Sacro Cuore, Kensal Rise

A trick played by every good pizza restaurant, in fact most restaurants of any kind, is to make the very difficult look very easy. Making a good pizza is not easy, not by a long way; you have to use the correct dough made with the correct type of flour, find top-quality (e.g. San Marzano) tomato purée and proper Italian mozzarella. You need a fiercely hot pizza oven, staff who know how to use it, and management skills to ensure consistent quality.

Watching the chefs at Sacro Cuore, however, you'd be forgiven for assuming that making a good pizza is no more demanding than grilling a slice of cheese on toast. Onto briefly-spun dough goes a layer of tomato sauce and a few chunks of cheese. Depending on the order, further toppings may involve some Neopolitan salami or leaves of fresh basil, before the whole thing is flung to the back of the pizza oven then ignored as long as it takes to prepare another one. Finally, without any obvious help other than the chef's own intuition, a perfectly-timed pizza is retrieved from the oven and makes its way to the table.

Whatever they're doing, it's working. A "Bufalina" (£9.45, tomato sauce, posh buffalo mozzarella and basil with an additional aubergine topping for £1.50) was a faultless demonstration of everything that's good about pizza - fantastic tomatoes and a generous amount of salty, stretchy cheese. "Salsiccia & Friarielli" (£10.45) was a pizza bianca (no tomato sauce) with huge lumps of Neopolitan sausage and mounds of moist friarielli (the Neopolitan name for Rapini) nestling in mozzarella. Both were distinguished by their incredible bases, as rich and enjoyable as any flatbread you've ever had, bubbly and crisped up on top and with the kind of chewy bite that makes you want to keep eating until you can eat no more.

There's a very reasonable (and very Italian) wine list, a short but tempting arrangement of starters such as bruschetta and burrata, and a couple of pleasant salads. Service was a little bit wobbly but nothing that can't be excused from a venue open less than a month, and if this new location doesn't quite have the atmosphere (I'm reliably informed) of the Ealing original (this is the 2nd restaurant from the same team), it makes up for it with attractive carpentry and bright floor-to-ceiling windows. It is a very, very nice place to eat.

Needless to say, if it really was as easy as Sacro Cuore makes it look, our high streets would be populated not by the cream-cracker-blandness of Pizza Express or the shallow-fried nastiness of Pizza Hut but with lovely Neopolitan pizza. That they're not - yet - is of course frustrating, but their slow expansion across London alongside fellow pizza masters Franco Manca is a heart-warming sign that things are improving. And once enough people notice the difference, and proper pizza gets the attention it deserves, I'm sure there'll be no stopping them. Today Kensal Rise, tomorrow the world.

8/10

Union Jacks, St Giles

While there were many things wrong with Jamie's Italian, at least the concept was sound. It was the Oliver Empire attempt at a nationwide family-friendly Italian chain in the Carluccio's mold, and though I'd personally rather eat at Pizza Hut (particularly now they've launched a new hot-dog stuffed-crust pizza - mmm) the rate at which Jamie's Italians are now multiplying around the UK means there is definitely still a demand for this kind of thing. In short, a celebrity name above the door can only get you so far - Jamie's Italians have a sense of purpose and a clear sense of identity and these have contributed to its success despite the rather rubbish food.


But what on earth is he up to with Union Jacks? There's a little introduction insert in the menu. "At Union Jacks, we want to take you on a journey of discovery through Britain", it begins, "and reintroduce you to familiar flavours cooked and presented the Union Jacks way." This is all very well, and there's a lot to be said for anywhere that wants to take the use of British ingredients seriously, but as far as I can make out, their radical idea is to take a random collection of famous names - Cropwell Bishop Stilton, Worcestershire sauce, pickled onion, and slap them on top of a cheap pizza base. Except they don't call them pizzas, they call them "flats". Not a pizza, not a pide or some other kind of Middle-Eastern flatbread, but a brand new Great British creation exclusively available at a Union Jacks near you now, and literally nowhere else at any time in history. To launch not just a new restaurant chain but to also single-handedly try to create a new style of cuisine, well, the man has ambition, I'll give him that.


