Favourite Places, Autumn in Columbia Road
Campania Restaurant - on loosing something more than just another waitress…….
Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)
Nestled like an abscess behind the floral pageant of Columbia Road, Ezra Street takes its name — scholars insist, though scholars will insist on anything for a glass of warm Sauvignon — from the Old Testament scribe Ezra, who returned from Babylonian exile only to discover that even there the rents were lower. The cobbles were laid in the reign of some Hanoverian or other, and have not been cleaned since, which lends the whole thoroughfare the moist, confiding aroma of a Victorian fishmonger’s regrets. On Sundays a tributary of humanity floods down it, each pilgrim clutching a single overpriced eucalyptus stem and the unshakeable conviction that buying a fern constitutes personality.
It is here, midway along this damp intestine of artisanal sourdough and reclaimed nothing, that one finds Campania — a trattoria of such studied authenticity that one half-expects Vesuvius itself to erupt apologetically through the espresso machine. The walls heave with sepia photographs of moustachioed forebears who, one suspects, would sooner have eaten their own shoes than the £14 burrata now dispensed beneath their grave Neapolitan gaze. The bread arrives warm, the wine arrives eventually, and the bill arrives with the brisk inevitability of a tax demand.
But Campania’s true glory — its San Gennaro, its weeping miracle, its relic more potent than any vial of liquefying saint’s blood — was its star waitress, the artist known to terrified regulars and fleeing tourists alike as CCA Stone.
To call CCA Stone scary is to call the Somme a bit of a kerfuffle. She moved between the tables with the magnificent contempt of a galleon parting a sea of plankton, and she perfected over many seasons a single facial expression — somewhere between Medusa mid-petrifaction and a customs official who has just found something in your suitcase. Ask her for oat milk and she will regard you as though you have requested she personally lactate it. Enquire whether the pasta is gluten-free and a silence descends so profound that, three doors down, the flower-sellers crossed themselves and lowered their prices out of pure animal instinct.
And yet — and here the satirist must lay down his stiletto and remove his hat — she was correct. For CCA Stone was the last bulwark of the old East End against the rising tide of men named Jasper in unstructured linen, the final flaming sword guarding the gate against influencers who photograph the carbonara, abandon it, and post it captioned “obsessed”. When a table of six asked to split the bill nine ways, she did not flinch; she simply fixed them with a look that has reduced hedge-fund analysts to soft cheese, and the East wind itself held its breath. She is an artist, you understand, and the dining room was her canvas, the customers her unwilling and frankly substandard pigment.
Legend holds that a food blogger once sent his risotto back twice. He was never seen again. The market traders say his ghost still wanders Ezra Street on Sunday mornings, eternally seeking a window seat, eternally denied, while above him the sign for Campania swings gently in the breeze like a gallows on a feast day.
So raise, if she permits it, a glass of the house red — a vintage that fights back — to CCA Stone, terror of the trattoria, scourge of the brunch-class, the only honest critic East London had left. Long may we miss her scowl. Long may we miss her sigh audibly at the specials. And long, long may we remember her making Jasper (or equivalent gilet) cry into his negroni………….
