Review by Matthew Norman, sunday Telegraph, Food:
Service:
Atmosphere:
Matthew Norman.THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE.
Mathew Norman cannot resist joining in the alarming rapture for Locanda Locatelli.
Was there ever, in the history of British restaurants, such as instant smash as Locanda Locatelli? When it opened in March in a hotel off Oxford Street several newspapers had to carry apologies for the stains on the page where reviewers had drooled over their own words, while a call for a table elicited the reply that they'd be thrilled to accommodate is...in about ten weeks time.
It would be tweaking the truth to claim that this level of rapture doesn't bring out the very worst in those of us who prefer to let the hype settle down before finding out whether it was justified. It's like hearing that friends have just bought the most exquisite house. You are thrilled for them, of course. But the day your turn comes to go round and coo, somewhere in your soul a naughty little voice is squeaking, "Please, God, let it have rats and a major structural fault,"
This desire to find the imperfect in everything is, so celebrities like to inform us, that uniquely British trait known by Australians as "tall poppy syndrome" (build 'em up to knock 'em down) - and I can't claim that the chance to redress the balance with Locatelli would have been unwelcome. No one likes to run with the crowd.
Alas, alas and thrice alas, whatever crumbs of journalistic integrity remain oblige me to confess that the crowd was right, and that this is a very special Italian indeed.
The evening did start promisingly when a waiter exhibiting a certain "we are the talk of the town" cockiness refused a request for a copy of the menu to take home. "We donna give it to nobody" he said, his tone suggesting that any further inquiry would be met with, "You aska one more time, you gonna sleep witha da fishes." But from then on, fault was irksomely hard to find.
The decor, a cross between the sort of 1960's nightclub that played "The Girl from Ipanema" on a loop, with a 1970's Consulate advertisement in the back of Vogue in which people sat languidly around wearing Italian shoes, won't be to all tastes. But we thought that the hemispherical cream leather banquettes, curved mirrors and pleasantly dim lighting created the right sort of casual yet mildly sophisticated Eurotrash feel.
Anyway, who gives a damn? Food like this you'd be happy to eat on a silage mound. The menu (the one the donna give to nobody) is packed with novel and intriguing dishes, and no one was disappointed. There was some confusion when someone was given a broad bean and pecorino dish that she hadn't ordered, but this was replaced, quickly and apologetically, with a wonderfully fresh French bean salad with sun-dried tomato and smoky tuna (£8.50).
Both pasta starters were magnificent. My "home-made" taglionni (come now, Giorgio, no one thinks you buy Supersavers) with courgettes and dry tuna roe (£9) was imaginative and spectacular from the first salty taste of the roe to the luxuriant oily after taste. Raviolli with lemon cream and pork ragu (£9.50) was no less original or delicious.
Best of all was simplest of all - a spring salad (£7) of radish, baby carrot, fine beans, peas and endives, all in a dreamy light dressing, that had my wife in so alarming state of rapture that at one point I was close to summoning an ambulance.
"It's like eating fresh air," she enthused (do tramps, when they eat fresh air ever compare it to a spring salad?). "If I were a billionaire, I'd have this flown to me everyday, wherever I was in the world."
I was still musing on the absence of any "we" in this plutocratic fantasy when the main courses arrived. Loin of beef grilled with artichokes (£19.50) lacked the intensity of flavour evident elsewhere, but John Dory with potatoes and peas (£23) was superb, as was red mullet wrapped in capacollo ham and served with borlotti beans (£22). My roast rabbit with parma ham and polentta (£19.50) was incredibly good as well. If I had to split hairs, I might say it was infinitesimally over salted, but, doubtless, that's tall poppy syndrome kicking in once again.
The portions were so healthy that we picked at only one pud - a predictably delectable combination of white chocolate and yogurt with pistachio ice-cream and passion fruit (£7) - and when we became fixated by the playboy figure on the next table (all silver hair and Italian suit), to the point of inventing a life story including marriage at 19 to woman called Allegra who was later uncovered as a Bolton transsexual called Steve, it was clearly time to go.
To think that Giorgio Locatelli, whose extreme talent was obvious when he cooked at Zafferano, can create dishes seldom if ever seen before in Blighty, and find time to make his own pasta...This is one tall poppy, I say without regret, that won't be cut down for some time yet.
