Dalla, Hackney

The comparisons with my last post won't be immediately obvious, but within the context of their own chosen cuisines Josephine Bouchon and Dalla are doing rather similar things. Both have a very strong and educated sense of what it means to cook French or Italian food. Both do so with skill and flair, showcasing said cuisine at its very best. And - crucially - both leave you wondering why so few other places seem to be able to do this kind of thing so bloody well.

Very like the Chelsea place, as soon as you step inside Dalla you want to stay there. True, tables can be a little bit close together (this is also true of Josephine... sorry I'll stop talking about that restaurant now) but it's a bright, buzzy, attractive little spot that seems absolutely machine-tooled for its job as a neighbourhood restaurant. A tiny open kitchen in the corner fizzes with activity (and seems home to about twice as many chefs as looks comfortable) and the welcome from front of house couldn't be more, well, welcoming.

All of which would mean nothing if the food wasn't any good, but here's the thing - Dalla serves some of the best Italian food I've ever had in London, or in Italy. Dishes which look exciting enough on paper arrive as the absolute very best versions of themselves, and often with a little extra unexpected twist that pushes them to even further greatness. These are Cornish sardines, which I would have been happy enough with just simply grilled whole, but at Dalla they're meticulously deboned and served warm fresh off the grill with a lovely sharp garlic vinaigrette.

Steak tartare avoided many of the pitfalls of lesser versions by being properly seasoned and containing nice big chunks of soft lardo. But the unexpected twist in this dish was the addition of toasted walnuts - and very good walnuts too, not the horrid bitter ones you get in British supermarkets - providing an extra texture and buttery nuttiness. It all added up to one of the better raw beef dishes I've enjoyed in years.

Next up, a silky-smooth slice of excellent sheep's milk ricotta alongside a deeply-flavoured caponata. It still seems strange, as a meat-eater, describing a vegan dish (I mean the caponata, not the cheese of course) as deeply-flavoured but as is often said, the best vegan dishes are vegan because they're supposed to be made like that, and aren't just vegetarian or meat or fish dishes with the dairy or protein taken out (or - worse - replaced with ultra-processed vegan alternatives). I am now a committed caponata fan.

I was torn on the next dish - not because it wasn't brilliant, because it was - but because I always have a problem with divided loyalties comparing the Italian style of anchovies on toast with the Catalan style with tomato and olive oil of holidays of my youth. But I suppose there's room for both in the world, and needless to say these were fantastically enjoyable, the thick layer of dairy matching the salty cured fish and neither element overpowering the other. But the twist towards greatness in this dish came in the form of a sprinkling of lemon zest, adding a fragrant, citrussy sweetness on the finish. Very clever stuff.

It should come as no surprise, then, given everything that had come before, that Dalla can also do world-class pasta. Tagliatelle with venison ragù was about as good as this dish gets (I imagine), the firm, fresh pasta topped with a deeply satisfying, gamey sauce studded with big satisfying chunks of the good stuff. It's one of the more baffling mysteries of Italian food in London that even in 2025 so few places can do a decent pasta dish (good pizza is everywhere, by comparison), but then I suppose that's all the more reason to celebrate when somewhere like Dalla comes along.

But if the ragù was excellent, this bowl of passatelli with lentils was close to life-changing. Lentils make a superb ingredient in a pasta dish, their vaguely soily, fatty texture binding together the pasta and the other ingredients to make hugely a satisfying bite. But the touch of genius here was the addition of red mullet broth, a powerfully-flavoured fish that can often, in the wrong hands, be a bit too fishy, but as a seafood stock used to infuse pasta and lentils made for heady, salty, seafood perfection. I've honestly never eaten anything quite like it.

Wikipedia tells me that saltimbocca is a dish of sage-and-prosciutto-wrapped veal, although thanks to London's seemingly endless capacity to never do what it's told I've had pigeon, guinea fowl and chicken versions of the dish in the past but never veal. Anyway I now have lemon sole saltimbocca to add to the list, and can confirm it works incredibly well, the dense, meaty flesh of the (again, meticulously deboned) sole seasoned and complexified by the ham and sage. Maybe one day I'll try the veal. I bet it won't be as good.

We never wanted lunch to end, and so ordered three out of the four sweets on offer. Apple tart was warm and soft and moist, with generous chunks of sweet poached apple and a nice sharp dollop of crème fraîche (or whatever the Italian equivalent is, sorry Italians) on the side.

Tiramisu I didn't try - I can't do caffeine - but I mean it looks alright doesn't it?

But pannacotta - so often a lazy pub dessert afterthought - was genuinely great, so ethereally light it practically disappeared in the mouth leaving a heady note of vanilla-flecked dairy and lovely sharp-sweet saba (a syrupy liquid made from grape must). I thought pannacotta was boring - it just turned out I'd never had it before.

If I was finding it hard to criticize anything about Dalla, then that wasn't about to change with the arrival of the bill. With plenty of wine, more than enough food - all of which was unimprovable - and including service that never put a foot wrong, the cost per person was £72. I'm so used to being shocked at the price of eating out in London in a bad way that the pleasant surprise of being nearly £30 under my contactless limit was a rare and precious thing indeed.

So it's no surprise that tables at Dalla are as rare as Italian speciality-breed hen's teeth. It takes a lot to stand out in a city that eats as well so regularly as London and yet this unassuming little bistro in a bleak, graffiti-strewn stretch of Hackney already feels like the future - an intelligent, flatteringly accessible take on modern Italian food that has deference to tradition and yet the confidence to stamp their own personality on dishes that are never less than great, and often extraordinary. It is, in short and in all probability, one of the best restaurants in town. What else do you need to know? Just go.

10/10