Theoretically there's no reason why there couldn't be an exciting, modern mid-range Italian restaurant in every corner of London. If the wild successes of Padella and Bancone have taught us anything, it's that Londoners love a good fresh pasta dish, and are more than willing to join a long and slow queue in whatever inclement weather the city decides to throw at us, as long as at the end of it we can enjoy a nice plate of cacio e pepe and an Aperol spritz.
However, as you may have noticed, there isn't an exciting, modern mid-range Italian in every corner of London, and genuinely accomplished (and affordable) pasta dishes are few and far between. For every Padella with its exquisitely tasteful and masterfully constructed take on the classics, there's a Norma, their bull-in-a-china-shop attitude to ingredient combinations yielding some pretty distressing results. And for every Bancone, whose striking silk handkerchief pasta topped with egg yolk became an instant classic as well as a genuine sub-£10 bargain, there's chain rubbish like Carluccio's, clogging up our high streets with soggy linguini and overpriced deli tat.
Noci is neither as bad as Carluccio's, nor as good as Bancone, which makes the job of reviewing it rather difficult. It's not that any of the dishes were inedible, they just weren't particularly memorable either, and all the while you get the very strong impression of a solid, well-meaning kitchen attempting to tribute-act their way to success without quite grasping what made the original (the head chef is ex-Bancone) work so well. Take the focaccia, for example - perfectly nice, just not quite enough texture or salt or flavour, and I'm not sure dumping a handful of cold stewed onions on top really achieved much.
Seared tuna steak was, well, fine - bit underseasoned and a tad on the dry side but not too bad. I'm not sure the runner beans did enough of interest to provide a proper accompaniment, and the salsa they were topped with appeared to be not much more than chopped sun dried tomatoes, but it was just about worth the £9.50.
Fried squid were much more my kind of thing - greaseless, nicely seasoned and served with a little pot of bagna cauda. If I'm going to be brutally honest the bagna was a little bit too fatty and without quite enough of a hit of anchovy, but it was still a better starter than the tuna.
We were soon onto the pasta dishes though, all arriving at once which was quite slick of them. People are bound to directly compare the silk handkerchief pasta here with the Other Place, so I might as well too - Noci's isn't as good. In Bancone the dish is a masterclass of cool understatement, beautifully arranged fat flowers of pasta glossy with walnut butter surrounding a single egg yolk. The Noci version was carelessly presented, the two different shades of pasta confusing the eye (I thought the darker ones were mushrooms until I looked closer) and scattered underseasoned funghi doing nothing but distract from the (decent) pasta. The nice bright orange Burford Brown egg was an upgrade though, so I'll give them that.
This was on the menu as "Cacio e pepe bigoli", but the eagle-eyed (and the recently-returned-from-Verona - me) amongst you may have spotted that these aren't bigoli, but in fact bucatini. Perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice. They were OK, but the flavour was quite subdued and the pasta had a strange tackiness, and was nowhere near as good as the heavenly version at Padella.
Veal & pork ragu was rather unpleasantly sweet, possibly from too many aggressively caramelised onions - in fact it was my least favourite of all of the dishes. There was no real meaty hit, it was all a bit bland and characterless, and the pasta (paccheri) had the same cloying texture of the buccatini. Not particularly nice, I'm afraid. Also, although Tête De Moine is perfectly nice in many other contexts, the Italian I was eating with had more than a few words to say about the logic of topping an Italian dish with Swiss cheese, let me tell you.
Much better was lamb open ravioli, which not only had perfectly constructed pasta and lovely rich lamb but, somewhat against expectation, the addition of chive oil not only brought beautiful highlights of shimmering green but also a genuinely interesting extra herby note, really complimenting the meat. One of the more successful dishes, this one.
And lastly, seared scallops, nice in of themselves despite needing a bit more of a crust, but on a bed of pappardelle in cavolo nero sauce so utterly devoid of flavour - despite plenty of pancetta which may as well have been fried cardboard for all the seasoning it provided - that we were finally compelled to ask the front of house for some salt. It helped, but this was still a pretty underwhelming dish, and at £16.50 the most expensive item on the menu.
There were, in the end, bits and pieces to enjoy at Noci. But it all felt like a bit of a tribute act, and much as I can enjoy a tribute act, the fact is, the genuine article is still out there wowing the crowds for about the same amount of money and slightly more style. Eating at Noci is the culinary equivalent of a Bootleg Beatles concert - you have to admire the technique and the effort involved even if the result is ultimately no more than four slightly squishy middle-aged men jiggling about in ill-fitting suits and silly wigs. Only with pasta.
With a bill of £40 each with only a glass of wine, it wasn't back-breakingly expensive, just very slightly pricier than elsewhere, and not as good. And I'm afraid there's no real way of framing that as a recommendation. Of course this being London you can pay a lot more for a lot less, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a thrusting new Italian restaurant in Islington to be aiming a little bit higher than adequate, let alone to live up to the promise of its pedigree. Life's too short for boring pasta.
6/10
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