eating out: cafe cecilia
I wish someone loved me the way cafe cecilia cooks lunch
I am as selective with where I choose to lunch as I am with who I choose to love. With both luncheons and lovers, everything needs to be just right for me to become a repeat customer.
Lunch, like love, is long-lasting and tender, it is not drunk and dangerous like dinner and sex. Lunch should be shared with someone special, dinner could be shared with any random dick from a dating app. Lunch is a daylight kind of love. It is honest and lays its cards on the table. There is no night-time sparkle or seduction to hide behind. Lunch is a three-course stroll in a royal park, not a small plate shagathon in a wine bar.
At lunch, the ingredients should be fine, but not so fine that I have to google the ingredients beneath the table. The food should be flavourful and filling, not fatty and fortified. The staff should be friendly, not fabulous or formal. The customers should be casual civilians, not content creating cunts. Plates should be prepared for pleasure, not #paidads. There should be soup and salad, not side eyes and selfies. Crumbs and stains should stay, inhibitions should be scraped away.
The food should be flavourful and filling, not fatty and fortified. The staff should be friendly, not fabulous or formal. The customers should be casual civilians, not content creating cunts. Plates should be prepared for pleasure, not #paidads.
Last week, I had lunch at Cafe Cecilia and it was just like real love. It was beer-bellied tummies touching, Hackney Downs hand holding, bed-sheet bodies sandwiching.
Cafe Cecilia is like an Avante Garden Centre cafe: it serves kindness, bread and good soup, with a side salad of unmistakable chicness. When I entered the restaurant, to my shock, I didn’t immediately get the sense the open-kitchen chefs were discussing my fuckability. No, instead the chefs subtly acknowledged my 10/10 sex appeal and got back to work. The kitchen has the gently busy energy of birds building their nest, not beastly bulls mounting their sous chefs, pumping them full of fragile manhood and tiny cock. I see friendly, smiling chefs at work, not self-loathing beasts with mouldy green piercings.
The kitchen has the gently busy energy of birds building their nest, not beastly bulls mounting their sous chefs, pumping them full of fragile manhood and tiny cock.
The Cafe interior is stripped back and sparse, like St John but without all the Hannibal Lecter look-alikes. This is by no means a diss. Anthony Hopkins in Silence of Lambs is some of my most frequented wank bank material. The minimalist style suits me just fine - if a restaurant is overly designed, nasty opinions will form in my head whether I like it or not.
I am shown to my table. I sit in woodland warmth by the window, opposite the industrial sites. I have a clear view of Hackney’s famous gaping Gas Cylinder - the thing that those outside the M4 might refer to as a fucking eyesore, but the local artistes are deeply connected to, much like that lady who likes humping the Eiffel Tower.
The dining room caters to different types of people, although perhaps with an extra topping of fashion - like a jacket potato with caviar. I survey the room for a potential lover. Restaurants are much like airports: in a public space, embarking on a shared experience with strangers, we can’t help but scan the space for sex. On an airplane, we might bump into them on the way to the toilet, we might look at their table and see what they chose to eat, we might even analyse who they are with and decide that we would be a better fit in their life. The chef/owner Max Rocha is here. He would be a fine lover, I think: Irish and handsome. My stomach rumbles. I order a lager and a simple bottle of Tsingtoa arrived. I am delighted. In this part of London, it is not unusual to order a can of lager and instead, receive an eight quid can of yeasty floral piss.
Restaurants are much like airports: in a public space, embarking on a shared experience with strangers, we can’t help but scan the space for sex. On an airplane, we might bump into them on the way to the toilet, we might look at their table and see what they chose to eat, we might even analyse who they are with and decide that we would be a better fit in their life.
To accompany my beer, I have my first bite of Guinness bread and butter and it is perfect. It is often this moment in restaurants, with the first sip of booze bubbling in my head, and my teeth sinking into a slice of good cheesy butter on bread, that I get a sense of what is to come. It is like foreplay - a good indicator of how satiating the main course will be. And at Cafe Cecilia, I am in for a session of sturdy lovemaking: my limbs relax and my stomach howls for more.
The dining room is filling up nicely for a weekday lunch. There are no business lunches, or if there are, I can’t tell they’re happening, which is a relief. Despite being in a restaurant that is well reviewed, there is no air of arrogance, which surprises me. In an ideal world the waiters would be less good looking, just to make me feel better, you know? But I suppose you can’t have it all.
Next I try the chickpea and chard soup, which is wintery, tasty and perfectly lumpy. And that’s what I want my soup to be, lumpy. Either that or satin, silky and tasting of lobster and money. Nothing in between is enjoyable. But a good lunch, like a good lover, doesn’t need to offer me riches. Simplicity, chunky bodies and happiness is ultimately butter. This is followed by an artichoke graceburn and olive tapenade dish. It is delicious and pretty, like me frollicking naked in an orchard.
And from here on, the plates keep coming and the portions are mighty generous. This lunch, much like a seasoned seducer, will undoubtedly end up with me unbuttoning your trousers. I am eating excellent ingredients that I recognise - and can spell - on the plate, I am drinking Sancerre that is as crisp as the white walls, and I am falling in love with a lady called Cecilia. There is fried veal that is thick and meaty, not thin and stylish, with a fat fried egg on top. Very creamy, very crunchy, very good, very nice. And then my green salad. You may be surprised to know just how much I like green salad. A good green salad is as vital as an interval cigarette: cooling, sharp and clears the gullet for more fat. And this, this was an excellent green salad. A perfect Camel Blue on a beach.
And then my green salad. You may be surprised to know just how much I like green salad. A good green salad is as vital as an interval cigarette: cooling, sharp and clears the gullet for more fat. And this, this was an excellent green salad. A perfect Camel Blue on a beach.
My fifth dish, braised cuttlefish orzo, is silky, hot and meaty. On a trip to the loo, I see my reflection and my teeth and lips have turned inky black, it looks like I’ve been eating the ass of a Ryman’s photocopier. But I feel no insecurity or shame, I feel silly and funny and at home. It is at this point that I know that lunch at Cafe Cecilia does not cater for lust, but love. If he doesn’t want to kiss my lips when they’re fishy and stained, then it just isn’t real love.
All the food at Cafe Cecilia is generous and know-able and non-snobby. It is simple and non-sceney while still being chic - fear not, there are no high maintenance old ladies and snotty, screechy toddlers to put you off your food. Instead, there is Simone Rocha, the fashion designer and sister of Max, the owner, a few tables away from me. She has been put on an ordinary table, just like me, the only marker of her superiority is that her clothes are better than my shit ones. When other restaurants give overtly superior treatment to VIP tables (friends, family or PRs), it makes the other guests feel cheated on. It leaves us thinking - what does she have that I don’t? Bigger tits? Should I have given you more head? But no, this restaurant is a loyal lover who recognises beauty in other women but would never dream of infidelity. And he always gets me a glass of water even if he’s already in bed.
In a world where chef residencies are constant and ever-changing, there is now the sense that you are sort of permanently missing out on something, or late to the party. And there are all the manically insecure menu trends. Where there were once whipped cods roe, there were then flatbreads, then pickling everything but your nan’s knickers, then soft serve ice cream, then gildas, and now it is, I dunno, graphic design? Who the fuck knows. I’m having lunch at Cafe Cecilia and so I don’t care.
And so, despite all the awards and PR attention the cafe has received over the last few years, I am pleased to report: it is still good. I went when it first opened, I went last year and I went last week. It remains as it always is: a generous, humble, and repeatable delight. Cafe Cecilia has become a classic to me. And this year, I want to return to the classics. I want to have more love, and I want to eat more lunch.