There are lots of good things to say about Café Cecilia, but may I start with the shallowest? You can come off the motorway from way out in the flatlands, zigzag through the surface streets of east London, turn on to Andrews Road and park. Right outside. You can sit in a window seat, look out over the canal, the narrow boats, the vast Victorian gasworks — and your car. It is disorienting. I don’t think it impaired my critical faculties, but I was halfway through the main before I could stop myself gazing through the glass at my decomposing SUV and idiotically mouthing, “Look, my car!” I mean, this is “gritty E8”. I’ve only previously managed Restaurant Dream Parking in LA.
OK. Enough. I’m sure you’ll go on a bike, an electric scooter or on foot. Whatever. But I do know you’ll go, and I’ll tell you why. Café Cecilia was set up by Max Rocha, scion of the fabulous fashion family, in a thoughtfully designed new build in the most aggressively gentrified bit of Hackney. The staff are beautifully and quirkily dressed by sister Simone Rocha, the maître d’ in a parachute dress and rubber clogs, the wait staff looking like the winners of the Most Stylish Apparatchik contest at a tractor fair in Magnitogorsk.
The punters are even slicker. Couture-vultures, drawn by the fashion pedigree of the place, arrive in elegant dribs and understated drabs from the four postcodes in London that still contain enough disposable income to dress up for lunch. Everyone except me is thin.