Zucca

In reality, the British ‘love affair’ with Italian food has more to do with convenience and a lack of adventure than a particular affinity for the produce, flavours or cooking of Italy.

Pasta is filling and quick to make, with students and ‘busy young professionals’ buying tons of rubbery shop-bought tortellini that comes with that bizarre, tasteless paste in the middle. ‘Spag bol’ is an ever-present dish in the repertoires of mums across the country but, judging by supermarket shelves, their versions must often taste of sweet tomato sauce. The distinction between American pizza and Italian pizza is worth pointing out too, as there isn’t anything particularly Italian about a deep pan pizza with a cheese and pepperoni stuffed crust, or one with pineapple on it.

Things don’t get much better when you go out to the average Italian restaurant either. It seems that normal expectations of the food in an Italian restaurant are so low that the chef can serve anything he likes, provided it comes on a doughy base or is mixed up with pasta, usually overcooked. People make excuses about it tasting 'homemade' when actually it's just crap. The other week I had the misfortune to eat in Buona Sera, an unfathomably busy Italian restaurant at Clapham Junction, which serves a pizza covered in nothing but melted hard mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce and three strips of parma ham rendered tasteless by a bake in the oven. The red served in that place would make anyone with a remote interest in decent wine cry.

Yet Italian restaurants like Buona Sera seem to do well, perhaps because people think of Italian as cheap and cheerful slap-up food; after all, how far wrong can you go with pizza, lasagne or penne? Well, quite wrong given the evidence.

Maybe people just don’t care about the food and want something hot over which to chat. I assume restaurants like Buona Sera, of which there are many, must rely on these punters, as well as the ones who remove basil leaves from their food as if they were inedible decoration. The food in these places is certainly bland enough to allow the unadventurous to feel exotic for eating out without causing them to worry about an encounter with any challenging or unfamiliar flavours, or flavour at all for that matter.

The trouble with all of this, with the jars of Dolmio, the squash-ball mozzarella, the parmesan smelling of feet, the overcooked pasta, the deep-pan pizza, the Tesco tortellini, the boring lasagne and the uninspired Italian restaurant menus, is that they give Italian food a bad image. Enter Zucca.

When we sat down for this meal, I didn’t really know what to expect. Zucca is an Italian restaurant in Bermondsey that has received positive reviews and won awards (it was voted in the top three Italian restaurants in Europe by 'The World's 50 Best' judging panel) but then so has Bocca Di Lupo in Soho and I consider it one of the most overrated restaurants on the planet having eaten there. I've had so many below par Italian meals that it's hard to have high expectations for the next. Poor me.

The design and style of Zucca is ultra-modern but, remarkably for a new restaurant, there are tablecloths, which soften the edges and prevent the interior from feeling too stark. The dining room is beautifully lit inside and tables are well-spaced. I’ve realised recently just how much this impacts on the feel of a restaurant, and when we were shown to our seats we could see diners taking advantage of the room to lean back in their seats and laze around in post-meal leisure. They looked encouragingly content. For a fully booked Saturday night there was a remarkably calm, relaxed atmosphere in the dining room and none of the frantic bustle you feel in some busy restaurants.

Picking up the menu, the first things to notice are that it’s small and features only two pasta dishes. There’s no pizza. Good. The prices are also staggeringly cheap for a wildly hip restaurant such as this – antipasti dishes are £4-£6 and mains are between £10 and £15.

Amongst the antipasti is the carpaccio of sea bass, a dish that has recieved such lashings of praise in reviews that I began to wonder whether, in some bizarre anthropomorphic twist, a sea bass carpaccio had taken over the planet and was holding the children of food critics hostage. Reasonably unlikely, but either way we ordered the dish along with smoked eel bruschetta.

Not being a recognised food critic or having any children to kidnap, I can report under no duress that the thin fillets of sea bass had a beautiful texture, both meaty and soft, and a delicate fishy flavour. The chilli and olive oil dressing was unusual but it worked. Customers can buy bottles of the olive oil used by the kitchen from the restaurant and they probably should.

The bruschetta was on another level entirely. I’ve had smoked eel before and loved it but not like this. This was proper chunks of eel steak, rather than the shredded stuff I had in the past, and my slippery dead chum had been imbued with an incredibly complex, strong smoky flavour. It came with big, salty capers and fennel, all of which was sat atop toasted homemade bread. The whole dish was a pleasure to eat, for the contrasting textures as well as the flavours.

If you’re in the business of condoning the slaughter of animals for human consumption, why not eat all of them, provided they have been treated decently (the murder bit aside)? This was roughly my thinking when ordering veal chop and spinach for my main course, that and ‘I bloody love veal and want to order it’. And worry not little cow who art in little cow heaven; the chef at Zucca made sure that you will live on for eternity in my memory.

For this chop was one of the most mind-blowingly tasty hunks of flesh I have ever eaten. It was so good that I couldn’t help smiling with joy between mouthfuls; I almost laughed out loud at one point.

It arrived looking like a slightly small, slightly pale T-bone steak, with big, thick black lines seared on it from the grill. Cooked the medium side of medium-rare, it was pink and juicy and more tender than beef. I love the taste of charcoal, salt and meat together and this was all three in perfect harmony.

It was a large piece of veal but every mouthful was as good as the first and when it was all gone I had that feeling the little boy has in The Snowman when he runs outside to find his mate has melted. I have been fortunate enough to eat in some great steak restaurants but this chop was up there with the best grilled meat I have ever tasted. My jaw aches from the activity of my saliva glands whenever I think of it.

