Everything is on the small side at Sally Abé’s new restaurant, Teal, a short walk from Hackney Central overground station in East London.
The restaurant is a mere 500 sq ft, an area that encompasses the kitchen, a bar, and includes seats for a maximum of 25 customers. The chef herself is not that tall but makes up for this with sheer determination and drive. She has written a short menu: five savouries, four starters, four main courses and four desserts. And she has managed to fit all these dishes onto a small piece of paper that measures not much more than four by six inches.
But this is a menu that promises pleasure. As does the wine list, compiled with great thoughtfulness by her business partner, Abe (Abraham) Drewry, who began at wine retailer Majestic Wine before moving into hospitality. They met working alongside one another at the fashionable Bull in Charlbury, Oxfordshire.
The size of the restaurant is obviously a limiting factor. I overheard the table next to me being told that the restaurant was unable to make the initial two cocktails they had asked for simply because the bar did not yet contain all the vital ingredients. But Drewry obviously recognises the flavours his customers are looking for in a range of 10 sparkling wines, 10 white and 10 red, all fairly priced and half available by the glass, as well as a further 10 listed as ‘special bottles’. These include a 2022 Pouilly-Fumé from Didier Dagueneau (£160); a 2014 Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Emile from Trimbach in Alsace (£162); and a 2020 Art Series Chardonnay from Leeuwin Estate in Australia (£165), which I look forward to considering on my return. On a humid lunchtime in early May, my guest and I enjoyed a glass of 2023 Evening Land Chardonnay from Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills for £11.50, each poured in JR glassware. (‘Chardonnay is my favourite grape variety, Champagne my favourite wine’, Drewry was to confess to me subsequently.)
Abé gives her classical training away when she opens her menu with the phrase ‘savouries’ rather than the more modern ‘snacks’. But her four do have an old-time feel about them: a Locket’s savoury (pear, watercress and Stilton on toast); a Scotch egg; angels on horseback (oysters wrapped in bacon); and devils on horseback (a prune wrapped in bacon). We enjoyed an angel and a couple of devils, but Abé told me that it is the Scotch egg that has proved the most popular.
Of the four starters one stood out to me: it was described as a chilled pea and mint soup, chickpea chip and goat’s curd £14), and it was absolutely terrific. The soup (was comforting and cool, with a crunch provided by the obviously recently podded peas and a couple of chickpea fritters topped with the curd. Meanwhile, my friend, who described himself as an aficionado of crab tarts, admitted to being extremely pleased with Abé’s version, served with fine herbs and lemon (£17).
The same division applied with our main courses. Opposite me was someone I have known as a restaurateur and restaurant supplier who knows a thing or two about what comes into its own during the British asparagus and strawberry seasons. So the last dish I thought I would ever see him order would be one of English asparagus, ricotta dumplings and hazelnuts. Yet he did and enjoyed immensely.
I chose the chicken, spring vegetables and verjus (above) which arrived in a bowl vigorously glistening with colour. There was the pale yellow meat of the poached chicken breast with two shades of green around it: the paler green of the lettuce leaves and the darker green of even more peas, broad beans and French beans. The acidity of the verjus bound everything together most successfully.
It was with the dessert section that Abé really decided to have some fun. There is a ‘penny lick’, a small glass of vanilla ice cream for £1 which brought back memories of venturing out to the mobile ice cream van in 1960s Manchester for ‘penny brokes’ (small broken ice lollies), in those days sold for a penny. We chose a buttermilk pudding topped with English strawberries and a marmalade ice cream sandwich. Both were excellent and I paid my bill of £209.01 with pleasure.
A couple of weeks later I sat opposite a smiling Abé in Flying Horse Coffee, a café in Shoreditch, next to Legado restaurant where she was due to give a talk on the growing role of women in the professional kitchen, a topic about which she is passionate. I asked her how it had all begun.
‘I was born in Mansfield and when I was 18 I moved to Sheffield. I wasn’t sure of what I was going to do but someone had given me a cookbook by Delia Smith as a present. I cooked my way through this book and fell in love with cooking. I enrolled at Sheffield Hallam University and then there was a placement at the restaurant in the Savoy Hotel run by Gordon Ramsay which I took.’ She added, almost unnecessarily, ‘I seem to thrive on pressure.’
There she met her future husband, chef Matt Abé (they have since split up), and together they went to eat at Brett Graham’s restaurant, The Ledbury in Notting Hill, where they were invited to see the kitchen, the most tiny and highly organised restaurant kitchen I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. This was the beginning of Abé’s nine-year association with Graham: five years at The Ledbury followed by four years as head chef at Graham’s other highly regarded restaurant, The Harwood Arms, before moving on to The Bull. Abé considers Graham to have been her principal mentor, but added that she has never cooked outside the UK.
In November 2025, Abé and Drewry saw the Hackney site for the first time; since then events moved quickly. They put the £200,000 together and took over a corner site that had once been Pidgin restaurant and before that a fish-and-chips shop, and opened on 26 March 2026. It is named after her favourite game bird.
At our lunch I was sitting opposite the bar at Teal which has an opening into the kitchen so I could watch Abé as she and her small brigade of women were hard at work. Then she came out, still smiling and carrying our two desserts. As with Sally Clarke at her restaurant and the late Skye Gyngell in her Spring restaurant, she exuded confidence and charm. And as Abé pointed out, ‘There is far more to running a restaurant than just cooking the food and that is what I would like to get across.
‘These are qualities I believe women can bring to professional kitchens. When I began cooking professionally 20 years ago, only 17% of all those working in them were women. It’s a percentage that has improved considerably but still has some way to go’, she concluded in a voice that would brook no opposition.
The cooking, the wine and the manner in which we were looked after at Teal were all terrific. It is, I repeat, small – there is no room in the kitchen for a walk-in fridge so they have to start every morning from scratch. And, as they find their feet, Abé and her small brigade are open only Thursday to Saturday for dinner and Friday to Sunday for lunch. But do persist: a reservation at Teal is well worth hunting down.
Teal 52 Wilton Way, London E8 1BG
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
