Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Now we know the most efficient way for a House of Lords peer to run up a stately expenses tab: by eating out in Westminster. On our visit this smart Italian restaurant was packed with grey-suited parliamentarians, senior civil servants and Whitehall mandarins, many of them talking shop and looking as if they think nothing of spending sixty quid per head on expenses every weeknight. Lucky them.

This ‘corner tavern’ is in reality a full-blown fine dining restaurant from restaurateur Claudio Pulze, who has been responsible for creating more good restaurants in London’s than Terence Conran and Gordon Ramsay put together.

Chef Michele Brogi's starters are a clue of what’s to come: pretty, carefully-presented dishes using simple but good ingredients. Cooked octopus is cut into thin sections and arranged to look like a cross-section of a roasted garlic bulb, topped with simple scoops of buffalo mozzarella and desiccated tomato.

Dishes are not textbook Italian: raw and cooked cod appear together in a fish course, which is drizzled and dribbled with sauces and garnishes including some daringly retro deep-fried onion rings. It’s either irony, or he trained at the Little Chef; we think the former.

The dish names in Italian then in English are still hard to decipher; one dish that sounded like osso buco arrived looking more like a a burger-shaped steak tartare on top of a dloop of potato purée, but the slow-cooked meaty tastes were all present and correct. The most show-off of all the dishes was the duck breast, poached then presented like a row of up-ended cotton reels with a parmesan crisp carefully placed on top.

If you’re looking for good Italian wine to go with your meal, you’ll be spoiled for choice. But the bar’s no place for sleazy deals. Brightly-lit and in full view of the street and Home Office across the street, it would however be perfect for undercover journalists to sting a dodgy peer.

Time Out London Issue 2008: February 12-18 2009