Christmas Comes Early – Carluccio’s, London

See below for a sneak preview of this year’s glorious Christmas spread coming to a Carluccio’s near you this Autumn.

Carluccio's Christmas Press Preview
Last Thursday, Carluccio’s at St Christopher’s Place was transformed into a winter wonderland complete with real fir trees and (not so real) snow at the entrance. Inside, a long banqueting table was filled with this year’s range of regional Italian sweets, cakes, biscuits and treats.

Press and bloggers mingled with the superb Carluccio’s team to discover this year’s range.

Those that arrived early were treated to an espresso and the chance to be the first guests to dig into this season's panettone, dark chocolate-dipped clemetines, chocolate-covered nougat cigars and much, much more.

As the day rolled on, the feast grew to include summer vegetable risotto, broad bean and pancetta salad, free-flowing bellinis and prosecco, and those who timed it well even got a glimpse of Carluccio’s own father Christmas aka Antonio Carluccio.

Carluccio’s Christmas Range – Highlights
In no particular order here are a couple of this year’s delights.

Panforte Bianco – a dense sticky Tuscan cake made with candied fruit, toasted almonds, honey, cinnamon and nutmeg and covered in icing sugar.

Christmas Crackers
Guaranteed to give your festive table a bit of design kudos, I love this year’s Carluccio’s Mini Christmas crackers. Inside each cracker there’s a party hat, chocolate and Italian trivia question.

Pasticceria di Benevento – A subtle butter biscuit selection covered in dark chocolate and decorated in little gold balls. What a lovely gift!

Sfogliatine. – These beautifully-packaged delicious honey and almond slices are new to the range this year.

Wrapped in gold, the Pandolce is a classic Christmas cake from Genoa. A great gift for gran!

Ho, ho, ho – Pupazzetti milk and dark chocolate Santas, stick them in the kids' stockings.

Get Your Italian Christmas Fix:
The Carluccio's Christmas range will arrive in stores at the end of October and will also be available online: www.carluccios.com

Cecconi’s

I think Cecconi’s is my favourite Italian restaurant in London. The classic Mayfair establishment is a slick operation with polished staff, a buzzy central bar (complete with hanging hams and good-looking Italians perching for a drink), and comfortable seating ideal for people watching if you nab a spot by the window.

I visited on Saturday with one of my favourite and most generous of dining companions (and bearer of a healthy credit card) – Mr H.

We popped in after seeing the brilliant Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy (go if you can get tickets). Our time was so enjoyable it turned into a long, boozy lunch, which resulted in unnecessary purchases at Regent Street’s Habitat on the way home. Oops.

The Food:
I started with a delicious dish of gnocchi with butternut squash puree and Mr H had a rather decadent potato soup with truffle shavings.

For main course I went for the waistline option of rare seared salmon, artichoke, fennel and quail eggs. It was fresh and lovely but tasted a little bit too on the healthy side. I would have preferred a bit more of a lively dressing on it.

Mr H. had, without a doubt, the largest piece of rib-eye steak I have ever seen served in a restaurant, which came served with purple sprouting broccoli and a side order of spinach. The piece of meat was so large he was defeated before he reached the end and that is the first time I’ve ever seen any man not finish a steak!

To accompany, we drank our way through a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio and then a nice bottle of Vermentino di Sardegna 'Crabilis', Pala, Sardinia Italy, 2008.

Moving on to desserts, we indulged in chocolate fondant with pistachio ice cream and apple tart with custard cream. Bellissimo!

Toilet watch: Fresh lillies, a posh marble basin, Cowshed hand wash and hand cream and individual towels.

Cecconi’s
5a Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3EP
T: (0)20 7434 1500

Jamie’s Italian … Finally

I’ve already made a couple of attempts to visit Jamie’s Italian in Canary Wharf, but since its opening late last year and due to its highly irritating ‘no bookings’ policy, the wait has been over an hour and a half each time I’ve tried.

However, it’s now 2010, the hype has died down and I’ve just returned from a late Monday lunch with my family where we walked straight in and took our pick of tables.

What’s The Deal: Jamie’s Italian seems to pitching itself as Carluccio’s younger, brighter, funkier, brother, with restaurants popping up in many new towns and lots more openings forecast around the UK.

The Meal: I ordered Pappa Pomodoro – a rustic “Tuscan peasant soup” (£5.25). It was hearty with a generous amount of fresh basil and gorgeous chunks of soggy tomato-soaked bread and drizzled olive oil. Slightly on the salty side but apart from that a good soup.


Alongside this I ordered Gennaro’s Winter Salad (£3.35). This was a plate of lovely oily chargrilled vegetables – roasted pumpkin, radicchio, red onions, warm plump sultanas and pine nuts (which I forgot just how much I loved). Tasty but perhaps better ordered as a side to a meat dish.

