Osteria, Barbican

On Wednesday evening I broke one of the cardinal sins of eating out - I chose a restaurant based on setting and location, rather than the appeal of the menu or skills of the kitchen. This is usually a recipe for disaster, as it's well known the Curse of Tall Restaurants (a catch-all term that includes restaurants in impressive settings of any kind that don't have to try very hard to attract custom, no matter how far off the ground they are) is always ready to strike at any unfortunate punter that thinks the view from the 30th floor of an anonymous city tower block will make up for any lack of interest on the plate. Well maybe it can, for some people, just not the restaurant spods I tend to hang around with.

But while I am immune to the charms of most Tall Buildings you could mention, can take or leave river views and regard soaring marble atriums and plush furnishing with extreme indifference (this isn't the least bit true, but I'm trying to make a point so bear with me), there's one building - or more accurately, series of buildings - in London in which I would happily spend weeks on end, dinner or no dinner.

The Barbican is a breathtaking work of brutalist genius, a vast complex of soaring, bush-hammered concrete towers, monolothic apartment blocks dripping with hanging plants, and a series of landscaped grounds - including an astonishing sunken water garden - that adds up to as impressive a work of visual and sculptural art that you can find from any century, in any art gallery or museum in the world. I love its romantic spotlit stairways, the walkways threading their way through it all several stories in the air, the confidence and intelligence in every tiny detail of the place. I just love it there.

So yes, dinner at Osteria, on the third floor of the Barbican Centre (the arts complex in the middle of it all) was mainly an excuse to spend a couple of blissful hours taking in the beauty of the surroundings, out of the rain without resorting to standing in the theatre lobby downstairs and gawping like I usually do. The food didn't have to be brilliant, or even very good, to be worth our time.

Happily though, it was - most of it - more than worth the price of admission, and rather than being something to do with our hands while enjoying the view over the lakes and fountains, the food impressed in its own right. House foccacia was only slightly on the insubstantial side but tasted soft and fresh, and soaked up the olive oil nicely.

Ham broth was exactly what was expected and what was required, and so we had no complaints. A good, clear consommé, strongly seasoned and containing huge chunks of pig, the poached egg adding an extra layer of silky complexity, it was an eminently enjoyable starter.

So, too, a dish of grilled sardines coated in anchovy breadcrumbs and samphire. The effort that had clearly gone into removing most of the bones in the fish was appreciated, but it still wasn't quite bone-free enough to eat as a fillet, and the extensive further surgery required rather made the initial labour rather superfluous. They were fine little things though, soft flesh and crisp skin, and seasoned well.

Pan-roasted spring chicken had a strongly citrussy and nicely crisped skin strongly resembling the product from Chicken Shop, and as anyone who's ever been to Chicken Shop will tell you, this is a Good Thing. Perhaps the purple potatoes could have been a little warmer but that's a minor criticism of a dish that was otherwise effortlessly, straightforwardly enjoyable.

Similarly wild boar ragu, perhaps not the most blindingly wonderful bit of pasta I've ever been presented with in my life but cooked nicely al-dente, coated in plenty of parmesan and with a good mound of minced boar to make up for a slightly insipid tomato sauce. But the important thing is, both plates were licked clean. Not literally, that have been a bit embarrassing, but we certainly didn't leave anything edible behind.

We were even enjoying ourselves enough, thanks as much to the attentive service as the stunning views over St Giles Cripplegate and the City of London School for Girls, to order dessert. Sadly here our enthusiasm took a bit of a knock - sorbets were fine, a mango flavour probably being the best of the three flavours presented, the others lacking a bit in personality. But tiramisu was a pretty dubious affair, squirty cream and chopped-up brownie soaked in what felt like half a pint of booze, which felt us feeling rather queasy.

