Review: St Clair, Clapham

St Clair is an interesting new opening in Clapham. From the outside it’s looking like a refined French fish restaurant, with dark blue walls, marble tables, comfortable chairs and a wet fish counter at the front. But the sign on the window says it’s a cevicheria, the dishes on the menu stir in some Brazilian names, and a lot of the ingredients are straight from Japan. This is Nikkei cuisine and these are all things that I like though, so let’s see…

Okay, service is a little shambolic. Maureen’s main arrives (with apologies) when the rest of us have almost finished ours, and they also manage one wrong dessert (but they leave this for us to enjoy as a freebie and replace it in a few minutes). They’ve not even been open two months, and as I’ve said before: I’m much more interested in how a place reacts to cock-ups and complaints. They react generously and helpfully.

Starters are all colourful and exciting to look at. Crab salad looks stunning, and the causa-like beetroot coloured potato is a great base. Flavours of watermelon jelly and tiny green tobiko give the dish some pep, as does the wafer-thin and ozone-y seaweed cracker. There’s a lovely tuna tataki as well, generous slices of very good fish and a really splendid addition of fermented physalis. My only quibble: these are meant to be sharing plates, so what use is one physalis?

The St Clair ceviche is a thing of joy. Really great, sharp, fierce and yet creamy tiger’s milk, beautiful pieces of fish and good accompaniments of big corn and sweet potato. The only disappointing starter is the mackerelmole, which I’d be perfectly happy with for lunch at the office, but if it’s any more complicated than guacamole and smoked mackerel mashed together then it doesn’t reveal it.

Mains are good. My bavette is cooked sous vide and then seared, which in this case produces a perfectly toothsome piece of flavourful beef for a charming £14. That’s using the right technique to good effect in my book. Mash, gravy, pan gratata and vivid little piquillo peppers are all spot on. On the other hand, I can’t stop myself stealing spoonfuls of moqueca from the dish next door. The sauce is packed with all the flavours of salty seafood and earthy palm kernel oil I remember from Brazil, but it’s also satin smooth with sheen of sheer luxury. Maureen’s duck is excellent too, though jolly big.

Mochi ice creams are an easy pud for some of us, and I’m in love with the yuzu flavour. The mistaken pud was a roasted plantain with dulce de leche ice cream. The caramelised plantain had an interesting almost leathery flavour, but the ice cream was oddly unindulgent for dulce de leche. The final pud was a mont blanc, in name at least. It was actually a lovely concoction of broken-up soft dark chocolate cake, clementine, delicate sake cream and exceedingly moreish salt chocolate brittle. I just couldn’t connect it to the name.

Coming in around £45 each before drinks for three courses (plus, really, more side dishes than we needed) I’d say the price is on the high side but not excessively. There’s top-notch inventive Nikkei cooking here. There were a couple of less successful dishes and a couple of service hiccups, but I’m hoping that will polish out when they’ve been open for a bit longer. Great to have this just down the road.