Again, all of which would be fine if all those fancy ingredients weren't all used in such odd ways. Take the "Red Ox", a thin layer of slow-cooked (and fairly decent) oxtail alongside some mushy oniony gloop of some kind, bashed into meek submission by shockingly orange blobs of powerful unpasteurised Sparkenhoe Red Leicester and then finished off with a kilo of watercress. The cardboardy base splintered and snapped when I tried to pick up a slice to eat, and the mix of strong cheese, funky horseradish and bitter greens just made a giant, confusing and faintly disgusting mess. Yes the bread itself was poor and tasteless but it wasn't otherwise cooked badly - these ingredients were just simply never meant to exist together as pizza toppings. Which is presumably why they never ever have anywhere else before.


Still hungry after abandoning great swathes of dry crust from my "flat", I gave Union Jacks a chance to redeem themselves with dessert - a "Retro Arctic Roll". I'm fairly sure when I had Arctic Rolls at the school canteen they didn't come with a fresh summer berry compôte so perhaps the "retro" just means they'd kept it in the freezer longer - that would explain the very crumbly sponge at least. Otherwise this was a very ordinary thing, just about worth £4.50 but hardly worth going back for.


Many of the problems with Union Jacks come from the same place that made Jamie Oliver's other heavily-publicised restaurant Barbecoa so disappointing. Not knowing whether it wanted to be an authentic American BBQ joint or a modern international restaurant showcasing British ingredients, Barbecoa fell awkwardly between these two competing philosophies and never really excelled at anything. The food there was expensive, geographically vague and ultimately mediocre despite the phalanx of chefs having access to a huge open-plan kitchen with as many different types of ovens as anyone could want (or need). Union Jacks have access to some fantastic local produce that we should be very rightly proud of, but dumping them all on a pizza base and calling it cooking is most definitely not the future. At least, I bloody well hope it isn't.

4/10

Pizza Pilgrims and Banh Mi 11, Berwick St, Soho

Berwick Street market in Soho is barely a few months old but the careful selection of fresh greengrocers and hot food stalls gives it the atmosphere of a much more established arrangement. Of course, it is helped by the atmosphere of Soho itself, the stalls nestled in between trendy artisan coffee shops like Foxcroft & Ginger and Flat White, as well as the more, er, "traditional" sex shops and suspiciously threadbare "modelling" agencies. I love Soho - always have - and I hardly needed another reason to toddle down from Holborn on my lunch hour. But the combination of the buzz and shabby glamour of this part of town and some utterly brilliant new ways of spending your £5 lunch money is now even more difficult to resist.

I may be the last blogger on earth to write about Pizza Pilgrims, but before you cry hype-fatigue (and I know there's plenty of you just love being the first to do that), remember only this - they really are that good. I sometimes think pizza is the most abused foodstuff in the capital, and while there have always been a tiny handful of places doing it well (Donna Margherita in Battersea, Franco Manca in Brixton, Due Sardi in Shoreditch), it seems these are a drop in the ocean next to chains like Zizzi's (whose pizzas taste like ketchup smeared on cardboard) and depressing novelty hen-party joints like Fire and Stone.


There's no chicken tikka or Thai green curry abominations at Pizza Pilgrims though, thank God. All their pizzas are made to order, and for the most part are remarkably simple constructions - a smear of San Marzano tomato purée, a few chunks of silky mozzarella, a few leaves of basil. They have the odd special topping, such as n’duja or salami, but the key to their extraordinary good flavour (and believe me, they taste as good as you could possibly hope for) is a solid foundation of great base ingredients, and a stonkingly hot oven housed in the back of a tiny van that looks like it's made of Lego. At £5 for a single portion (I'm guessing about 10", but don't quote me on that), they are also remarkably good value, which would explain the 40 minute queue on my first visit, but I believe this was unusual - outside peak times they can bash them out in a couple of minutes. And anyway, food like this is always worth waiting for.


Just a bit further up the road are old Broadway Market favourites Banh Mi 11. Regulars of their Hackney spot will understand already what all the fuss is about, but for the uninitiated these are doing for the titular Vietnamese sanger what Pizza Pilgrims are doing for pizzas. Into a golden warm baguette is stuffed carrot & radish pickle, cucumber, a handful of fresh coriander, lovely toasted peanuts and crispy dried shallots. Next you choose between a variety of droolsome protein options (I went for "Imperial BBQ" - hot pork marinated in caramel and lemongrass, according to their website) and then the whole lot is covered in a few dollops of fresh green chilli sauce of some kind and a generous slick of Sriracha.


