A new café/bar/restaurant offering ‘eclectic modern European cuisine with an Asian twist’ has just opened in Shoreditch. Penkul & Banks, serving tapas and sharing plates (what else?), takes its name from two furniture craftsmen whose Victorian workshops were sited at 77 Curtain Road.

Of course more recently the site was home to a manly-menued place called Beard to Tail. Its meat-heavy fare never inspired much more than mixed reviews from our reporters and Jay Rayner once dubbed it ‘a wretched indictment of Shoreditch hipsterism’. Indeed on our visit there we found the whole experience rather cold (both the food and the atmosphere).

Let’s hope Penkul & Banks’s offering will have more success. Their weekend brunch – including unlimited prosecco or Bloody Marys – sounds as if it could be quite a hit.

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