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Tucked away down a Brixton sidestreet, Maremma is a cute neighbourhood restaurant filled with friends, couples and some charming waiters. The cooking here draws inspiration
from the coastal area of Maremma in sunny Tuscany and from Italy more generally.
The best of the menu was the homemade pasta, like the pumpkin cappellacci (pasta dumplings), which walked a delicate line between sweet and savoury. The soft, mild squash was a peerless match for the warming pool of butter-and-sage sauce, adorned with the
crispy fried leaves of the herb and crumbled amaretti biscuits.
A plate of fresh pappardelle with wild boar ragù was equally good: the sauce-licked ribbons of pasta interspersed with tender chunks of meat. Later, a piece of nicely charred, succulent swordfish arrived spread in a rosemary-and-anchovy sauce. But the accompanying rapini,
a kind of broccoli famed for its bitter taste, didn’t work: its sharp flavour clashed with the rest of the dish.
Elsewhere, the puntarelle salad was more pleasantly bitter, but overshadowed the delicate cured venison. Desserts of tiramisu and semifreddo were good but there was nothing really
game-changing going on. Maremma may still be a tad rough around the culinary edges, but do go if you’re local, and want great pasta and bags of cosy atmos.