Of course, it's brilliant - the fresh pickles and fragrant herbs lift the rich pork fat, the baguette gives just the right amount of resistance, neither crumbling apart nor giving your jaw too much of a workout, and the texture of the toasted peanuts and Sriracha is an utter joy. There is barely a single element of this sandwich you could change to improve it - the mark of a truly exceptional piece of work - and I can't praise it highly enough.


God knows it's not hard to find reasons to be depressed about the state of British food, many of them documented in miserable detail on these pages, but on the streets of Soho on a sunny afternoon as I tucked into yet another lovingly-crafted and great value lunch, it occurred to me that actually there are far more reasons to be hopeful. The food stalls of Berwick Street have already started spilling over into the top end of Rupert Street, serving Indian dhaals and Ghanaian wraps and fierce-looking Thai curries. Elsewhere in town, too, thanks to the raging success of the Eat.St collective, exciting new street food stalls are met with delirious enthusiasm, and the more popular protagonists have become minor celebrities. There will always be crappy laminated chains peddling gross profits and "black pepper, sir?" but it's becoming increasingly easy to ignore them. And for that we should be truly thankful.

Pizza Pilgrims 9/10
Banh Mi 11 9/10

EDIT: Although Berwick St Market is of course centuries old, I had assumed that the hot food bit was new. Not so, according to David the Pedant, because Freebird burritos have been there for at least 5 years. Shows you how much I know.

The Fish Place, Battersea

As I've often mentioned on this blog, it's a good idea to be deeply suspicious of anywhere that, for whatever reason, doesn't have to try too hard to attract custom. I'm not just talking about West End tourist traps like Aberdeen Angus or TGI Fridays, either; anywhere that can rely on a captive audience (airport bars, motorway service stations) or a celebrity endorsement (any number of terrible Marco Pierre White joints, and certain Ramsay gaffs) can also easily fall into the trap of convincing themselves popularity = quality. I was reminded of this rule while suffering a truly diabolical novelty Christmas "pizza" at Fire and Stone Covent Garden last week, consisting of a tasteless semolina flour base, salty (possibly packet) gravy replacing tomato sauce, and a number of ill-advised toppings attempting to emulate a roast turkey dinner. I have many issues with restaurants nakedly courting the pissed-up office Christmas party crowd, but this pizza was just so bad, so completely and utterly disastrously ill-advised and cheap tasting, that the fact the room we ate it in was rammed made my stomach heave with sadness even more than the toppings on the pizza. Definitely not recommended.


But for every Fire and Stone or Frankie and Benny's or Garfunkels there are, at the other end of the scale, restaurants not gifted with the capital to afford a prime West End spot but which nonetheless bravely attempt to attract custom by just cooking nice food. Sometimes these brave outposts of quality and value attract hoards of paying customers to their remote, undesirable locations and end up becoming local legends - think Sushi Hiro all the way out in Ealing, or Pearl Liang, tucked beneath a windswept office block somewhere near Paddington. Of course, it doesn't always work - Bacchus was great but the wilds of Hoxton were a step too far for the fine diners of London and it eventually closed - but there is no reason why an odd or slightly remote location cannot still host a popular and decent place to eat.


And then there is the Fish Place. To call this area of Battersea remote would be somewhat of an understatement. It's almost as if they don't want to be found - typing the postcode on their website into Google Maps points you towards a backstreet near Clapham Junction but in actual fact the restaurant is buried inside a desolate riverside development near the London Helipad - handy for international superstars or heads of state perhaps, but not for anyone else. I spent a good ten minutes pacing nervously around deserted, badly lit footpaths until I happened upon a tiny laminated sign pointing me down an unlikely dark alleyway between two buildings. It was quite a relief when I found the front door of the restaurant and settled my nerves with a glass of house white.


It's early days at the Fish Place so to criticise the house bread for being toasted instead of fresh is perhaps a bit harsh, and there was plenty of it. An amuse of scallop ceviche was fantastic though - citrusy and sweet without losing the distinct flavour of raw seafood.


Dorset crab ravioli was even more impressive. Bringing to mind some of the superb seafood pasta dishes at The Square, fresh crab, excellent pasta and a rich herby cream/seafood sauce sat on top of al dente cabbage. I imagine there would be some people not unlucky enough to possess my battered tastebuds that may consider it rather aggressively seasoned - however, I thought it was perfect.


