I am just a lone woman, eating a pickled egg and asking Poppies to love her. Yet, from my table in the new Portobello Road branch, the love is not reciprocated. Solo dining is one of my specialist subjects, and my advice for lone wolves hoping for a walk-in anywhere is to turn up slightly earlier than the rush, when the staff are likely to be less fractious and dismissive of you turning up to clutter a table.
Poppies starts serving its famous fish and chips from 11am, so I arrived 10 minutes before noon. Once inside, and as usual when I’m on my tod, I scan the room so I’m able to dispute whichever dismal crevice the server might try to stuff me in. By the toilet door? Next to the Epos machine? In this all-new Poppies, the worst seats out of the 64 available are those next to the open front door, where the queue is sorted into takeaway and eat-in diners. Armed with the knowledge that I’m intending to spend about £30 on regular fish with chips and a slice of apple pie, I fight the server’s urge to seat me there. “How about there or there?” I ask, pointing a hand towards a couple of nicer spots, but he seems to have suddenly become acutely myopic.
