Fay Maschler reviews Enoteca Da Luca: In a quarrel with itself over what it stands for

Fay Maschler finds m,any aspects of this new City restaurant to be about as far from an enoteca as you can get
Bar Italia: the wine selection at Enoteca Da Luca
Daniel Hambury
Fay Maschler27 November 2017

The meeting where the name “The Bower” was chosen for a new office development on Old Street is one I would like to have attended. Abutting what is often referred to as Silicon Roundabout, described by architecture critic Rowan Moore as “made of several decades of mistakes: horrible traffic engineering, drain-like pedestrian underpasses, Seventies and Eighties office blocks of special mediocrity” and still innocent of the proposed transformation that should make it less of a death trap for cyclists, a word that invokes a verdant space under trees or climbing plants is particularly ridiculously inappropriate.

Enoteca Da Luca, the fifth in a group of restaurants, four of which are in the City, has as its stated philosophy — for what it’s worth — “piccolo e bella”. Spread over three levels, Old Street is in fact the largest of what the name might lead you to believe is a local wine shop with regional produce informing the menu.

It has long been my belief that architects, particularly “award-winning architects”, have scant comprehension of basic activities such as sitting, eating, sleeping or climbing stairs. The first-floor dining area would seem to have been designed by someone who has never enjoyed a meal in a shared space and with its apparently sealed windows and bleak view of another unfinished block casting the terrace into almost permanent shadow, is about as far from an enoteca as you can get.

A welcome sight is manager and sommelier Max Sali, last seen by me about six years ago when he and his chef brother Federico opened Tinello in Pimlico Road backed by Giorgio Locatelli, a venture that sadly folded (it’s now Enoteca Turi). One of my companions at lunch, the second meal at Enoteca Da Luca, is John Lanchester, who also reviewed Tinello in its day and in that same year published his illuminating Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

Allure and playfulness: Fresh and popped corn soup
Daniel Hambury

John, partly I think in an effort to be helpful, starts with wild prawn crudo, yuzu gel, puffed rice and nasturtium. Thinly sliced pinkish prawns — gambero rosso? — cover the plate sweetly and prettily. Dots of jellied yuzu have a stabbing effect, completely annihilating the delicacy and, in the words of my other companion Joe Warwick, are “like putting Sarson’s on a burrata”.

His first course of pork fillet, coffee, avocado guacamole (is there another kind?), aged balsamic, egg drops and mustard leaves offers well-flavoured meat, possibly cooked sous-vide, under a tangle of leaves with blobs of egg and balsamic vinegar occupying most of the plate. “Dots are the new smears, I suppose,” says John resignedly.

Burrata, basil sorbet, black olive croutons and tomato essence (poured on at the table) is simpler, more unashamedly Italian and enjoyable, a better exposition of kitchen restlessness and imagination. At dinner on another day fresh and popped corn soup comes into the same category, sweetcorn with just its allure and playfulness, without any sickliness.

The pasta section — from £13-£15 — is counter-intuitively and unsuccessfully effortful. Whatever your favourite theory about carbonara — a dish made by Apennine charcoal burners or the outcome of bacon in the supplies of American soldiers during the Second World War — it is never, as here in tagliolini fish carbonara, an assembly incorporating white fish. A whole new carbonara-gate might erupt following on from the outrage in Italy over the one-pot French recipe stipulating farfalle and crème fraîche. Egg yolk, the valid link, in the Enoteca kitchen has been subjected to a week of curing in salt and sugar and is then grated bottarga-like over creamy — another outrage — pasta.

Borlotti beans make a fine soup when paired with pasta but an unpleasantly starchy drab dressing for pappardelle and porcini. Rabbit ragut [sic] on tagliatelle is not improved by the addition of the alien flavour of orange.

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In what are priced as main courses — £16.50-£21.75 (annoyingly written as fractions) — roast veal arrives as a greyish slab uncoloured by whatever cooking process was used on horseradish mash that has none of the defining bite of that root. The overall effect is of a kitchen striving for originality — striving is always good — or bored by convention, but ultimately losing the plot, especially the plot of an enoteca.

From the desserts, “Da Luca” tiramisu, deconstructed natch, is skilfully composed with a nice variety of textures. Wine companies on the list include the over-familiar Antinori, Frescobaldi etc — and little evidence of the interesting recent developments in Italian wine. It seems that Enoteca Da Luca is in a quarrel with itself over what it stands for.

After lunch we repair to Hill & Szrok in nearby East Road, a green-tiled oasis in the desert of hideous unhelpful development.

207 The Bower, Old Street, EC1 (enotecadaluca.co.uk. Lunch and dinner Mon-Sat. A meal for two, with wine, about £105 including 12.5% service.

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