Still, all said and done, we were sat in the Barbican, playing a real part in the life of this extraordinary place, soaking in the atmosphere and making use of the cool 70s concrete toilets. For that alone it would have been worth the £42.75 a head with a carafe of Gavi di Gavi, and for the food to be not just passable but actually pretty enjoyable was a quite significant bonus. Apologies if this has turned into more of an architecture than food blog, but I hope you'll not mind indulging me just this once - rules are meant to be broken, and there's no building in London breaks the rules so comprehensively, and so successfully, as this brutalist beauty. Oh, and Osteria? That's rather good, too.

7/10

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Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant, Euston

On a wet weekday evening on the mezzanine level of Euston station, I and my dining companion are perhaps the only two people that are there only to eat. Ordinarily, the customer base of Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant would consist of frazzled parents and their kids, intercity commuters and the odd hen party, all nervously guarding their luggage while Virgin Trains pick up the biggest chunks from the floor of the 18:47 departure to Glasgow Central. Nobody chooses to spend their evening at Euston, or any departure hall for that matter, from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Coach Station. Which is generally why they're amongst the most depressing places on the planet.

It's this atmosphere of collective anxiety and gloom that My Restaurant has its work cut out to battle against, and under the harsh Network Rail strip-lighting and to the accompaniment of delayed departure announcements and grim security warnings, there's only so far a jaunty colour scheme and comfy booths will get you. So, perhaps taking a cue from its famously ebullient celebrity owner, front of house are the most insanely overenthusiastic and excitable bunch of people I've come across since the affected theme-park bonhomie of the Hard Rock Café, all young Italian men with giant haircuts flamboyantly flapping their dishclothes around and shouting at each other. Halfway through our meal, one whose shift was ending (and who had already thrown a hoodie over his work jumper) insisted on shaking our hands and curtseying (at least I think that's what it was) before heading downstairs for the tube. It was all quite overwhelming.

Typically, of course, I'd find service at this level of rabid fervour utterly insufferable, and indeed there were a couple of moments I wanted to climb into my glass of Chardonnay and die. But you know what, they meant well. And if they feel the need to engage grumpy food bloggers in banter, even said food blogger made it as clear as he possibly could that he'd rather pull his fingernails out than put up with one more second of it, then I suppose they need something to distract themselves from the reality of working in a train station restaurant.

Anyway, I imagine you'll want to know what the food is like, and on this front - initially - everything went exactly according to plan. Which is to say a sharing platter of charcuterie and bread called somewhat optimistically "Fantastico" contained, for a whacking £24.75, stale old slices of grim supermarket hams, soggy foccacia, bendy grissini and the very worst pesto either of us had come across in our lives, looking and tasting like pond scum. Weirdly, the hams were only stale and dry in parts, and the grissini only chewy at one end, which suggests that the problem may be more storage than sourcing. But it was clear none of it should have been served, and was worth nowhere near the prices being charged.

So far, so predictable. Nobody would expect me to have anything even approaching a nice time at any of the public vote restaurants, and suffering through a board of stale salami while an extravagant Italian performs tricks with cutlery is presumably exactly the kind of thing you came here to read. We awaited our main courses with the familiar gut-punch of dread and hopelessness. Things weren't going well.

And then something very strange happened. A £31 fillet steak in green peppercorn sauce arrived, just two pieces of meat neatly arranged on a plate, with no fripperies and no frills, looking like something you might actually want to eat. I cut into one of the pieces to reveal medium-rare, tender flesh, bleeding in the same way you might expect a perfectly good, perfectly cooked bit of beef to bleed. It tasted, if not like the greatest bit of protein I've ever had access to, then certainly better than I've been asked to eat at far more expensive places, places with tablecloths and cloakrooms and toiliets you don't have to pay 30p to use.

More astonishingly, and yet more confusingly, my friend's crab linguini was actually, well, good. Expertly cooked pasta with plenty of bite and bounce, a good, well-seasoned sauce containing lots of fresh ingredients, a bit heavy on the garlic perhaps but not disastrously so, and loads of sweet white crab meat. Surely the crab wouldn't have been picked on site and was probably frozen, but there's no harm in using pre-prepared seafood, and to pair it with such skill with just the right amount of everything else, and season it fautlessly, requires someone in the kitchen to know exactly what they're doing.

