Archway, Battersea Park

Firstly, I have a confession to make. Many years ago I was very kindly treated to lunch at the River Café in Hammersmith, and I didn't like it. I think I was mainly intimidated - by the well-heeled crowd, the scale and the power of that vast dining room and open kitchen, and yes, by the prices, astronomical figures seemingly chosen only to be as shocking as possible to anyone who wasn't a multi-millionare. I gave it a rather grumpy review, then vowed never to return.

Years later, though, I did go back. The River Cafe staff are given very generous discounts from time to time, and encouraged to bring along anyone they want to share the fun. So, curious to see if they - or indeed I - had changed over the years, I found myself taking an afternoon off and joining a staffer friend for lunch.

And I had the time of my life. Everything was briliant, from the atmosphere in that cavernous room to the friendly but extremely capable staff to the exquisitely tasteful and seasonal wood-grilled Italian food, it seemed to be the kind of place where it would be impossible not to enjoy yourself unless you had a giant wood-fired chip on your shoulder, and I felt incredibly stupid for having denied myself it all these years. And if you're thinking "well, he would like it as he wasn't paying", guess what - as soon as that lunch was over I made myself another booking in a couple of weeks' time and paid in full. And I had the time of my life all over again.

So what's all this got to do with Archway? Well, most obviously, it was set up by ex-River Cafe staff, and if nothing else the Hammersmith place has a fantastic track record of sending out its alumni to propagate fantastic pasta around the country. We have them to thank for such names as Sonny Stores in Bristol, Trullo in Islington, and the sadly-departed Zucca in Bermondsey, although we do also have them to blame for Jamie Oliver so the less said about that the better. Anyway, now SW11 has its own little slice of Tuscany-on-the-Thames, and on a wet Wednesday evening I headed down an unlikely dark alleyway underneath Battersea Park station to see if it could carry on the noble tradition.

From an attractively short and straightforward menu, first to arrive were flatbreads, fresh out of a wood-fired oven, one topped with leeks soaked in "brown crab meat butter" (that's poetry right there) and another with gorgonzola, figs and honey. In both, the bread was the star - full of life and crunch and comfort - and though I obviously preferred the one topped with "brown crab meat butter" (I mean, duh), they were both very impressive bits of baking. A good start.

But it was with the arrival of the first pasta dish that Archway really flexed its River Café muscles. Cavatelli with beef ragu was - and I'm not using these words lightly - completely and utterly perfect. Perfect pasta with a perfect bite, a perfect tomato-red wine sauce studded with rich ground beef, perfectly seasoned, perfectly served. Yes, you'd hope a modern Italian restaurant with such a pedigree should be able to knock out a decent bowl of pasta but this was clearly a world class bit of cooking, astonishingly good.

Equally good - and so yes, perfect again - was pappardelle with mushrooms, brown butter and sage, another heavenly combination of bouncy fresh ribbons of pasta, seasonal funghi and heady herbs all soaked in a silky buttery sauce. As a not-very-good cook myself, and particularly when it comes to fresh pasta, I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what sets the good pasta restaurants apart from the great, apart from the fact that some make me pleasantly surprised, and some make me with giddy with utter joy. Archway fits in the latter group.

Fregola "risotto" (fregola are little balls of pasta a bit like tapioca, but nicer obviously) was the base for a selection of fresh clams and mussels studded with just enough chilli to provide and nice buzz above the seafood. There's something incredibly satisfying about eating a forkful of fregola soaked in salty seafood broth, lighter than a risotto but packing the same flavour punch. Dangerously moreish.

As possibly one of the finest pasta restaurants in the country, you really don't need another reason to visit the place. But I'm happy to report that a giant butterflied mackerel was a great demonstration of Archway's skill with grilled fish. The mackerel itself was immaculate, with a dark, crisp skin holding a good amount of fat next to soft and perfectly-timed flesh, and though it would have been nice to have crunchy cubes of toast instead of soggy tomato-bread, the "panzanella" salad dressing was otherwise very nice.

Desserts were generous of portion and of flavour. The strawberry creme brulee was my own favourite, topped with chunks of steeped berries so full of summer colour they practically glowed. And although to this day we couldn't quite decide every ingredient that formed the "torta della nonna" (and completely forgot to ask at the time), the custard filling was expertly balanced by a nice delicate pastry crust. And that's probably all you need to know.

In the interests of this post not turning into a completely two-dimensional gush-fest, I feel duty-bound to point out two things I didn't quite get at Archway. Firstly, the wine list is presented in a font so miniscule, and the lighting in the room was so "romantic", that nobody on our table could read it, so we ended up just pointing at a price and hoping for the best. Fortunately, the Archway's choice of house white is as tasteful as the rest of their operation, so all ended well. Secondly, there are two identical unmarked doors off the main dining room; one leads to the toilets, the other to a store cupboard and office. So there's a potential problem there.

