Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

You can always spot good lineage. Bars and restaurants come and go, but the best ideas they create live on and mutate in new forms elsewhere.

Sitting in Polpo, a charming new bacaro (Venetian-style wine bar), you can recognise influences from both Venice and London, interestingly combined. The room itself has a fashionably distressed look: white wall tiles, a bronze-coloured tin ceiling, low-wattage filament light bulbs that give it a faux patina.

Wine – good wines, picked from four good importers – is brought in rustic jugs of 250 or 500ml, but disingenuously dispensed into tumblers, not wine glasses. This 18th-century town house was once home to the Venetian artist Canaletto, and he’d probably feel at home here today.

The terse menu descriptions and archaic typeface echo St John. And the procession of small, flavour-packed dishes are very reminiscent of Bocca di Lupo, just a few streets away. It turns out that chef Tom Oldroyd worked for a short while at Bocca di Lupo, an influence which has clearly informed this menu.

Some of the dishes are classically Venetian, such as a cicchetti (Venetian bar snack) of a disc of grilled polenta topped with a scoop of moist salt cod. Others are more creative, such as slivers of cuttlefish, cooked in their black ink in the Venetian way, which can then look like mud from the Grand Canal; but embroidered with gremolata, the zest of lemon and a kiss of garlic and parsley make the dish glow like Merchant of Venice’s treasure.

Three savoury dishes per person seems about right. The menu’s divided into types of ingredients, including hot, crisp nan-like breads such as the pizzetta bianca, topped with cheese and onion. From the ‘meat’ section,pork belly is slow-cooked and rich, served with radicchio, hazelnuts, and chewy crackling. From the ‘vegetables’ section, fennel is sliced mandoline-thin and served with cobnuts and green beans.

Most of these dishes have an almost Protestant simplicity and intensity. But a more Catholic aesthetic appears in a slice of of ciambella (ring cake), laid on its side like a slain dragon, dressed with marbled stripes of white and dark chocolate sauce that make it look like a plinth from St Mark’s Basilica.

A different lineage can be seen in the service. Customers are greeted at the door by charming co-owner Russell Norman, who used to handle front-of-house at ‘society’ favourite, Le Caprice. He sized us up and put us at the back, far awayfrom the action, with waiting staff who looked barely enough to drive or vote. Minutes later the first of the ‘celebs’ arrived, and got one of the good tables. A succession of ever more fabulous creatures arrived, including a lady in a stunning prom frock. It turned out that Norman’s former colleague, chef Mark Hix, was having a launch party for his own new place, called Hix, just around the corner. Some of this St James’ set appeared unused to slumming it in Soho, but were clearly having a good time. We left just as chef Rowley Leigh and his entourage arrived. Expect to find coverage just as favourable as this review in the ‘society’ food columns.

Time Out London October 2009