Historical version 4 of Hopper And Bean, N10 3DU (view current version)

Hopper & Bean is a café in Muswell Hill with a cheerful yellow theme.

Essentially one long room with a counter on the right hand side and a very long table down the left hand side. The counter has a display cabinet with variously-filled panini, various pastries, and some cake. There is a mix of seating: some bench seating, but mostly ordinary wooden chairs (but painted yellow), and couple of armchairs - total around 50 places. Apart from the very long table, there are a few other largish tables, plus a lot of marble-topped tables.

Rowley Birkin QC visited on a Sunday morning in December 2019. There were I think five staff, outnumbering the customers initially, but more customers arrived throughout the morning. The music was at a very low level (mixture of easy listening/pop), and there were Sunday newspapers (Sunday Times, Observer, Mail on Sunday). For £7 I had two Cumberland sausages on toasted sourdough with a beetroot hummusphoto. An Americano was £2.40 and Earl Grey (leaf) was £2.50.

Now, back to this yellow theme. The cups and saucers are yellow, as is the coffee machine, lampshades, awning etc. - all looks good, so fair enough. But something very curious: the "Out of the Blue" cafe I visited quite randomly the following day ALSO has a yellow theme (walls, cups, even the coffee machine). OK, so perhaps one place has been inspired by the other (Google Street View for May 2019 shows neither of the Hopper & Bean outlets yet in operation, but Out of the Brew had been around for three years by then). But BOTH websites have the same grey-black cube icon, so what's that about? Same website building tool/developers? Same ultimate company behind them?

Child-friendliness: several children were present during my visit. There is a baby changing tray in the spacious toilet, and there are high chairs (though without trays).

Accessibility: all level throughout (very slight step to get, about 1-2 cm), easy to manoeuvre around, large toilet with grab bars, alarm and washbasin suitably low.

The have reasonable Wi-Fi (network: HBGuest; password on a board behind counter, but note it's lower case not upper case), stable though not fast (1.7 Mbps down). There are several sockets around.

Rowley Birkin QC's conclusion: a good place to work - several other customers were working away on laptops for extended periods - with no annoying (to me) intrusions.

Last visited by Rowley Birkin QC, December 2019. Opening hours taken from door, December 2019.
OS X co-ord: 528410 OS Y co-ord: 189643 (Latitude: 51.590512 Longitude: -0.146126)
This is version 4 (as of 2019-12-14 19:16:52). View current version. List all versions.