But I am nitpicking, and the fact is there's very little to fault about Archway. Service was friendly and enthusiastic, the room is nicely proportioned (although I think some would find the tables a little too close together, depending on your elbow-room requirements) and the vast open kitchen, stretching back three times as far as the dining room is long, as far as I could gather, is a wonderful focal point and endlessly entertaining as you watch bits and pieces being moved in and out of the wood ovens and grills. And at £64pp it's even at the lower end of the London 2023 restaurant budget spectrum. But never mind all that - just go and eat the pasta. Everything else is a footnote.

9/10

Noci, Islington

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

Sonny Stores, Bristol

Trips away from home have taken on a certain extra wide-eyed, frantic edge since the beginning of the pandemic, a nerve-shattering combination of not knowing how long these freedoms will last and a disbelief we've even been allowed out at all. In Bristol for my birthday weekend I felt a particular obligation to fill each day with as many bars, and restaurants, and activities as possible and so within 5 minutes after we'd arrived at Temple Meads we'd checked in at the Hilton Garden Inn (£50/night, clean, lovely staff, very highly recommended) and flagged an Uber to take us to Southville and lunch.

Sonny Stores feels, at first, like an unlikely location for a dynamic young modern Italian restaurant, tucked away at the end of a quiet terraced street and with only residential buildings visible in every direction. In fact, its isolation is somewhat of an illusion - bustling North Street with its shops, restaurants and breweries is barely a few steps away, and besides, Bristol isn't exactly the biggest city in the world. One of the joys of spending a weekend here is that you can essentially walk everywhere, and there are some fantastic pedestrianised routes through places like the Christmas Steps and Clifton which really show off the place to stunning effect.

The Sonny Stores cocktail list is short and - with one bizarre exception - traditional. The list is on a small chalkboard and read (from memory) something like "Negroni / Aperol Spritz / Bellini / Spaggly Waggly". Of course, we had to ask, and it turns out a "Spaggly Waggly" is a "supercharged Negroni" which of course made us want to order it even more. And very nice it was too, with a dash of (presumably) prosecco sitting very comfortably beside the usual vermouth, Campari and gin.

Very soon after arrived a little bonus unordered nibble of fried polenta, all soft and light and lovely. As an introduction to the way they do things at Sonny Stores it was very impressive - good ingredients treated well, straightforward without being simple (as anyone who's ever had horrid crumbly mealy polenta before will attest). *SEE EDIT

Sweetbreads came draped in lardo, because... well, because everything about the idea of sweetbreads draped in lardo is brilliant. Some chicory - sorry, tardivo - shoots added a bit of vegetal bitterness, and a delicate buttery dressing tied it all together. Like polenta, sweetbreads aren't always the most cooperative things when it comes to getting a good texture, but these were absolutely perfect, crisp and golden brown on the outside and soft inside.

A pizzetta arrived next, obscenely inflated around a central reservoir of Reblochon-a-like Rollright cheese and studded with shallots (I think), guanciale and rosemary. There was a lot going on here, but it all worked thanks to a genuinely great pizza base and - again - absolutely top-notch ingredients.

Paying someone to open a can of anchovies for you is a situation that I know some struggle with, but then the same people are often quite happy to order wine in a restaurant and I can't really see a difference. There's only a problem if it's bad wine - or bad anchovies - but these were of course excellent, firm and meaty in good oil.

Cuttlefish, served in their own (I assume) ink with braised fennel and gremolata brought not only a riot of herby, salty flavour but also the joy of seeing your friends tongues turn black as the afternoon wore on. We should all be eating more cuttlefish, too - it's one of the best types of seafood in terms of sustainability and it tastes great. Well, it tastes great when it's cooked by Sonny Stores, at least.

And so to pasta, and given the pedigree of the kitchen (ex- River Café chef Pegs Quinn) you'd expect their work on this front to be world-class too. And cavolo nero pappardelle certainly were, gently al-dente, soaked in butter and richly flavoured with a generous topping of pecorino. At £15 for not a huge amount you could sense the influence of the River Café in another way, but this was still a lovely thing and definitely worth the outlay.

Unfortunately, pork agnoli were not quite so enjoyable thanks to some catastrophic overseasoning. The pasta was still excellent, and 'nutmeg butter' lived up to the billing and then some, but the pork filling was so salty it just made the whole business a bit painful, a shame given how everything preceeding it had been spot-on. A mis-step then, but not enough to derail the entire meal.

In fact we were so confident the agnoli was no more than a blip that we ordered both desserts (along with, ahem, a round of Fernet Branca). Tiramisu was ethereally light and delicately coffee-fied, and so easy to eat you could practically inhale it.

And a chocolate cake was straightforwardly excellent, gooey but still holding an attractive shape, and cooled with crème fraîche.

Though it's fair to say I raised an eyebrow at the prices of the pasta dishes, the fact our huge, hugely boozy and hugely enjoyable lunch came to just over £50/head in my opinion puts it firmly in bargain territory. I pretty sure you'd pay more at my favourite London pasta joint Bancone (though not much more) and if this was the River Café itself... well, let's not even imagine. These last couple of years have been traumatic enough.