We ate our main courses slowly, and in silence. Like a special effects sequence from a pretentious food documentary, the crowds around us jittered and blurred and spun around in hyperspeed as our little table became the calm, focussed centre of the world. As the last forkful of crab-flecked pasta, and the last morsel of tender fillet steak disappeared from our plates, we came to in an empty dining room, all travellers having left for destinations up the country, and with only a skeleton staff to cheerily wave us goodbye into the dark, rainy night.

So yes, there were mistakes made that should be unforgivable. Nobody should be charging any amount, least of all the price of a ticket to Birmingham, for stale prosciutto and bad pesto, and even the good food was too expensive. The service needs to be dialled several notches back from hysterical, and it will never be particularly pleasant to eat your dinner in a train station departure lounge. All these things are undoubtedly marks against Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant.

But partly due to the wine - we had quite a bit of it, more for insurance reasons than anything else - but mostly because there are some people in the kitchens of this strange goldfish tank of a space overlooking the station concourse that are clearly taking pride in what they do - we left without the expected fug of queasiness and resentment, but with something almost approaching happiness. A first, after so many years, from a You Decide restaurant. So thank you, the voting public, for this one; I imagine next year I'll be back to visiting car parks in Croydon and rage-tweeting about brownfood, but for this brief moment all I have is gratitude. Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant isn't bad at all.

6/10

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Luca, Clerkenwell

In an ideal world, you’d visit any restaurant completely blind, with no preconceptions about the ability of those involved, no knowledge of the background of the chefs or the experience of the front of house, and not the slightest clue who’s bankrolling the place, and who stands to win or lose from its success. Then, you’d go in, have your dinner, pay your money, and make an entirely objective appraisal of the experience, all the better to relate to others they should make the trip themselves. Or not, as the case may be.

Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world. Even if I wasn’t a desperately tragic restaurant geek (which I very much am), scouring the print reviews and pages of Hotdinners every five minutes to see if that Belgian seawater-dough taco place I had my eye on had opened yet, it would be impossible to avoid every nugget of information about a new opening, whether it’s a new project from an existing high-profile chef, or the first bricks-and-mortar restaurant from a street food star. Expectations and preconceptions, whether you like it or not, will affect our impressions of a place well before we step through the front door. That’s just the way things are.

So I will probably completely fail to be level-leaded and objective about Luca, a new modern Italian restaurant on St John St, because I know full well – as you probably do too – that it’s being operated by the team behind the trail-blazingly creative Clove Club in Shoreditch, Michelin-starred 26th Best Restaurant In The World, and comes with a weight of expectation so heavy it could drown them in their own sparkling water before we’d got as far as the starters.

Before we get to the starters, though, nibbles. These are “parmesan fries”, a description that undersells them hugely, as instead of the expected bowl of chips and cheese we have these gorgeous things, tubes of fluffy parmesan mousse, delicately crusted on the outside and dusted with paprika, like savoury churros. These are a must-order item at Luca, genuinely exciting and innovative in exactly the kind of way – for better or worse – I was expecting from the Clove Club team.

From here on, though, events conspired to be a little – though only a little – more ordinary. “Sea Robin crudo”, a very pleasant arrangement of fish carpaccio sweetened with clementines and drizzled with olive oil, the kind of thing you’ve eaten before if you’ve ever been to a smart modern Italian restaurant in London (both Café Monico on Shaftesbury Avenue and Bernardi’s in Marylebone do something similar, if perhaps not quite as refined). Sea Robin, by the way, is another name for gurnard, a pseudonym I like to think they’re using so I can call the dish “RobinSea Crudo” in my mind. Yes, I’m sure that’s why they did it.