Review by Paul Riddell, The Scotsman Sat 9th. December, 2006, Food:
Service:
Atmosphere:
Quite simply the perfect lunch, in every way
The Bill
Lunch for four, £181.70, excluding drinks
NOTHING can adequately prepare you for a visit to this restaurant. No amount of high-flown rhetoric about its food, no lashings of hyperbole about its civilised approach to dining, can quite convey just how good it is.
To truly savour that, you'll have to go there. All I can do - and yes, I admit that I'm failing in my duty here - is give you a little taster and see if it whets the appetite.
If it doesn't, either you do not like Italian food or you are a big Jessie.
We arrive just before 1pm, spat out by the pre-Christmas Oxford Street throng onto a near-deserted backstreet; we are still there at 4:15pm, satiated and talking, talking, talking. As are most of the other diners. The waiting staff look almost disappointed when we leave, even though they are beginning to lay tables for dinner.
Here, evidently, is the first condition of good Italian dining, as Giorgio Locatelli, the Michelin-starred owner of this famous restaurant, would have it. Time affords relaxation affords conviviality. (The absence of any Gordon Ramsay-style injunctions against the wearing of jeans and T-shirts helps, too, to dissipate the feeling of stuffiness that is often palpable in high-end restaurants.)
After a long, languid look over the menu, which is extensive without being overwhelming, we plump for starters and main courses - you don't really choose in a place like Locatelli because if you could, you'd have a little of everything.
James's seppa alla griglia (char-grilled cuttlefish, £10) comes bathed in its own ink, which is the colour of a spilled blue biro. It is fresh and soft and delicious. Those epithets apply in spades to Holly's capesante all'aspretto di zafferano (pan fried scallops, saffron viniagrette, £12). It being a beautiful, cold, crisp, clear London day, Ruth and I are rather pleased with our winter-warming strozzapreti al ragú di cervo (pasta with venison ragout, £7). The pasta is al dente, the sauce rich, the tiny chunks of meat jaw-achingly tasty. All this is washed down with an examplary Pinot Grigio. Yum.
So good are the starters that we worry about the arrival of the main courses: can they really live up to what has just gone before? The best of them is undoubtedly Holly's medaglioni di cervo, porcini, crema fritta e radicchio (medallions of venison with pan-fried cream and radicchio, £28). The venison is gorgeously tender and cooked (pink in the middle) to perfection. James and I descend on the piece she can't manage like vultures - in the interests of research, of course.
James's filetto di branzino in crosta d'erbe e sale (fillet of wild sea bass baked in salt and herb crust, £29.50) is textbook stuff.
Ruth and I, meanwhile, both have tonno alla griglia con insalata di rucola e pomodorini (char-grilled tuna with wild rocket and cherry tomatoes, £22), which reminds us - at precisely the same instant - of a marvellous holiday a couple of years ago in Sicily.
The art of char-grilling a tuna steak requires a master craftsman to get that seared, smoky taste on the outside while leaving the flesh lovely and pink in the middle; Locatelli most emphatically has the touch (and we know it is him and not an understudy because he occasionally floats into the restaurant with his dirty chef's whites on to chat with customers).
To accompany our main courses, we share an exquisite Amarone. Without wanting to come over all Oz Clarke on you, we really could taste those rich, heavy grapes drying in the sun by the side of Lake Garda.
Speaking of indulgence, three of us went on to have dessert. To say that the Italians specialise in dessert is somehow to downgrade the magnificence of their cuisine more generally, but these are divine.
James and I (he'd been in the gym that morning, I'd been walking for miles around central London: guilt factor, zero) have mousse di castagne, spuma tiepida di cioccolato, crema di timo limone e gelato al brandy (chestnut mousse, warm chocolate foam, lemon thyme cream and brandy ice-cream, £7) while Holly has millefoglie di mele caramellate, sorbetto alla mela (caramelised apple "millefoglie" with apple sorbet, £7). I needn't say more.
Ambience, excellent; food, stunningly good. What about the look? Locanda mixes contemporary minimalism - dark wooden floor, glass partitions, abstract artworks - with retro furniture - cream leather circular booths with matching cream leather rotating chairs which scream 1970s at you, but which do not look in the least out of place.
But perhaps the most notable feature of the restaurant is the staff, who know everything about the menu, and so can answer anything from the smallest query about the special dishes of the day to where the mozzarella has come from; and, above all, are exceptionally friendly, jovial and unintimidating. In London, these are not attributes you can ever take for granted.
They are all paid well, of course, which is pleasing. So it does all come from the top, from a chef at the top of his game who is likely to be there for many years.
Go see for yourself.
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