In a weekend full of good food, good booze and various other not entirely unrelated incidents (well done the staff at Bristol Royal Infirmary A&E who managed to patch up a broken foot in just over an hour on a Monday morning) this lunch at Sonny Stores stands as a shining example of the best of Bristol's restaurant scene and I couldn't have imagined a better birthday lunch. While not absolutely perfect, it overwhelmingly impressed in so many areas (service was also fantastic) and for such a reasonable amount of money that it goes right to the top of my list of favourite restaurants in the city. And next time I'm in town, whenever that may be (and who knows anything any more), I will be returning.

8/10

EDIT: These were in fact not polenta but chickpea pancakes, which explains why they were better than the usual polenta...

The Italian Greyhound, Marylebone

In a handsome old building in Marylebone, life in post-covid Britain appears to be creeping back to normal. Staff scoot about in smart uniforms, the tinkle of fine glassware fills the air, and a relieved and deeply grateful public (which would include me) are settling back into a routine that God Knows I hope won't hit a brick wall again.

I had a hugely enjoyable evening at the Italian Greyhound in Marylebone - it's early days for the new kitchen, nobody running a hospitality venue is having a particularly relaxing time of it at the moment, and the quality of the ingredients and technique on display was well worth shouting about. And if everything arrived with at least two or three - sometimes more - bits and pieces too many, which tended to distract from what would otherwise been an even more impressive display of Italian classics, well, who cares. I'm still out and about and eating.

Having said all that, I actually thought the cocktails on offer had been modified from the classics for the better - putting oregano in a Negroni is a very clever move, the flavour of the herb combining incredibly well with the other bitters and aromatics. Similarly a 'Smoked Negroni' worked incredibly well, not too bonfire-y and nicely presented. Pretty big measures on both, too.

I can see the way their mind was working, providing a medley of summer herbs and veg alongside a burrata, but I think you probably needed either asparagus or broad beans, not both, and perhaps the asparagus would have been nicer just presented as whole stalks rather than chopped up into bits and doused in oil and red pepper. But you know what, these were still good ingredients cooked well, and it all got polished off.

Smoked yellowfin tuna was a revelation - I believe they smoke it themselves, and the salty, earthy flavour of the fish itself combined with a luxurious texture was like a cross between the finest carpaccio and top-end smoked salmon. The caperberries were lovely too actually although I think it would have fared just as well without the cress or celery. Definitely on the must-order list though, no question.

Octopus, tender and nicely seasoned, came with daintily-peeled cherry tomatoes and celery leaves, and I do appreciate the effort to use every bit of the vegetables across a variety of dishes. This star of this dish though wasn't the celery, or the octopus, but some cubes of potato which were just about the sweetest and softest little bombs of flavour I can remember any potato ever being. I was so impressed, I asked what they were and was told a special name which I have since completely forgotten. Sorry. I bet if you asked them they'd tell you, though.

Onto the pasta dishes, and I imagine you know the drill by now. The pasta was fantastic, just the right side of al-dente and a joy to eat. Similarly the slow-cooked lamb (shoulder I think) was full of flavour and not a hint of chewiness, it just dissolved in the mouth. And there they could have stopped and had an absolute winner, except instead they decided to cover it all with breadcrumbs and herbs which, you know, weren't horrible just a bit distracting and pointless.

Even more "busy" was ricotta ravioli which as well as containing more beautifully done pasta, all silky and buttery and with a fantastic bite, had a ratatouille tipped on top of it, courgettes and tomatoes and pine nuts. Without the ratatouille this would have been one of the great London ravioli dishes - in fact, look it was one of the great London ravioli dishes, if you ignored the ratatouille.

Last of the savouries was a superbly cooked fillet of sea bream, skin nice and crisp and flesh inside just-so, a work of art by itself that didn't at all need the "aquapezzo" (lit. crazy water) broth underneath. I am not such an extremist that I would recommend they serve the fish literally on a plate with nothing else, but the aquapezzo was rather bland and the textures rather confused the experience of eating the fish.

Ironically - and wonderfully - when it comes to desserts the Italian Greyhound have decided simplest is best. Cherry and almond tart was a fine old thing, boasting a nice crunch and with a soft sugary filling of plenty of cherries. And a raspberry & prosecco sorbet just let its ingredients absolutely sing - no weird dressing, no confusion of flavours, just two blobs of pure summer loveliness. Where was this judiciousness in the savoury courses?

It sounds like I've been moaning a lot, and I have I suppose, but sometimes it's just easier to cover everything (in the correct spirit in which it is intended) than to attempt to sugar-coat the sorbet. As you can see from the score below, I had a nice time at the Italian Greyhound, and I do recommended it, I just wish they'd have a bit more confidence in their incredibly good pasta and raw ingredients and give them a bit more space to shine in their own right. On the other hand, you could go and decide all the dishes are perfect and you like it just how it is. All opinions are available.

7/10

I was invited to the Italian Greyhound and didn't see a bill. Imagine with wine/cocktails you should expect to pay about £50/head, which is about right for somewhere this smart in Marylebone. EDIT: It's occurred to me that the first paragraph way way too harsh considering everything that followed, so I've tweaked it a bit.