“Preserved peppers, air dried bonito and spinach” was a plate of cold red peppers and floppy spinach whose charms I’m afraid were completely lost on me. There wasn’t enough salty bonito (or the bonito wasn’t salty enough) to lift the bland peppers, and though the spinach had a nice enough flavour it still ended up all tasting like leftover ratatouille. And I don’t really even much like hot ratatouille.

I’d heard a lot (probably too much) about the “grouse ravioli”, and its famed “potato and whisky” sauce, so the fact I’d allowed myself to get excited about it probably contributes in no small part to the fact I found it faintly disappointing. The grouse itself came in the form of a mousse stuffing in the ravioli – fine, but pretty underpowered and the kind of thing that makes you wish for a thicker, darker, slow-cooked ragu-style, one with a bit more punch. The potato sauce tasted mainly of butter, and I didn’t detect any whisky at all, and though none of these things are exactly disqualifying for a pasta dish, they didn’t make for a particularly memorable experience, either.

The other pasta dish, spaghettini with shrimp and mace butter was, admittedly, lovely. Bouncy fresh pasta with an intense, briny, seafoody sauce, it was a perfect example of its kind, disarmingly familiar but beautifully rich and elegant. We’ve been a bit spoiled for pasta in London in recent times, especially with Padella in Borough Market doing what they do so extraordinarily well, so it speaks volumes this spaghettini was still a topic of conversation days later.

My own main of beef rump stuffed with pancetta was straightforwardly enjoyable, nothing groundbreaking and perhaps a teeny bit on the stingy side in terms of portion size but still attractive and seasoned nicely. It’s difficult to say anything too negative about beef and pancetta presented with green veg and one of those nice sticky reduced sauces, especially when it’s cooked as well as this, and so I won’t. I mean, I enjoyed it. Really.

A monkfish dish continued the theme – decent ingredients, cooked well – and was similarly hard to criticise even at the same time there was little to set the pulse racing either. Nothing was overcooked, or undercooked, or underseasoned, or cold (when it shouldn’t be) or warm (when it shouldn’t be). It was all, objectively, very decent food.

And look, maybe that’s all fine. Not every meal needs to reinvent the wheel or gun for a place in the Top 50 Best Restaurants list and the vast majority of people who eat at Luca will appreciate it very well for what it is – a solid, mid-range modern Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell, where you can book a table for 4 and be served by very pleasant and well-groomed staff and where tables have pretty cutlery and house bread comes with nice grassy olive oil.

The issue is, at the risk of repeating myself, a restaurant by the Clove Club comes with expectations. There’s absolutely nothing to stop these supremely talented guys from opening a solid mid-range Italian restaurant, there’s no good reason they shouldn’t, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. It’s not astonishing value in the Padella vein and neither is it a ripoff like the River Café. It’s just a good restaurant. It’s nobody’s fault but my own that I can’t be happy with that.

So perhaps the best advice I can give you is to take the above, and the score below, in the context of a person who's enjoyed some meals at Clove Club – and at the various incarnations before that, at the 10 Bells and so on – that have been very close to life-changing, and probably wouldn’t have been happy with anything less than that from Luca, either. And if you disagree with my scoring a place down for familiarity or safety or lack of ambition, I’ll only say that I scored the original Clove Club way, way up for risk-taking, innovation and ambition by the bucketful, as well. These things are important. Well, they are to me, at least. The rest of you can make your own minds up.

7/10

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Café Murano, St. James

London has never been and most likely will never be the kind of place where you can simply walk into the nearest restaurant and expect to be served an enjoyable and fairly-priced meal. Handled correctly, this city can be a foodie paradise, but it's always going to be lots of other things as well - a tourist hotspot, a center of commerce and finance, home to nine million people of all different preferences and persuasions - and not everyone has the same priorities (or standards) when it comes to eating out. For everywhere selling great food for a reasonable price there are a dozen Frankie & Bennys, Cafe Rouges and Garfunkels waiting to chew up and spit out anyone foolish enough not to have done their restaurant homework. It is easy to eat well in London, but it's not always obvious.