Dining companion 1 ordered Chargrilled Chop Steak Beef Burger, which came stacked high with gherkins and Fontina cheese. The meat looked gorgeous and he confirmed that as far as burgers go, it was pretty faultless.

Dining companion 2 went for a Jamie classic – Roasted Pumpkin Risotto (£10.25). Risottos are in essence easy to do well although I have had a couple of duds at previous London restaurants and occasions where the rice was a little on the hard side. This risotto had the right sticky consistency, lashings of Parmesan and plenty of pumpkin.

Dining companion 3 opted for South Coast Fritto Misto. The menu described this simply as “crispy fried fresh fish using the fish we should be eating”. She complained that the menu should have been a bit more explanatory as the fish included in the dish such as sardines and prawns were not her faves and if the menu had specified, she wouldn’t have ordered it. Good point – Jamie take note!

Toilet Watch: Visiting the toilet during your time at a restaurant is a necessary if not defining moment of any meal. I am very fond of the short break where one is able to stretch their legs, gawp at other diners’ food and check out the standard of the bathroom accessories – eg. Is the loo posh enough to have Molton Brown hand wash and individual hand towels?

Jamie’s designers have gone for an old-fashioned look in the bathroom, opting for traditional Crapper toilets with wooden seats and a row of tall china sinks, topped with an arty array of mirrors in the basin area.

The Final Word: If Jamie’s Italians are trying to steal the Carluccio’s market they will have to work a bit harder to compete with Carluccio’s wonderful Italian deli and foodshop than by simply offering up the odd Jamie tea towel and oven gloves. Jamie’s Italians appeal to a younger market who have far more adventurous tastes than young people 30 years ago and the prices are reasonable. However if he wants to beat Antonio Carluccio's Penne Giardiniera, Jamie’s going to have to stay in the kitchen for a little while longer…

Details:
Jamie's Italian, Canary Wharf
Unit 17
2 Churchill Place
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5RB

Tel: 020 3002 5252

Don’t Ask for Dessert at Bocca Di Lupo

I never made it to Bocca di Lupo when it opened in Soho late last year. It's still one of London's most talked about restaurants, most searched for restaurant entries on websites like Time Out, and seems to have been unanimously hailed as the best thing since Italian sliced foccacia by London's food critics.

Needless to say, I have been excited about last night's visit ever since I booked a fortnight ago.

The restaurant was much smaller than I was expecting, with no more than 15 tables in a bright, square dining room topped by a stunning glass panelled circular chandelier and surrounded by peach wall paint. The front section of the restaurant is devoted to a long bar area and downstairs there's a private dining room.

The Good (a mini ramble about watermelon):
The cocktails! I chose a basil and watermelon martini and despite the misleading title (the drink was actually vodka based) this was one of the smoothest tasting wonderfully concocted fruity delights ever to meet my lips. The basil and watermelon were a powerful flavour combination, so perfectly blended that I envisaged a fine figure of a barman poring timelessly over my drink as he measured out the perfect quantities of each ingredient to the exact millimetre, before crushing the watermelon by hand and then sieving the liquid through ice to get it to the optimum temperature.

The Menu:
...is a headache for the indecisive and a treat for any foodie. There are eight sections and every dish is offered as a starter or main. By the side of each option you can read which region of Italy it comes from, or if it's a creation of Bocca di Lupo's chef Jacob Kennedy it is awarded a 'BDL'.

After an hour of discussing our dishes and bugging the waitresses for translations of cotechino (a type of sausage cured on site), orecchiette (pig's ear shaped pasta) and guinciale (bacon made from pig's cheek), we were ready to go in for the kill.

I started with a BDL invention – shaved radish, celeriac and pecorino salad with pomegranates and truffle oil. It was fresh, zingy and bursting with truffle aromas.

Then I settled for a partridge seeing as it's game season and I've been reading and writing about the damn little birds for over a month now. The meat was juicy and rich and tasted great with side portions of wet polenta with Parmesan; borlotti beans with tomato and basil; caponata (summer vegetables in agrodolce with anchovies); and Romanesco broccoli served with parsley and Parmesan. Ahem, not all just for me of course.

Bocca di Lupo is special. The food has that homely, rustic, good-for-the-soul quality to it as well as the notion that time, love, thought and skill has been invested into each dish.

The Bad:
We didn’t order our food until an hour into our 2 hour and 15 minute slot and so sadly when the waitress put the dessert menus on our table she followed by saying we had come to the end of our time slot and didn't actually have time to order.

So, humph, we left without dessert and moved on to Soho's best-kept drinking secret 23 Romilly Street.

Oh well, next time I'll have to book for dolci and drinks only and finish off what I started.