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Please note, C Food's residency at The Employment Acadamy has now closed. Time Out Food editors, January 2019.
‘I’m on a see food diet’ my grandad used to say. Usually after hearing about a new foodie fad. He’d then raise his eyebrows and add, ‘I see food and I eat it’.
I doubt this is the play on words Millie Cowie had in mind when she created C Food, but it doesn’t matter: the attitude’s the same. This is a pop-up that’s simple, straightforward and a whole lot of fun. And, as it happens, it serves up some of the finest platters of seafood in London.
The place, though, feels anything but London. The pale walls, olive trees and strings of twinkly lights that adorn C Food’s Camberwell courtyard are all very Mediterranean, the long communal tables dotted with well-worn items that look like they’ve been picked up at a fleamarket in southern Europe. By the time you’ve said hello to the strangers next to you and realised there’s a live band thrumming away in the background, you begin to feel like you might actually be on holiday, and that you may have accidentally stumbled into someone’s wedding on your way to pick up a Cornetto. It’s lovely.
Unlike a wedding, of course, you’ll actually have to pay some money to be here, but tickets to C Food are just £30. For that, you get a tray of slippery oysters perked up with lemon juice and Tabasco and served with big bunches of bright, crunchy radishes. And then another tray, this one stacked with piles of smoked salmon, soft mussels, vibrant pink prawns and neatly packed crabs. None of it’s especially complicated, but that’s not the point – it’s tender and fresh and a little bit special. It was impossible to stop eating.
By the time we’d finished flicking shells off our knuckles and scraping clean the bowl of strawberries and cream that followed, we couldn’t have cared less that it had actually been raining for the past half an hour. In fact, somehow this just added to the magic of the evening, and judging by the wide smiles from everyone else huddling beneath the pop-up’s multicoloured emergency umbrellas, we weren’t the only ones to not care a jot. So take my advice and forget fad eating this summer. The only diet you need this year is a C Food one.