In a town so liberally strewn with potential traps and pitfalls, then, a little knowledge goes a long way, and finding myself in St James of a weekday evening, hungry and slightly out of my comfort zone (St James is out of most people's comfort zone I imagine, unless you happen to be one of the cast of Made in Chelsea and/or a minor royal) I fired up the app to see what was going on. The Ritz - well, possibly if someone paid off my mortgage for me before my next credit card bill arrives but that seemed less than likely; Gymkhana - tempting, but again hardly a budget option and I was planning on taking the parents there next week anyway; and Kitty Fishers - bit of a walk with no guarantee this wildly popular spot would have any room for us anyway once we got there. So, what to do? It was then I realised I was stood fiddling with my iPhone outside Café Murano, which had plenty of room at the bar, and deciding I'd rather spend the rest of the night actually eating rather than deciding where to eat, went inside.

And I'm very glad I did, because what a lovely place this is, comfortable and friendly thanks to an attractive long bar and charming front of house who put us very much in the mood for enjoying ourselves even before the Aperitivo di Maggio (Bobby's gin, Pimm's, grapefruit juice, sage & orange bitters) arrived. And needless to say, once they had arrived we enjoyed ourselves a whole lot more.

House focaccia, pleasantly moist and tacky was the next sign that we were in safe hands. I always appreciate when restaurants go the extra mile to bake their own bread, even when the results are less than brilliant; this was top stuff though, with the perfect texture for soaking up the excellent peppery olive oil it was served with.

A plate of salami also demonstrated some intelligent purchasing decisions. So often in London, Italian food is a poor facsimile of the original, with all the form and colour of the real thing but none of the flavour. You will, I'm sure, have seen a charcuterie board like this in umpteen "Italian" restaurants in town, looking fine until you try some of it and are rewarded with the taste of cold fat and slimy supermarket ham. Not so here - this was top pig product, moist salami and lovely thick curls of marbled (speck? [edit: I'm reliably informed it's coppa]) ham. And the carta di musica (love that name) wasn't just there for texture, being gently seasoned and with a nice flavour.

Asparagus, Parma ham and parmesan is a familiar combination of ingredients, but Italian food is all about familiarity - the trick is in the use of the very best ingredients, and combining them sensitively. In this case, crunchy, glossy asparagus, more excellent ham and generous shavings of good parmesan.

"Spring Minestrone" is about as good as vegan food gets - that is to say, expertly balanced and seasoned, with notes of fresh spring herbs, but just missing that extra depth of flavour you'd get from animal stock. Perhaps criticising minestrone soup for being minestrone soup is a stupid thing to do, but it occurred to me as I was eating it so I'm mentioning it to you now. I still liked it.

I ordered "Tagliolini, sprouting broccoli, lemon & homemade ricotta" with the glorious memory of a recent lunch at Padella in mind, where fresh pasta, lemon and ricotta were combined to knockout effect. I still enjoyed the Tagliolini at Café Murano - the pasta itself was particularly nice, all bouncy and firm and full of life - even if overall the dish didn't have quite as much going for it as the other place. The ricotta was a little sloppy and the seasoning slightly subdued, but there are still worse ways of spending your money than on a plate of nice fresh home made pasta.

Pitch-black squid ink cavatelli, with clams, Datterini tomatoes and samphire was more impressive, a dish that could have been airlifted from Sicily it felt so authentically vibrant. Imported Italian tomatoes were also used in a side salad, flecked with crunchy sea salt and drizzled with Balsamic vinegar. All of it the kind of thing you'd happily order again and again.

