Officina 00, Old Street

I've not been to New York for a few years now, and it's probably not a good idea to go there at all at the moment given that indoor dining is still outlawed, but I seem to remember restaurants there being incredibly dark. More than once I ended up having to illuminate my menu using the torch on my iPhone, and stubbed my toe on someone else's chair feeling out for the route to the bathroom. I appreciate that the clandestine lighting scheme has its fans, and certainly atmosphere is important - more important than I'd care to admit sometimes - but I also reserve the right to fully appreciate what I'm being asked to eat, and not have to stab blindly at a vaguely plate-sized area in front of me in the hope that some of my attempts might return something edible.

It's via the awesome power of Adobe Photoshop, then, that I'm able to show you the rustic visual appeal of the dishes at Officina 00 because once the sun goes down (and the days are only going to get shorter) the candlelit dining room becomes so dim that it's only thanks to one of the Covid safety precautions - online menus on a backlit mobile screen - that I was able to figure out what was on offer at all. The menu in question though, fortunately, is a short and sweet list of tasteful Italian classics in the Padella or Bacone vein. And that I'm risking invoking the name of those two Mediterranean titans shows you that Officina compares pretty well with them indeed.

First though, a white Negroni - that's clear vermouth (Martini bianco) and Italicus liqueur instead of the usual Campari. Were it not for the olive garnish it would look for all the world like a glass of iced water, but it tasted great - if anything, more balanced and less bitter than a "normal" Negroni, and joins the list of great "clear versions of cocktails" alongside Bob Bob Ricard's Clear Bloody Mary and, er, well I'm sure there's another example somewhere.

A single large raviolo, made from good firm (though not overly so) pasta was seasoned with parmesan shavings and broke open delightfully to reveal a soft yolk centre. Sure, in these days of star pasta restaurants and new wave Italian cuisine this could very be the kind of thing you've seen done before, but it's never less than a delight to crack one of these open no matter how many times you have the opportunity to do so.

What's more unusual is seeing home made sausage on an Italian restaurant menu, and these were very fine things, all salty and porky and richly flavoured, arriving with caramelised onions and a white wine and sichuan pepper sauce. It takes a special kind of effort - not to mention skill set - to produce your own sausages, and especially to end up with a product as notable as this. Consider me impressed.

House bread was a nice tacky sourdough with a fantastic dark, brittle crust and came with whipped parmesan butter, which was every bit as enjoyable as you might hope "whipped parmesan butter" might be. And I'm sorry about the photo but it's only now after post-processing I know what they looked like myself.

Not everything was completely perfect. Linguine was underseasoned and quite claggy and dense, and though the clams were nice there weren't quite enough of them. Also, I wonder at the logic of dressing the dish with raw, rather bitter oregano leaves, which were rather odd and distracting. Either fry them in butter first, or just incorporate them into the sauce - either would have been an improvement I think. Still, all said and done this was a portion of fresh pasta and fresh clams, and still got eaten.

More successful was papardelle with porky meatballs, boasting yet more lovely lively pasta and a big dollop of cooling burrata on top. I mean, if you're the kind of person that can't enjoy papardelle in tomato sauce with meatballs, then there's probably no hope for you. I am not, thankfully, one of those people.

Good pasta restaurants, like Padella and Bancone and yes, Officina 00, make it all look so easy. It's "just" pasta, isn't it? Surely nowhere with a license to serve food and a predeliction for Italian classics should be stumped by the requirements of handmade tagliatelle, or the constituent parts of a decent passata. Even if you aren't going to stretch to making your own pork sausage or can't work out how to keep the yolk runny in an egg raviolo, surely the basics are exactly that - basic?