As an experiment to see if the kitchen was as happy with meat as with fish, I ordered venison for my main, which came with very seasonal (and very nice) roast pumpkin and a little fan of some kind of dauphinoise potato. The venison itself, if I'm going to be picky, was perhaps not the gamiest tasting protein I've ever enjoyed, but the flavour of the meat was secondary anyway to a completely brilliant truffle sauce which was just about the best example of its kind I've had in years. I could just not get enough of it. And yes, in case you're wondering, that is a slice of pear providing sweet counterpoint to the other savoury ingredients.


Just before dessert arrived a very sharp palate cleanser of gin and tonic sorbet, headily (and excitingly) alcoholic and so cold it made the spoon stick to my tongue on every bite.


The biscuit and couli and sorbet elements of this blackberry mille-feuille were very good, but I'm afraid the blackberries themselves were rather bland. I'm wondering, in fact, whether raw blackberries could really ever sit well in a dessert on their own, as unlike raspberries or strawberries they don't seem to have the flavour or sweetness to stand out. However, they are at least seasonal and it's all credit to the Fish Place that all the ingredients made perfect sense for late autumn, and the attention to detail (Sainsbury's teabags aside perhaps) I'm sure went a long way to explaining why it all tasted so damn good.


So, some very good food, then. But none of the things that are wrong about the Fish Place have anything to do with the food. The first thing that may dissuade you is the price - at £45 not including service for three courses this is a restaurant in a very odd location with no particular pedigree to speak of that has, from the get-go, priced itself alongside long-established neighbourhood favourites like Chez Bruce or L'Autre Pied. Sure, it's top quality cuisine - Michelin star standard I'd say - but there's a certain arrogance in assuming that people are going to travel here when there are a number of other places offering these prices (and indeed less) for cooking of at least a similar standard.


And then there's the location. Again, I know it's early days, but there were only three tables of two occupied all night, and although the views from the first floor over the docks were pleasant enough, the journey here and the rather stilted atmosphere in the clinical new building were not. I hope there are enough people nearby with £60 a head to spend on good food to keep the Fish Place in business, as it would be a crying shame for cooking of this standard to go unnoticed, but if I live in Battersea and find the reward of eating here only just worth the effort required to find and pay for it, then I wonder how the rest of the capital feels. For now though, I will have faith that excellent food will find an audience no matter how unlikely the location, and wish the Fish Place the very best of luck.

7/10



I was invited to review the Fish Place

Pizzagate

When I first moved down to London all those years ago I made it a personal mission to work my way through as many of the (literally) hundreds of food delivery flyers that drop through my letterbox every month as I could, with the intention of impressing friends and visiting family members with the best that Battersea takeaway joints had to offer. Unfortunately only a tiny handful are any good. Spice Fusion impressed early on with their strong flavours and generous portions of poppadums, as did the Bombay Bicycle Club, which I'm told Gordon Ramsay is/was a regular customer of, if that's any recommendation. I have however come to the sad conclusion that there are no good Chinese or Thai delivery places, that only the two mentioned out of around 20 Indian deliveries are any good, and it's never a good idea to get a donner kebab delivered, sober or otherwise.

As for pizza, happily there are two excellent options, both on Lavender Hill. My current favourite is Firezza, which as well as delivering piping hot pizzas with excellent bubbly crusts has the most brilliant mobile ordering system: with literally 3 clicks you can send a pizza to your front door - it's dangerously easy. And then there's Basilico, who make actually pretty good Italian-style pizzas and were my favourite pizza suppliers until very recently. In fact, the Basilico Pizza Funghi au Truffle was almost a regular feature in my house, until one day something occurred to me that had been bothering me for a while. There's no truffle in it.

I don't mean just no real truffle - I wouldn't expect a £15 delivery pizza to be scattered with Alba's finest whites, nor even the preserved variety at a push (which has a horrible texture anyway). But truffle oil is incredibly potent and can be picked up from Tescos for not much more than a couple of quid, and even a few drops would lend an unmistakable familiar earthy aroma to a pizza. And yet, time after time, the Basilico Pizza Funghi au Truffle would arrive without even so much of a hint of truffle. So one day, I set off up the road to find out what on earth was going on.