As I've said, London may never be the kind of town where you can pick a restaurant at random and be entitled to expect a great meal. But sometimes, when I find myself chancing upon an unassuming Italian bistro in St James (albeit one with a bit of a pedigree) it feels like every day we're getting a step closer to that ideal. There are loads of great places to eat out in London, and despite all the rubbish and tourist traps and ripoff joints there are just enough spots like Café Murano to remind us that, all said and done, we have it pretty good here. Don't you agree?

7/10

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Padella, Borough Market

I have a rather conflicted relationship with intimate open-kitchen restaurants. At their best, for example in Japanese style sushi bars, they offer the ultimate host-guest experience, allowing a chef to tailor the pace and content of a meal on an invidivual level and giving the customer an intimate view of the skill and technique that goes into the making of their dinner. Served blind, the food at Sushi Tetsu would still rank amongst the finest Japanese food in the capital, but seeing it prepared before your eyes with such balletic skill and artistic flair lifts the experience to another level.

And then there are the open kitchens where perhaps I don't want to see precisely every raw detail of what goes on in the making of my dinner. The thing about sushi bars is that most of the boring and ugly prep goes on behind the scenes; all you see as a diner is the last chapter, the beautiful final few strokes of the brush. There's an aesthetic magnificence in the preparation of sushi, it needs to be seen. What I don't need to see is tupperware being opened, clingfilm torn apart, piles of waste being shovelled into black bin bags, handfulls of blue roll being used to mop up smudges and spills. These things subtract from the joy of eating, not add to it.

So with that in mind, there are certain fascinating things to be seen sitting at the bar at Padella. These certainly include the almost forensic care and attention that goes into the making of the pasta, a skill which surely ranks right up there with Japanese noodle mastery. Watching the chefs at Padella gently tease apart a clump of pasta into the individual boiling cages, taste the water for seasoning, then eventually transfer the pasta to a pan, teasing the liquid back and forth to capture just enough of the precious pasta water, all this is a joy to behold, something entirely new to me and which undeniably enriches the experience of eating at Padella.

But when I order a beef carpaccio and watch someone grab a plate from the fridge, tear off the clingfilm and then hand it to me, well, not so much. I'm fairly sure there aren't many better ways of serving beef carpaccio in a busy kitchen I'm just thinking that had I not seen someone pull it out of the fridge a few seconds earlier I wouldn't have noticed quite how cold it was. Despite all this though, it was clearly very good beef, dressed in excellent oil and delicate crystals of sea salt.

The pasta, though. Good lord, the pasta. It's probably not a good idea to deal in absolutes but let's face it, when has that ever stopped me before, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the pasta at Padella is the best I've had the privilege to eat anywhere in Britain or abroad. Pici cacio e pepe was thick with a gentle give, silky with a perfectly balanced parmesan, black pepper and butter sauce and so intensely addictive when the last of it had disappeared from my plate I experienced what I can only describe as a profound sense of loss, a deep and ferocious longing for more pasta. Possibly this had something to do with the portion sizes at Padella being not quite on the right side of generous, but even so, this was exceptional pasta.

Then ricotta and sage ravioli, utterly flawlessly executed pillows of fluffy, dairy loveliness, glossed with gently herby butter and topped with fresh shaved parmesan. It's hard to comprehend that the pasta at Padella could be improved upon in any way; in fact more than that, it's better than I ever thought pasta could be, enough to ensure I never order it from anyone else again lest I sully the memory of this one perfect pasta moment. Yeah, it's good.

So I'm willing to ignore all the other annoyances - the cling film, the blue roll, the no reservations, the fact they saw fit to sit me right next to a stranger on an otherwise empty bar - because I would walk a thousand miles through rivers of molten steel for a chance to eat that pasta again and everything else is an insignificance. All I can suggest is you make the trip to Borough Market yourself and get in line. You think you've had pasta before? You really haven't.

10/10 (for the pasta)
7/10 (for the restaurant)

Chances are Padella will be in the next version of the app. But if you get there and the queues are too big, why not see where else round there is good.

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