Thursday Night Market (chicken on my stoop)

Since the recession closed most of the shops in Granville Arcade in Brixton, a company called Space Makers have been filling the empty units with pop-ups and short-term lets to keep the area ticking over and stop the space falling into disrepair or being sold to developers. There is an excellent article explaining this (far more eloquently) here.

As a result there are some really sweet little places in there now, a retro sweet shop, a Greek restaurant, a seafood place and a fancypants pasta cafe. The maze of avenues is becoming pretty gentrified as evidenced by the frequency of the likes of me and my white middle-class friends running about buying flat whites and artisan breads.

On a Thursday the market stays open until 10pm, and in an attempt to keep it 'Old Brixton' my friends and I decided to go for some jerk for dinner. Usually we frequent Bamboula or Negril for our jerk fixin's, but we switched it up this time and went to little more than a shack with an oil drum barbecue outside. I'm glad we did, it was easily the best chicken I've had. Ideally jerk chicken should be blackened by the flames of a barbecue for that deep charred flavour, citrusy but salty and warm with spice. This was all of those things and more. I think the experience was possibly improved by eating it with our hands on a ramshackle stoop in front of a poster of the emperor Haile Selassie. Old Brixton indeed.

Take Two (possibly Take Zwo, the sign is ambiguous)
Coldharbour Lane
At the Brixton Village Entrance, Jct Atlantic Road.