Joel Golby meets his ultimate meat at Hoxton’s Via Emilia

“The staff are cutlery-reluctant at Via Emilia: starters, we were told, are traditionally eaten with the hands in northern Italy”
New home: Joel Golby found a little heaven at Hoxton's Via Emilia
Joel Golby29 March 2018

Ambience: 4/5

Food: 5/5

When I was a child the treat for enduring a shopping trip to town with my mother was this: she would take me to the deli counter and order a portion of sliced garlic sausage, which I would eat raw with my pink little hands, lowering each slice into my tiny mouth like an animal.

I was a large boy. Each time, the woman behind the counter in a tight green hairnet would ask me this: ‘How, large boy, would you like your garlic sausage sliced?’ And I would tell her: thin. She’d adjust the machine accordingly. No: thinner. The machine would not go any lower than that, she told me. This is as thin as it gets. My ideal slice of deli ham is between one and two atoms thick, translucent enough for you to read a page of a book through. My ideal deli ham is sliced so thin it is essentially a concept, a whisper of meat. Ah, I resigned myself to thinking. Until they invent lasers to do this, they will never slice meat thin enough to satiate me.

Via Emilia in Hoxton has figured it out, and now I live there.

Joel Golby

The concept of Via Emilia is this: food from the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna is really good, so let’s just serve that. This is a concept that is bulletproof. Forty covers, tiny tables and low lights mean it is intimate: we ate elbow-to-elbow at the marble bar, right by the kitchen, which slams out plate after plate of perfectly rich eggy pasta, thin, thin deli meats and life-altering tiramisu.

The staff are cutlery-reluctant at VE: starters, we were told, are traditionally eaten with the hands in northern Italy, so just do that (you can ask for a spoon if you absolutely must, but it feels like doing so might result in a surcharge being added to your bill and a lifelong restaurant ban). We had the aforementioned thin meat along with a medium-hard cheese (Caciotta di Montemauro) and a fully soft one (Squacquerone di Romagna) and folded them up with pillows of gnocco fritto — the restaurants’ version of a starter carb, which taste-wise lands somewhere between bread and a fairground doughnut and made me retroactively mad at every piece of bread I’ve ever had that wasn’t, instead, gnocco fritto.

The staff are cutlery-reluctant at VE... you can ask for a spoon if you absolutely must, but it feels like doing so might result in a surcharge being added to your bill and a lifelong restaurant ban

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If you behave you get a fork for mains, which is obviously pasta. Tajadèl bulgnaisi col ragó, or as we called it, ‘bolognese’, was how it should be: eggy, eggy tagliatelle shot through with salty, meaty sauce. Turte vèird (ravioli parcels nestled in a sage butter sauce) were peppery, green and almost juicy; pisarei e fasò (gnocchi cooked with borlotti beans) was almost meaty in its simplicity. The menu recommends three pasta dishes shared between two, which could have been a little sparse if we weren’t saving room for the house dessert: tiramisu, conversation-silencingly good, caramel notes with coffee and cream and two spoons to share.

It’s important that you enjoy this meal with Lambrusco, the region’s iconic sparkling red, a rarefied version of the same thing you used to throw up on park benches early in your drinking career. After a chat with the Lambrusco evangelist server we tried the Di Sorbara, which was fruity and plummy and just the right amount of rich, and sort of like a very delicious cough syrup but also not — anyway, we did the bottle and then four shots of limoncello.

Via Emilia isn’t a place for a private meal — we ended up talking about thinly sliced deli meat to anyone who would listen, which unfortunately for them was every table within a two-metre radius — but the food makes you want to give up on British life and move immediately to northern Italy. Highly recommended.

Via Emilia

1 Bottle of Lambrusco £25

1 Gnocco fritto £2.70

1 Caciotta di Montemauro £3.50

1 Squacquerone di Romagna £5

1 Cotto meat platter £10

1 Turte vèird £8.50

1 Pisarei e fasò £7

1 Tajadèl bulgnaisi col ragó £8

1 Tiramisu £4

4 Limoncellos £14

Total £87.70

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