You better like fish (23 Feb-22 Mar 2025)

Vol. 3: Do I really like worrying whether I’ve torn my stomach open?

Fish Central sits on the ground floor of a block of council flats in St Luke’s, just by Clerkenwell. On Saturdays, the streets must be quieter than anywhere in Zone 1. The restaurant is more than 50 years old, and was founded by George Hussein, who still owns it. It was initially half the size, and just did fish and chips. It shared the building with an undertaker, one of the waiters told us with a chuckle.

My friend Michael booked, which was entirely unnecessary. We had the dining room almost to ourselves, a marvellous thing, straight out of the early 2000s: white tablecloths next to panes of glass that beg the light in, just like in the music video for ‘Lucky Man’, all shining onto your well-priced glass of white wine. Your parents would love it. We loved it.

The restaurant serves fish, centrally, as it promises. For that, it gets full marks. Still, things were better than they needed to be. A starter of grilled sardines, served with a tomato, onion and lettuce salad was divine. I was given a pile of fat, scaly little sardines, juicy rather than scabby and dry. The prawns in my friend Sam’s prawn cocktail were good quality.

We then had fish and chips. Which was good. I think something about the plate diminishes fish and chips — far better out of a paper bag, which keeps the heat in until you open it. Yet Fish Central may also be one of few restaurants in the country where you can order the sides that we did: onion rings, and samphire.

I’ll return for the pudding menu one day too, which I hope you’ll allow me to quote in full: amaretto crème brûlée; apple strudel; rice pudding with strawberry jam; lemon tart with clotted cream; warm chocolate ganache cake with vanilla ice cream; tiramisu; signature sticky toffee pudding (all £7.50).

Sonora Taqueria is a hype-ish tacos spot in Stoke Newington, which I walked to on a sunny Sunday afternoon, cutting down past Manor House and through Clissold Park and its beautiful people and all the way down Church Street, which with its Jimmy Fairly and its Gails, feels like an accident; a street from Barnes that somehow flew ten miles north-east. The road is inarguably nice, but something about it feels curated, rather than organic.

Sonora wasn’t as busy as I thought it was going to be, so I’m surprised they messed up my order. They completely forgot one taco, which I didn’t mention because of laziness, but I did want to see what they would make of slow-cooked ox tongue. Instead, I had a ‘mushroom chorizo’ taco, which was pretty good, and a Barbacoa: slow-cooked beef with chilli sauce, white onion and coriander. It was messy and gorgeous. A good taqueria in London is a rare thing. It’s not my point, but I’ll make it anyway: Londoners expecting to find brilliant tacos spots in the city have a case of severe America Brain. We do not have many chefs with the chops, heritage and interest in making tacos, as America, being right next to Mexico, does. Spots like CDMX in Soho or Los Mochis in Notting Hill were born out of calculations in a boardroom, not love in a kitchen. Sonora, and from friends Guacamoles in Peckham, seem to be the exception.

I also had a good meal at Master Wei Hammersmith, which I went to with some work friends. Cindy Yu, sadly leaving us for the Times, did all the ordering (‘can I be a dictator about this?’). This was foolish, because Cindy had previously been drinking, and so ordered far, far, far too much, to the extent that we were all wheezing and hiccupping our way throughout the party we went to after. As a five, we tried to conquer: boneless chicken in ginger sauce, spicy sliced beef, salt and pepper deep-fried crispy pork, dry-fried green beans, chive hezi (x4), liang pi noodles, pulled pork burger (x2), cumin beef burger (x2), wontons in chilli oil, vegetarian biangbiang noodles, beef biangbiang noodles, and hand-pulled noodles with chicken and peppers. I’d had most of these dishes before, and love them still: the chicken in ginger sauce was particularly good that night. However, I didn’t love the chive hezi, little savoury pies filled with scrambled eggs and chives, which came severely under-salted.

Finally, I had two lovely dishes containing agretti, at Quality Wines and the Garden Museum Café. Agretti, or monk’s beard, is on the verge of going out of season, and it’s one of the things that I’ll usually make sure to try and eat while it’s around. It grows on seashores in the Mediterranean Basin, and has a very similar grassy, briny taste to samphire, but with a textural similarity to wakame.

At Quality Wines, it came with a simple dish of mozzarella, anchovy and garlic, and at the Garden Museum Café, it adorned some boiled potatoes next to a sand sole covered in Montpellier butter. I’d never had sand sole before, and it really was, as they say ‘the flattest of fish’. I’m philosophically keen on serving fish whole, and with the bones all left in. But I, and everyone, and you, are telling a bare-faced lie if you say you like spending half the meal picking little spiky fish bones out of your mouth, and then half of the afternoon wondering whether you’ve lacerated your oesophagus.

Thanks for reading. Sorry about the short break — I’ve got more responsibilities at work, but we’ll get this thing back to fortnightly.