The staff in Basilico Lavender Hill were lovely - helpful and friendly and eager to show me round their little branch. God knows what they thought of the strange man demanding to see their truffle oil but if they were put out they didn't show it. And although I half expected them to make some excuses or even admit they didn't put any truffle oil on the pizzas, they soon produced a couple of bottles - one half-used - of what the label proudly proclaimed was "Italian White Truffle Oil". With their permission, I opened the bottle and took a sniff.

Nothing. No truffle aroma at all - not even the faintest scent. The oil literally smelled of nothing - and not even olive oil, just completely inert. I offered the bottle to the guy behind the counter, who agreed with me that it smelled of nothing. I tasted a bit from my fingers - again nothing, just oil.

Now, if Basilico are deliberately using fake truffle oil and advertising the pizza as au truffle, then I'm pretty sure that's against the law. If they're being diddled by their suppliers, paying a premium for ordinary vegetable oil that has a 'Truffle' lable on the front, then their suppliers are in breach of the law. If on the other hand - and this is probably the most likely scenario - that Basilico are deliberately using a 'truffle' oil containing such undetectably tiny amounts of the raw ingredient that it's not technically in breach of the law but they're able to use the word 'truffle' on the menu without being sued, then that's just cynical.

To give Basilico a fair hearing, I called their franchise manager on the phone, who explained that he'd look into the matter and get back to me. After a couple of weeks, having heard nothing, I called him back and we had a bit of a chat about the fact that I'm pretty sure the truffle oil they were using had no truffle in, and he very unconvincingly maintained that he could smell a "very subtle" odour of truffle in the Basilico oil. I challenged him to tell the difference between that and a normal bottle of vegetable oil. I also offered to meet him at the Lavender Hill branch, and I would bring a little bottle of my own truffle oil by way of a comparison. That was a few weeks ago, and I still haven't heard anything. Something tells me he's not that confident he can tell the difference after all.

The result of all this to-ing and fro-ing is simply that they have lost me as a regular customer, which admittedly won't give them too much to worry about in the long-term. But it got me wondering how many other delivery places in London are guilty of embellishments on their menus. There's an Indian takeaway near me that advertises itself as organic - if you ordered a balti from there and the chicken wasn't really organic, would you be able to tell? I certainly wouldn't. Or what if KFC used only 10 different herbs and spices in their "secret" coating instead of 11? Would there be rioting in the streets?

As a light-hearted footnote to this post I was going to tell you about the Gourmet Chocolate Pizza Company, who kindly offered to send over a sample of their... unique... product to review. I was as you can imagine slightly sceptical, but still interested to see what on earth this crazy concept would be like up close. Unfortunately, thanks to the heavy hand of the Royal Mail, what arrived was basically a little plastic bag full of chocolate chippings:


It would take quite an imagination to reconstruct the neat little wedge of chocolate pizza that I'm assured this pile started off as at the beginning of its journey, but I'll have to take their word for it. I'm also afraid it's not an idea I can wholeheartedly endorse - if you eat a chocolate pizza like you would a real pizza you'd end up having a LOT of chocolate in one go, and if you didn't, well, what's the point in it being pizza-shaped? But perhaps I'm missing something. The chocolate tasted nice, so, yeah. Good luck to 'em.

As for Basilico, I've probably taken it as far as I can without going to the authorities, which given that I have a full-time job and I'm not 100% sure of the legal situation anyway, I'm not about to do. Plus, given that I'm lucky enough to live in London, I can just go and order a different pizza. Basilico's loss is Firezza's gain - I was tucking into their Chorizo pizza just last night. Except, hang on - come to think of it, that chorizo tasted an awful lot like ordinary sausage....

Photo courtesy of Food Stories

Donna Margherita, Battersea - Revisited!

One of the drawbacks of the food blog format - along, to be fair, with any newspaper or magazine restaurant review - is that your public opinion of a restaurant is made once and preserved forever. I have made a conscious decision to never write about the same place twice, the idea being that however lucky or unlucky or misinformed I was on the first visit, a restaurant would only usually have one chance to impress the average punter and a first visit is as close as I'm going to get to a level playing field. That, and because I pay for all the meals out of my own pocket, I just don't have the budget to work my way around the entire menu before forming an opinion.

