The Seas The Sea Chef’s Table Hackney

Ageing fish beside the counter

Dry-aged turbot waits in the ageing cabinet beside Dover sole. Leandro Carreira works as Chef at The Seas The Sea Chef’s Table Hackney in London, carrying a line of kitchens that began for him at Mugaritz in Spain, then moved through Viajante, Climpson's Arch, and Londrino. At this station, the work narrows to British seafood and time: fish held until texture tightens, house ferments and garums used for length, and a counter close enough for guests to see the method before it becomes a course. Carreira’s earlier Londrino years, from 2017 to 2019, gave him a chef-founder platform in London; here the discipline sits inside a working seafood operation rather than a sealed dining room. The house began from Alex Hunter’s Chelsea fishmonger and seafood bar in 2019, then opened the Hackney railway arch in 2021 as a production-led chef’s table. Carreira has described stepping away from polished fine dining toward something lighter, with less fuss. The room suits that shift. It asks for precision, but it does not hide the fish before service.

Fourteen courses from the day’s catch

The format is counter dining, built around an omakase sequence that has run in 11- to 14-course forms. The cooking follows the catch rather than a fixed canon, with British seafood arriving through the group’s own supply lines and the menu changing with what is strongest that week. Dry-ageing is the signature gesture at Hackney: Brixham turbot and Dover sole have been held in view, their maturation folded into dishes where sweetness, fat and spring matter more than ornament. Carreira’s bench has also used monkfish liver with bergamot, scallops with egg yolk and pine shoyu, and pão de ló with fennel seed ice cream and caviar, a Portuguese reference carried into a seafood room without turning into biography on a plate. Ferments and garums do quiet work in the background. The wine program is curated to stay close to saline, citrus and umami lines, not to pull the pass away from the fish.

A railway arch with the engine room showing

The counter sits inside Arch 337 Acton Mews, in a Hackney space where the dining room and seafood production do not fully separate. Vans, tanks, cold storage, knives and the ageing cabinet belong to the same field of vision as the pass. That proximity changes the meal’s tempo. The room stays intimate, with 14 seats, but the work around it has the scale of a supplier that moves fish onward to restaurants across London and southern England. Polished oak and soft light keep the counter composed; the industrial frame keeps it honest. Guests see fish before it is portioned, cured, warmed or sent. The room is quiet enough for the bench-side details to register.

A room built to keep changing

Hackney has also become a residency space, with the Untapped series launched in 2023 and later Kitchen Supper menus drawing on the same dry-ageing fridges, shellfish tanks and daily landings. That matters because the place is not only a dining counter; it is a working set of tools made available to different hands. Carreira’s fish-ageing discipline remains the grammar of the room, even as the pass opens to other cooks. Brixham turbot is in the cabinet at Arch 337 Acton Mews.