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Please note, Archie’s Bar is now closed. Time Out Food editors, February 2018.
Having spent a rather a lot of time lingering in front of The Cheese Truck’s stall in Maltby Street Market, watching them hand out obscenely oozy toasties while trying to hold back a waterfall of drool, I’ll admit to feeling pretty excited when Archie’s Bar, their new spot in a Deptford railway arch, opened. And I was right to be: these guys have pretty much perfected the grilled cheese sandwich.
Take the one with Rosary goats cheese, honey, walnut and rosemary butter, for example – it’s deliciously creamy with just a hint of sweetness, and spiked with a satisfying nutty crunch. They could serve nothing but this and the place, I am sure, would be a runaway success. There’s also one with Cropwell Bishop stilton, bacon and pear chutney, which is powerful to the point of being a little bit overwhelming – but blue cheese enthusiasts will struggle to find a better hit anywhere.
These delights, along with a couple of other options featuring carefully sourced British cheeses, are served in a straightforward space with exposed brick walls and a picture in the corner of the converted ice cream van that started the whole thing off (a note: there’s no loo, but you can make use of the public one a few doors down).
There’s other stuff on the menu too, including stringy mozzarella sticks, a range of skillets filled with macaroni cheese, shakshuka and queso fundido, and some fondue fries that were the only real disappointment on our visit – they were a little overdone and the excessive gooeyness didn’t add much in terms of flavour.
Inevitably, the end of our meal was marked by sweats, cramped stomachs and a feeling a deep guilt about the number of calories we’d just ingested. But it was totally worth it.