Success is sometimes found in fraught circumstances. For Crispin restaurateur Dominic Hamdy, the idea for his latest hit, Shoreditch’s Bistro Freddie, came amid family catastrophe. “My dad was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago,” he says. “And at that time, I was like, I need to think of my next move, what are we going to do? His name is Freddie so I thought, well, I’ll do somewhere called Freddie’s or something like that.”
The influence of his father — who remarkably has since recovered and dined at the corner restaurant bearing his name — runs deeper than a few letters over the door. The bistro, all cream walls and wood panelling, and candles spilling their wax over old wine bottles, is perhaps half French, half English; a measure of Casse-Croûte with a pint of Andrew Edmunds poured in. It is, says Hamdy, a cocktail from his childhood.
