Chumley's

Great place for brunch, many healthy choices and delicious Bloody Mary! But no laptops/mobile charging is allowed and WiFi signal is not that great!

The coffee was quite good, and the fruit pancakes amazing. Complement it with an orange juice. Lovely place to be on a sunny Saturday morning. Staff was fine and polite. It's a good place to come to enjoy a breakfast and a coffee. Prices normal for the location. There are some signals with rules about use/abuse of tables when working, specially in weekends. As it is a nice place with good tables an atmosphere, so I guess it's the kind of place that gets packed by freelancers, and there's a conflict there. At least they did not refurbished it to make it uncomfortable as other cafés do! If what you want is to enjoy a nice breakfast or a coffee, I really recommend it.

This cafe could be so much better. The coffee is good, but the staff aren't very friendly and the vibe is so bad as a result. They are never really busy, but clearly don't like having customers who use laptops. They make it clear that you aren't very welcome, by having rules about where you can sit, turning off the wifi 15 minutes before they close and changing the password super frequently. They also don't allow any substitutions on the menu, which is just annoying. Basically, too many rules and the staff/owners don't seem to particularly like their customers.

Good mood for working as a freelancer. Many desks and plug sockets. But, music is so disturbing for your work.The owner force to order immediately when my friend was sitting just for 5mins, if you wouldn't order you had to leave asap, very uncomfortable. You would order if you like to stay there, don't worry!? I've been here for few times but music is always terrible to concentrate on my working. The owner likes to tune in only folk music and very loud. Coffee taste is not bad, but not good. I am living around there but I would not go anymore. Looks like it attempts to get into the cafe and spend on your money less than 30min then you should leave out! If you have laptop, do gather with other laptop users in one table with very irritating eyes by the owner, who doesn't like to let people stay longer in the cafe.

Physically a nice place. Horrible service and the staff are beyond rude. They are pretty offensive and discriminatory. The manager hearing my American accent even had the audacity to say to me that nothing good comes out of America except Bruce Springsteen and some other guy. I visited this place over a year ago, and they were very rude to my husband and me. But I thought some time had passed and surely it is much better. Nope! Not much has changed. I'm sure there has to be some sort of law against the kind of hostility and miserableness. This place treats people of color or who are not from the U.K. like they totally despise them. There are too many great places in Stoke Newington to sit and visit, this is definitely not one of them. Visitors Beware. Staff is very hostile toward customers who are a little on the brown side.

After a work deadline sprung up on me halfway through a lazy Sunday in Stoke Newington, I needed to find somewhere to sit and work - somewhere with good coffee, fast wifi, and a plug socket. A friend recommended Chumley's, and I wasn't disappointed. The coffee is kept with care, and the several cappuccinos I treated myself to had just the right amount of kick to help me power through my work. It's a friendly place, with lots of space, plenty of tables, and friendly and talented staff. I'll be going back without the laptop and work stress as soon as I can.

Everybody is on a laptop in this place, it doesn't feel so much like a restaurant but more like a library or desk space rental. The food is great, the standard of the surrounding places requires it. The do a good orange fresh and a good enough coffee. Dog friendly, laptop rich. TL DR - it's good but there is better around. Still well worth a visit

I have mixed feelings about this place. In my experience, the service is fine, and the food is okay even though they only serve one poached egg with two sides of a muffin for their eggs benedict, which isn’t standard - in my experience in other similar places, a half portion has 1 side of muffin and 1 egg, a full portion with 2 eggs, 2 sides of a muffin, thems the rules. What exasperates me is the limited opening hours for the kitchen, which shuts at 2pm on weekdays, and isn’t open at all on Wednesday although you can still get a limited range of toasted sandwiches when the kitchen is shut. Even at the weekend the kitchen is only open until 3pm. 3pm?! On a weekend? In Hackney? Most people don’t get out of bed until then. They should really remove the menus from the tables when the kitchen is closed - it’s a bit misleading otherwise. Also, there used to be power sockets here, however they appear to have recently been removed. I understand there is an area that is dedicated for laptop users at the weekend which may have power sockets but you may want to check - but this area is at the back, and doesn’t have much natural daylight so isn’t as welcoming a space as the rest of the place. Customers should be able to sit where they choose, if you don’t want them to be able to do that, you’ll need to have a ‘please wait to be seated’ service. You can’t have it both ways. In summary, like my school report said, has potential, but could do better. For now, I’m heading to the less regimented Cafe Z up the road - open until 7, huge variety of great food served every day until 6.30pm, accepts food substitutions and even has plug sockets, should you need them.

This place is fine to grab a coffee and croissant, but the breakfast/brunch is a bit disappointing. This is not due to the food quality, which is good, but because they have a strict rule about no substitutions, to the ridiculous point where you cannot even ask for a poached egg instead of a fried egg! Why then would you go here, in an area with at least 10 other fantastic, similary priced brunch places who actually work hard to give you good service and the meal you want.

Lazy Antisocial would be more accurate. Not allowed to read a digital newspaper with your coffee on a Sunday afternoon! For some reason, it was deemed that my reading the Sunday Times on my tablet having already bought a coffee was not allowed on the table I was sitting, and they didn't have a paper version of the Sunday Times. For some reason, newspapers and smart phones are fine but tablets are not. I was asked to put it away or move to the lounge area; I just left. It's a shame really - the coffee was nice and the food looked pretty good, although the chai latte was rather too sweet. However, the rules and regulations in this place are just weird, and it seems as though I'm not the only one to experience this. No tables, laptops or "working" on the tables. I'm not sure what counts as "working", but they enforce the rules strictly.