Except, experience suggests, they're anything but. Good pasta bars are still a rarity in London because this stuff is not easy - you have to know exactly what you're doing at every step of the process, and even the most experienced (and certainly the most expensive) places can slip up. Officina 00 is not the perfect pasta restaurant - if such a thing even exists - but by virtue of enthusiasm and effort and a genuinely deep understanding of the food they're serving, is absolutely worth the money they're asking for it and then some. I enjoyed it very much on the night, and now looking back at the lightened photos I'm even more convinced. Go to Officina, and you'll see for yourself. Just bring a torch.

8/10

I was invited to Officina 00 and didn't see a bill. Menu is here though, and changes daily.

Nuala, Old Street

It's a sign of just how old I and my peer group in London are getting that meals in fancy new restaurants often begin with a period of reminiscing about the previous use - or uses - of the building we happen to find ourselves in. I remember this particular spot on City Road, when I worked in the area in around 2008, being home to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but my dining companion last night's knowledge of the area stretches back even further, to when it was apparently a grim, bare-bones nightclub with blacked-out windows and murky reputation. That was when you'd occasionally catch Noel Fielding in the Dragon Bar just over the road, and a pint cost £4. Yes, that far back.

Anyway, in the now-almost-unrecognisable Silicon Roundabout, up pops Nuala, as flashy and "designed" as befits the area but with a welcome as warm and kind as an Irish mammy. Yes, Nuala takes a certain inspiration from the Emerald Isle as head chef Niall Davidson (formerly of, well, lots of places but most recently Chiltern Firehouse) hails from there, but the menu is far from traditional and has rather more Dalston than Dalkey about it. The friendliness and charm of the front of house, though, seems very Irish.

From "Snacks" (you'll know how the menu is organised if you've eaten at another cutting-edge British-Irish restaurant, the Dairy, in the last few years) we tried cod's roe crackers, superb smooth, salty tarama on top of delicate corn crisps, and neat discs of home made soda bread, sweet and soft, topped with shavings of foie gras and enchanting ribbons of preserved clementine.

"Crab salad in chilled cucumber broth" performed the intricate task of balancing white and brown crab meat utterly perfectly - just enough brown to have that earthy umami kick, sweetened with just the right amount of white - and the "broth" - in fact more like a gel - had a clean, defined cucumber taste. It was the kind of crab dish you always hope to find on a menu like this, but it's by no means a given that every kitchen can pull it off. Nuala managed it though.

Then the best sweetbreads I can remember eating in a long time. Huge, beautiful things, glazed with a superb meaty jus and without a hint of the mealiness that can affect lesser examples, they would have been astonishingly successful even without the "cauliflower rarebit", rich and smokey from the open grill, which accompanied them. Much like the crab dish, you hope when you see something like this on a menu it will live up to the promise, but only very rarely is it realised quite so brilliantly.

Rabbit is another tricky meat to get right - cooked well, it can be lean and gamey without being dry, but I've lost count of the number of times I've been presented with vaguely rabbity lumps of cotton wool, in otherwise even quite accomplished restaurants. Needless to say, at Nuala they know what they're doing with a bit of bunny, and a lovely grilled leg was presented alongside a couple of medallions of stuffed loin, all of it beautifully moist. Chunks of salt-baked celeriac sat in a subtle cream sauce studded with samphire, and added up to a very rewarding plate of food indeed.

Even superficially more straightforward dishes had plenty to recommend them. True, rump is often a chewier cut of cow, ordered often with the tacit understanding that whatever you lose in texture you'll gain in taste. And yes, although it took a bit of chewing, the taste from this beautiful bit of steak, Torloisk Highland cattle cooked to medium-rare over the coals and funky with a good deal of dry-aging, was well worth the effort and then some. This producer is a new one to me, but I will certainly be looking out for it on menus in the future.

It's at this point in lesser restaurants, whether the savoury courses had been mediocre or even quite good, that, sated and slowing, we'd pay up and leave. However we were having such a blast at Nuala that not only did we not dash home after mains but, having come to the conclusion that this kitchen could basically do no wrong, we decided to order all the desserts. So, a char-grilled pineapple, delicately filleted and arranged into a pretty yellow rose was joined by a quenelle of buttermilk/lime sorbet...