Therefore, it's not surprising that on occasion I do happen across either a mediocre restaurant that for whatever reason serves an accidental good meal the night of my visit, or of course an otherwise reliably good restaurant that has an off night. What is strange is that looking back over the last two years' worth of reviews how few there are whose scores, with the benefit of hindsight and repeat visits, I would change. Maybe an extra point added or docked here and there - I was a bit mean to Can Roca perhaps, and Laxeiro has disappointed on repeat visits - but overall my system - completely by accident you understand - kind of works. However, there is one review in particular that I can't allow to stay on my conscience. I'm not too big to admit that, back in November of 2007, I was completely wrong about Donna Margherita in Battersea.

It was on viewing the pictures I took of the pizzas we were served on that night that the owner, Gabriele Vitale, knew something was wrong. "Those big black bubbles of burned pizza base," he explained after he invited me back for a second try last week, "they are wrong. There was something wrong with the dough that night - I think it hadn't risen properly. A good pizza dough should have a nice even covering of small black dots. And of course, those mussels should not have been thrown on the pizza until right at the very end. Whoever was in the kitchen that night wasn't up to scratch." I agreed, after a commendably persistent PR campaign from Gabriele, to revisit Donna Margherita and perhaps learn a bit about Neapolitan cuisine in the process.


A cold antipasti selection of roast mushrooms, grilled aubergine, courgette and superb artichoke hearts were served covered in good olive oil and tasted very authentic. Warm antipasti consisted of terracotta bowls of half-and-half aubergine parmigiana and homemade meatballs in tomato sauce and a kind of dark lentil stew and courgettes and bacon. All superb comfort food, full of flavour and served in that traditional Trattoria style.



I was reliably informed that Neapolitan (that is, Campania) cuisine is generally more robust and contains a greater use of seafood than that from Emilia-Romagna. Now that they mentioned it, it occurred to me that we didn't have a single seafood or fish dish the whole weekend in Bologna. Here we were served two stunning plates of seafood - a medley of calamari rings, octopus tentacles and fried prawns, all perfectly fresh and cooked very well, and a very authentic tasting cold octopus salad. Gabriele told me that his English customers are a bit squeamish about the octopus and despite it ticking every box in terms of authenticity and taste, he doesn't shift much of it. Well, more fool them I say.


I will also reserve a special mention for the traditional Neapolitan salad of cherry tomatoes, rocket and buffalo mozzarella, which contained the juiciest, creamiest mozzarella I've ever tasted - including that from Bologna. Gabriele ships it in from Napoli every week and seasons it lightly before serving, and I can't imagine there being a better mozzarella served anywhere else in Europe.



All this was of course just the first act before the arrival of the main courses, starting with a deceptively simple margherita pizza. Made, needless to say, all in house, using Italian ingredients, it was a fine example of its kind and had an expertly balanced measure of the different ingredients, from the sharp tomato sauce to the rich stringy cheese. And, of course, a perfectly risen pizza dough displaying the correct smattering of small black dots. We were also shown the "correct" (I will need third-party verification on this of course, but for now I'm taking Gabriele's word for it) way to eat a Neapolitan pizza - first cutting the pizza into quarters, and then "rolling" each slice into a tube so that all the rich juices are trapped inside while you shovel it into your mouth. Using your hands, naturally.


We were then served two pasta dishes. One, a seafood spaghetti with clams and prawns and heaven knows what else, was as rich and wonderful as any plate of pasta I've ever eaten. The spaghetti was coated in a kind of seafood stock which made it silky in the mouth and the baked cherry tomatoes added another burst of flavour. Amazing stuff.


Also in the pasta department was a very attractive plate of large rigatoni served with a spinach-like vegetable along with various other herbs. Again, homemade egg pasta cooked al-dente and a rich and silky sauce.



Finally, a dense, nutty chocolate cake from Capri served with vanilla ice-cream, and a homemade Tiramisù, which tipped us over from "dangerously stuffed" to "potential hospital admission". But what a way to go.

And so, in a first for Cheese and Biscuits, I am going to re-review a restaurant. I will keep the original post up for historical reasons so that I can't be accused of complete revisionism, but I think its only fair that independent restaurants with a passion for authentic, honest food get all the breaks they can get. Because God knows there are enough people in London that will walk past Donna Margherita on the way to the Pizza Express just down the road, and miss out on one of the finest Italian restaurants in the capital. My original review, made on an off-night albeit with the best of intentions, is wrong. And fortunately, this is one wrong I'm happy and able to put right.

8/10

Photos courtesey of Helen Graves at Food Stories. Many thanks.