 2014 and my other half had Siren Craft Brew. We shared the onglet with almond, calcot and crisp bread, which was great, although one could easily stay vegetarian at Legs without feeling short-changed. A plate of dressed dandelion and green beans pushed my vitamin levels scarily high. I rectified this with a chocolate pot, drizzled with olive oil, flecked with sea salt. We ate at the window, distracted now and then by Morning Lane street entertainment. Some locals seemed equally bemused by me, a ridiculous woman with big hair, eating a plate of potato and orange slime and scraping leftover onglet into a Stella McCartney tote to take home for her thankless child-substitute labrador. The transmogrification of E9 means we can all be weird together.