...pumpkin ice cream boasted a fantastic sliky-smooth texture that only the very best home made ice cream has, and a chocolate and coffee affair had a nice big caffeine kick paired with cool, light dairy. All of it was polished off so thoroughly they could have re-used the artful stoneware without use of a pot-washer.

There's a lot of pessmism blowing aroud the London restaurant scene lately. Some of it, no doubt, is well-founded; the effect Brexit will have on our ability to attract quality talent from Europe and the world is yet to be quantified, and ingredient inflation is already making things very difficult for Spanish and Italian restaurants (and many others) who import much of their menus. But however easy it is to succumb to fear and despair, and however much the following months and years may give us reason to do so, it seems London's restaurants, for now, have decided to just sod it all and carry on being brilliant anyway. So, the best advice I can give is to make a booking at Nuala immediately and make the bloody most of it.

9/10

On The Bab, Shoreditch

From the top deck of the bus at Vauxhall this weekend I noticed a large electronic billboard advertising what seemed like some horrid new reality TV show. "StEaX and the City", you would be forgiven for assuming, involves couples competing against each other in a series of increasingly difficult steak-related challenges for the chance to have sex in a box in a TV studio. Except, it isn't. It's actually the name of a "American themed steakhouse fusion with Japanese kitchen", with a name apparently chosen by a guy who likes to be known as the "wacky one" in the office. God save us from other people's idea of comedy.

But if "S***X and the City" (sorry I can't even bring myself to type it out in full) makes you want to cleave your own head in with a meat tenderiser, it takes a special kind of courage (or complete naive obliviousness) to open a restaurant whose name brings to mind feminine hygiene. "Do you fancy a Korean tonight?" "No thanks darling, I'm On The Bab. I'll just have some cheese on toast then finish off that box of Thorntons in front of Downton Abbey." Which is a shame, because the food at this tiny little Old Street restaurant certainly deserves better than the name it's been given, and deserves to do rather well.

Negatives (name aside) first. As I say, it's a tiny little place and they've crammed a greedy number of tables in - the functional decor and rotating cabinet of bulgogi buns behind the counter add to the Seoul street food vibe, but knocking elbows with your fellow diners is never going to be a wholly enjoyable experience however authentic it is. And considering how seemingly authentic the menu and everything else was, it was a surprise to discover the beef buns themselves were the biggest disappointment of the evening - soggy and impractically large and containing a filling of bland beef stew, rather like the one of those Old El Paso beef fajita mixes.

Fortunately, everything else was much better. House kimchi was good - only mildly spicy and mildly fermented, but crunchy and colourful and presented in a little metal lidded jar. I'm told that it's normal in Korea to be offered a selection of kimchi in restaurants so diners can choose between different levels of fermentation and heat; it would be nice to have that option somewhere here too. Maybe one day. That next to the kimchi is pa jeon, spring onion & seafood pancakes, soft and satisfying and greaseless.

Our favourite dish was kimchi bokeum bab, described as "bacon paella" (what's not to like) with a fried egg on top. It was rich and salty while not being too heavy, and a decent amount of it for £7.50. The house fried chicken was also a good example of East Asian comfort food, although they could have done with taking more care on the butchery - I found a few bits of chicken bone marrow and gristle, which wasn't particularly fun.

But, at £20 a head for a whole lot of food, most of which was pretty good, we didn't leave hungry or disappointed. Sure, I have a strong feeling this isn't the best that the Korean peninsula has to offer, but it's early days, not just for On The Bab but for Korean food in London generally. One day someone will do for this cuisine what Gymkhana has done for Indian, or Hawksmoor did for the American steakhouse. In the meantime, you can do worse than pop in for a kimchi, cheese & egg omelette and a beer at On The Bab. It could be your monthly treat.

7/10