Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

Caponata is part of The Forge music venue, which showcases jazz-oriented live music in a brand new, purpose-built space. It’s a strikingly good-looking standalone restaurant with a sleekly modern Scandinavian look, flooded with natural light via a glassed-over faux courtyard. A two-storey interior wall has been planted with ferns and creepers to create a living green wall. Another pale-hued wall of wooden planks is a partition which can be folded back for concerts, while a long French window unfolds to partition off the dining area. The ground floor is the more casual osteria, while the first floor’s a slightly smarter restaurant.

It would have been easy to turn out the usual pizza and pasta in a music venue like this, but the menu’s mostly Sicilian. Linguine alle sarde is one such classic dish, of freshly-made pasta with fennel and sardines. In this case the pine nuts, tiny currants and celery swamped the sardines and fennel leaves, but the result certainly tasted Sicilian. Fennel seeds appeared in a Catherine wheel of very lean pork sausage, simply grilled and served with a sliver of white fennel bulb plus the inevitable cherry tomatoes and tangle of peppery rocket.

The starters suggested the kitchen is still finding its feet. While breadcrumb-stuffed squid was a mere few morsels of tentacle and body lost in a pool of tomato sauce, another starter was large enough to pass for a main course. These large arancini were excellent: three balls of saffron risotto deep-fried to give a crisp, orange-like skin, the centres filled with molten mozzarella, ham, or beef ragout.

Sicilian pastries are well represented, though the particular ones we tried were slightly overbaked. A cannolo (which looks a bit like a brandy snap) is filled with sweetened soft cheese; a ‘beignet’ looked at first like a tiny éclair, until you bite through the chocolate sauce to the biscuits beneath. And the Caponata version of cassata was more like a tiny slice of baked cheesecake, an unusual variant of this dish that I’d previously eaten in Catania in the east of Sicily.

Sicily’s an up-and-coming wine region, so there’s brief but good selection of Sicilian wines by the glass or bottle at fair prices in the osteria. Check www.forgevenue.org, for details of the free music events you can enjoy over a coffee or glass of wine in the osteria.

Time Out London June 2009