la sera By Jaqi Clayton-Church

Just before Christmas, a dedicated seafood restaurant opened in the High Street and beckoned with a fishy finger. We arrived for dinner on La Sera’s fifth evening and were delighted to find a nearly-full restaurant with a buzzy yet relaxed ambience. It’s not that other restaurants don’t have it: just that for so new a venture it was remarkable, as if La Sera were an established favourite where scores of regulars had enjoyed dining since Pontius was a pilot.

We were warmly welcomed and Mr C ordered a Kronenbourg. I chose a bottle of Beaujolais Villages from the 35-strong wine list (£8.45 for House, £45 for NV Moët). Fifteen minutes later we were still studying the menu, challenged because in fact there are two of them. First, the kind you usually find. This listed 11 starters (fish soup and pan-fried squid with chili and coriander sounded tempting), 13 seafood mains (monkfish wrapped in pancetta with courgette and aubergine cake, scallop risotto, and whole red mullet with wild fennel in a citrus sauce all had more than passing appeal), plus a handful of meat, vegetarian and children’s dishes. Difficult enough, but add to this the further menu and you have a deluge of decisions to make.

Eventually we settled on goat’s cheese and mixed leaf salad for our vegetarian, and crab & avocado salad (both £4.95). These were attractively presented, vividly decorated with fanned red chillis. The goat’s cheese, breadcrumbed and fried to perfection, was pronounced ‘beautiful’, and my crabmeat made a glorious texture and colour contrast with a perfect avocado pear.

For mains, Mr C ordered Mediterranean Gratin (£6.95), described as grilled mixed vegetables with a cream cheese sauce. In fact, the sauce that surrounded the layers of provençal veg was a dense, rich tomato affair, and the contents of our breadbasket disappeared fast as the flavoursome juices were mopped up with gusto.

Now to the second menu, which you might call ‘piscitorial pick’n’mix’. You receive a list of 
15 different fish or shellfish, with available items (9 on this occasion) ticked. You then say whether you prefer your choice grilled or panfried, and select one of 4 sauces. It’s a great formula, because it’s both fun and simple. The temptation of grilled lobster with herb and garlic butter proved irresistible, especially when we learned this comprised no fewer than three half lobsters. Even old Mr Cox, shellfish supplier supreme in our non-N16 life on the North Norfolk coast, would be hard pressed to provide all this for £17.95. With a ramekin of sauce, all the equipment needed to deal with the king of crustacea, and a well-dressed salad of completely different varieties of leaf to those in our starters, the entire experience was nothing short of sublime.

Of the puddings (all £3.95), Mr C was drawn to profiteroles, whilst I thought an iced Tia Maria preferable. Afterwards, we were shown down to a spacious basement bar, where we enjoyed a further postprandial. 

Any criticisms I have really are inconsequential, but perhaps the starters could be more varied. When it is likely that they will be followed by more seafood, ten featuring fish seems a little imbalanced. Spinach, a hollandaise or béarnaise on the sauce list, and a vegetarian option on the children’s menu would also have been welcome sights. But restaurateurs have to start somewhere, and doubtless things will evolve. With its surfeit of gorgeous food and drink in amiable surroundings, attended by friendly and knowledgeable staff, our collective sense of wellbeing soared at La Sera. Ex-tip and digestifs downstairs, £47.20 seemed a modest price to pay.
Go and enjoy.

La Sera
176 Stoke Newington High
Street, N16 7JL
020 7254 7666
Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner

hack(ney)watch By Anne Beech

An occasional and very random sampling of Hackney’s media mentions. 

The news media have been in overdrive for the last two months on the subject of the Clissold Leisure Centre and its now notorious swimming pool – further and better watery particulars are supplied elsewhere in this issue. Hackney coverage has gone into meltdown as a result. 

It had to happen just when some journos were suggesting that Hackney was positively coming up roses, of course – a line of thinking that’s about as unexpected as an aardvaark in Church Street. It started with a laudatory piece on the Very Reverend Pipes, mayor, in the Guardian in January, which almost allowed itself to concede that Hackney council was ‘on track’ if not quite yet ‘out of the woods’ - propelled by Pipe’s technocratic skills and the bludgeon of council toughie Max Caller.

In December 2003, apparently, the Audit Commission (which is what, exactly? – a bunch of bean counters?) gave us a ‘most improving’ authority gong (although I didn’t see this splashed across the front of the Evening Standard, sadly). Yippee! Can an Oscar be far behind – for ‘best supporting’?

Then the Independent on Sunday’s Talk of the Town magazine in February (which I would recommend, dear reader, were it not for the fact that the IoS has, in its wisdom, decided to close it down) waxed lyrical and almost misty eyed about Stoke Newington as the ‘New Hampstead’ – a bohemian paradise of other journalists, free thinkers and lentil eating surrender monkeys. All very peace and love and about as meaningful as an estate agent’s use of the word ‘promise’. But it made a change - until someone pulled the plug...

So now we’re back to mean streets, council ineptitude, vandalism (of what, by whom, I now begin to wonder?) and more of the same old, same old. Of course things can’t only get better.