The first thing you notice is the line. It bends past the railway arch, past the cold-pressed-juice place that's never open, past three boys arguing about whose grandmother's pepperpot was better.
The second is the smell. Fish-fry batter, cracked black pepper, a little cumin, a fryer running hot for six straight hours. By the time you reach the front, you've already decided what you're ordering.
Sade Edwards opened Cassava eighteen months ago with a small business loan and a bigger conviction: that there was a hunger in this city no Caribbean takeaway was meeting. Not the takeaway her parents grew up with, exactly — the kitchen has a wood-fired oven and a sourdough programme — but the feeling of it.
"I wasn't trying to make my grandmother's food. I was trying to make food that loved her back."
The result isn't fusion. It's translation. Hard-dough bread, but with a long ferment. Bake-and-shark, but the shark is responsibly sourced from a Cornish day-boat. Sweet potato pone, served with a scoop of something that has business being on a Michelin tasting menu.
The customers are why the place works. On Sundays the room fills with a particular kind of London — second- and third-generation Caribbean kids in their twenties and thirties, sitting alongside white couples on first dates, alongside an older woman from Stoke Newington who comes every week and eats alone.
"This is the food I missed without knowing I missed it," she said.
That's a sentence worth a business plan.