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Please note, Mennula has now closed. Time Out Food editors, January 2019.
The last time we reviewed this unusually smart Sicilian restaurant, we were excited by the food – nicely balanced between rustic and sophisticated, Sicilian and pan-Italian. However, the early promise was only partly realised on our follow-up visit. Yes, the room remains an attractive white L-shape with comfortable booths, but the service was still distracted (and distracting), and food quantity and quality fell slightly short of the level that the prices demand.
For £12.50, a tuna salad starter needed to be special, but a quail’s egg on top wasn’t enough to flavour the unexciting fish. Octopus salad, with cherry tomatoes and potato purée, was appealing, but similarly short on zing. Monkfish osso buco (an odd description, there being no bone nor deep flavours involved) was less thrilling than it sounded, and the accompanying risotto over-buttered. And warm calf’s liver salad was merely some tasty but not-so-tender liver set next to a green salad.
Attractive presentation and good bookends – small squares of bread, arancini, olives, almonds (after which Mennula is named) and cannoli – plus an all-Italian wine list with a well-chosen selection from Sicily’s resurgent producers, swings the overall verdict to a thumbs-up: but it walks the line.