The Tiny Squid Lighting Up Menus

The East London borough of Hackney has always been in flux: A diverse area characterized by waves of immigration, it has been home to everyone from Romans to Huguenots, West Indians to Turks. These days, it’s known for its creative and tech scenes — the first European edition of the Texas-born South by Southwest festival will take place in Shoreditch, home to London’s Silicon Roundabout, in June. East of Shoreditch, toward Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, you’ll find clusters of Georgian and Victorian houses alongside verdant parks and some of the city’s most interesting boutiques, bakeries and restaurants. At Sesta, which opened on Wilton Way in September close to Hackney Central station, the chef Drew Snaith, a co-founder of the restaurant, updates the traditional Scotch egg with ’nduja Scotch olives and substitutes stone bass for meat in a dish inspired by the Pakistani stew nihari. A 20-minute walk north, at Mambow, its owner, the 30-year-old chef Abby Lee, offers punchy modern Malaysian food paired with gin sours and natural wines. And just above Regent’s Canal, the family-run Miga makes refined Korean food such as beef tartare with Asian pear or pan-fried pork belly with king oyster mushrooms.

In Stoke Newington, in the northern part of Hackney, you’ll find quilted coats and balloon-sleeved raincoats designed on the premises at Sonia Taouhid, and cultish European labels including Folk, Toast and Sideline at the men’s and women’s branches of Array. Then there’s L.F. Markey, a few bus stops south in Dalston, which sells jumpsuits, denim overalls and dresses in joyful primary colors.

But perhaps the biggest changes to Hackney are taking place on its eastern end in the Olympic Park, where in May, the Victoria and Albert Museum is scheduled to debut its V&A East Storehouse. The 172,000-square-foot space will display thousands of objects, including a 15th-century gilded wooden ceiling from the destroyed Altamira Palace in Toledo, Spain, as well as David Bowie’s archive. And near the storehouse, the dance organization Sadler’s Wells has a new zigzag-roofed theater showing contemporary works from both local and international companies; in April, the choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s Skatepark will set the stage with quarter-pipes and ramps, and skateboarders will join the dancers. — Kate Maxwell

For the Rome-based jeweler Bulgari, the snake is definitional. Since 1948, the 140-year-old house has invoked the serpent’s sinuous contours, most often in watches, which over the decades have curled around the wrist both in the abstract tubogas — a flexible band created without soldering — and in realistic interpretations with hinged scales, gemstone eyes and dials hidden in the hissing reptile’s mouth. But for collectors who prefer their Bulgari asp with no purpose other than to adorn, this rose-gold bracelet, embellished with jelly bean green chrysoprase elements, a 3.23-carat cushion-cut Zambian emerald, a pair of buff-top rubies and alternating bands of pavé diamonds, is its own dazzling reward. Bulgari Serpenti Amazonian Enigma bracelet, price on request, (800) 285-4274. — Nancy Hass

Photo assistant: Karl Leitz

Japan’s Firefly Squid Is Embraced by Chefs Stateside

Each spring, hotaru ika, or firefly squid, ascend to the surface of western Japan’s Toyama Bay to spawn, setting the water aglow with pinpricks of electric blue light. Soon after, the finger-size creatures, which owe their luminescence to a chemical reaction similar to the one seen in lightning bugs, start appearing on menus in Japan, where they remain for just a few months. Now, U.S. chefs are embracing the squid as well. Hiroshi Tsuji, 48, remembers fishing for hotaru ika when he was growing up in Japan, where fishermen typically steep them live in soy sauce, mirin and sake. Now, at his omakase spot Sushi Gyoshin in Honolulu, he simmers and then chills them, covering them with chives and yuzu miso and placing one or two atop a piece of sushi. At Nisei in San Francisco, the chef and owner David Yoshimura, 35, pairs the squid with other fleeting springtime ingredients; last year, he served them grilled over miner’s lettuce with a stinging nettle-and-yuzu kosho (yuzu and chile paste) purée. While most squid are gutted before being cooked, firefly squid are tiny enough to consume whole, so “you’re eating the insides, too,” Yoshimura points out. “There’s a lot of umami, a lot of savoriness, a lot of funkiness.” Alex Ching, 33, who was until recently the chef at Kumiko in Chicago, likes to offset that funk with slivered pickled cucumbers and karashi sumiso, a sweetened miso-and-vinegar sauce spiked with hot mustard. And while you’re most likely to find hotaru ika in Asian-inspired restaurants, the seafood counter Little Fish in Los Angeles is an exception. There the squid are dredged in potato starch and fried, the result similar to crispy calamari. “The texture is really fun, almost squeaky,” says Niki Vahle, 32, a Little Fish co-chef and co-owner, with a “deep, cool ocean flavor.” — Martha Cheng

Founded in 1860 by the 20-year-old Edouard Heuer on his family farm in Saint-Imier, Switzerland, the company that would eventually become TAG Heuer began as a maker of pocket watches. Since the mid-20th century, however, the brand has been best known for a much sportier chronograph: the Carrera. Named for the Carrera Panamericana — a notoriously dangerous car race first staged in the early 1950s on the recently completed Mexican section of the Pan-American Highway — it debuted in 1963 with a sleek, unornamented dial that nods to both racecar gauges and the work of Modernist designers like Charles Eames and Le Corbusier. The watch has gone through hundreds of iterations over the years, the latest of which combines a vintage-inspired domed sapphire crystal with an abundance of diamonds: 72 of them set in the watch’s flange, with 11 more marking the hours. The new Carrera Chronograph is available with a blush or Prussian blue face, with coordinating straps in pale pink calfskin or navy alligator — a long way from midcentury modern minimalism, but a sign of our times for sure. — Jameson Montgomery