When The Clarence Tavern opened in early March – fresh lick of paint, restaurateurs of fine repute, interesting menu – it lasted four whole days before Boris Johnson told everyone to stop going to pubs. So they shut again.
When some creative mind eventually pens Britain 2020: The Musical for the Edinburgh Fringe, it should focus around The Clarence as the perfect parable of Britain’s ongoing fightback. The Clarence in Stoke Newington, north London, was once Steptoe’s in the 1980s, where, if I crimped my fringe and wore lipstick, they’d serve me halves of lager. Since then, it’s been The Daniel Defoe, The Clarence (again) and the Stoke Newington Tea House (though still, confusingly, serving beer), before reverting to its original name, registered in 1860. This feels apt: the pub had survived equally as frightening things as Covid-19 and managed to stay upright and serve ale. And, yes, now it’s serving potted shrimp with gooseberries, and farinata with sweet and sour aubergine, too, because times must also change.
At this point in the musical, an elderly regular from the Steptoe’s era would stumble in to honk through a plaintive torch song entitled What The F*** is Farinata? “I come here for a pint and a quiet hour,” he’d sing, “now you’re serving me yuppie pancakes made from chickpea flour.” Seriously, I’ve had time to think about this; I don’t get out a lot these days.
The evening menu is a single sheet of thoughtful, certainly-better-than-pub-grub options. Borlotti beans with fresh tomato and tuna. A tangle of green bean fritters with sharp, pickled walnut ketchup. Bavette steak with watercress. A heavenly, creamy gratin dauphinois that costs £8 and will take eight months to rid from my bum cheeks.
This is still very much a boozer: service is polite, casual, and certainly not silver, floors are stripped, tables are sparsely set, there’s a neat, scrubbed outdoor terrace, and the clientele are aged from seven to 70. The Clarence is a sibling pub to The Anchor & Hope in Waterloo and Canton Arms in Stockwell, as well as The Magdalen Arms in Oxford, all places that took a central part in crafting the unofficial rulebook of the modern gastropub. It’s perhaps little wonder, then, that an evening here gave me a fresh lease of life.
We stayed for more than three hours, and lingered over rhubarb bellinis, many extra plates of chips and the light slander of mutual enemies. It felt ever so slightly like old times. Perhaps this was due to it being my third time of dining with the same faces, and by now we’d burned out on the subjects of fear, woe and inconvenience. We’d already navigated such awkward matters as whether or not it was the done thing to share starters or whether it was permissible to nudge each other playfully mid-sentence. Instead, we drank white rioja, argued over whether gooseberry goes with shrimp – I say yes, it is clever and nouvelle – and tried to work out what the tangle of herbs was over the top of my aubergine farinata. It turned out to be dill and coriander, incidentally, with pine nuts. No vegetarian will leave The Clarence and claim their option was tasteless and done to death. This was a somersault of flavour.
Please do try, if you go, the peach and brown butter tart, which is all the right kinds of sweet, moist and summery. Though it’s more flan than tart, if I were picky, and my empty plate would suggest quite the opposite.
I used to think that I was the least cuddly person ever, but now I find dinners without hello and goodbye hugs quite brutal. Prickly me, I realise, is a fallacy. I long to bear-hug friends, grab their ears, tweak their noses, shove a spoon in their half-eaten trifles. I didn’t do any of that at this particular meal, but there were definitely oceans of laughter. The Clarence Tavern had the worst grand opening imaginable. Its second attempt is worth singing about.
• The Clarence Tavern 102 Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16. Open lunch, Wed-Sun, noon-2.30pm (3pm Sat, 5pm Sun), dinner Tues-Sun, 5pm-10pm. About £30-35 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.