Where do you go from there? Not for pudding we decided, so who knows what they’re like. But with the important food tasting like this, who cares; this is great Italian food at reasonable prices. One can only hope that Zucca is one of many new Italian restaurants that help to undermine the reputation for mediocrity Italian cuisine is getting in this country. The food at Zucca is an example of how good Italian can be when cooked with effort, expertise and flare.

GEEK ALERT: Retro Gaming

On my way to work I pass a billboard advertising a new computer game imaginatively entitled Killzone 3. This heralds ‘a new era in gaming’, according to the publisher’s marketing team.

My ‘era of gaming’ ended several years ago when I left home and went to university. Now I only play computer games on the rare occasion I’m at a mate’s house and we’ve got nothing else to do.

The mention of eras, however, made me think back to a time when I was feverishly excited about getting a new computer game and would spend/waste an entire Saturday night playing on it because I wasn’t old enough to like beer and I was too young to go out anyway.

Nostalgia and the talk of eras are reminders of age, and I realise there is already a generation of kids who will never witness some of the pathetic graphics I sat mesmerised by between the ages of 8 and 16. There might already be a generation of children who don’t even know what this sound is, or the frustration and arguments that it provoked:



So for those kids who have no idea how we got to Grand Theft Auto 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops, and hopefully for the enjoyment of mates with whom I misspent my youth, I’ve collected some clips of the games that kept me rapt for too much of my childhood.

It’s a testament to how gripped and engaged I was by some of these games that the sights and sounds bring back such vivid memories, not just of the gameplay itself, but of friends, places and occasions connected to them.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System

I daresay that the design of the SNES console reflects how the target demographic has changed in the games industry. It used to be children that played computer games; now that they're more sophisticated that's no longer the case. With its oversized buttons and chunky body, the SNES looks like it was designed for children or retards. No-one in their right mind would produce something that looked like this with young, aspirational adults in mind.

That huge grey letterbox shape is where the game cartridge used to go. You could expect to blow the dust out of there on a regular basis in order to get the SNES to work. Similarly, the cartridge itself needed a regular hoover. Not a great design but the best they could do.

I liked my SNES but not this much (right). You learn in life, and from Google image search, that there will always be people who take everything too far.

Zelda wasn't even that good. I certainly wouldn't have expected a reasonably decent but slightly odd bird to have it betwixt her loins on the internet. Each to their own though.

Games

Super Mario World: The console came bundled with this archetype platformer. I would spend many months labouring towards the conclusion of this game whilst listening to a cassette of 2 Unlimited's sophmore album 'No Limits' with the sound of the game on mute. Christ knows what my mum thought.

Starwing: Revolutionary when it was released due to using *gasp* 3-D polygons, Starwing was a rather odd story about four reasonably shit animals who had been trained as fighter pilots and then tasked with saving the planet.

Super Mario Kart: This game has been revamped several times for more recent consoles but I presume none of the later versions had such a jerky frame rate and pixelated graphics. Bizarre how these games all appear in full HD when I'm remembering them.

Rock 'n' Roll Racing: Must be one of very few computer games to feature music by Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Steppenwolf. The commentator, Larry Huffman, had a particularly memorable voice and there were some real epic two-player games that would occasionally see joypads get thrown or the console turned off if you blew your companion up too many times.

F-Zero: There are hipsters in Shoreditch listening to almost identical music at a rave while you read this.

NBA Jam Tournament Edition: Classic menu music, a total lack of realism and no longevity. The SNES wasn't powerful enough to allow five on five basketball games, so you got two players and the ability to score superhuman baskets.

Sensible Soccer: Of course, everyone called it 'Sensy' and did their best to get players into that sweet-spot on the halfway line where it was possible to score every time, provided you got the angle correct. I'd forgotten that there was no attempt at commentary, just the most monotonous musak playing in the background for the entire game.

Streets of Rage 2: One of the best examples of gaming in the 1990s. Contemporary music and sound effects throughout a whopping eight levels. This clip features some classic moments, including a bar room ruck with a leggy blonde called 'Electra' (at 5:10) in which our heroic protagonist gives her a bloody good headbutting. This game is also notable for its wonky perception of turkey's nutritional value; apparently eating a whole one regenerates your health, rather than giving you indigestion and a desire to lie down.

Decanter Great Spanish Fine Wine Encounter: John Radford's Rising Spanish Stars Masterclass

If you want to watch posh people lose all sense of decorum, it would be wise to attend Decanter’s next fine wine encounter and stand in the swirling epicentre of the main tasting hall as a blur of tweed and corduroy barges and hurries its way between producers.

It was certainly busy at the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone, the venue for Decanter’s first Spanish Fine Wine Encounter on the 19th February. The Grand Ballroom boasted 50 tables featuring some of Spain’s best wines, offering punters the chance to discover the regional variations of each wine-producing area.

Milling around with an empty glass while choosing what to sample is a pleasant enough way to spend a day, particularly if it serves as a recce for a shopping spree. A tasting as busy as this, however, does leave you wishing for something a bit more leisurely, so the real highlight of the afternoon was taking part in a masterclass given by John Radford, a regular contributor to Decanter and an expert on Spanish wine. The idea of his Rising Spanish Stars session, hosted in a smaller, separate ballroom, was to introduce participants to wines from regions other than the famous Rioja and Ribero del Duero.

Tasting thirteen red wines one after the other is in itself an excellent way to appreciate the different characters various regions have to offer, and the exercise is made even more interesting when you have someone as knowledgeable and entertaining as Radford to guide you through it. Learning something about the people, places and backgrounds of the wines gives you an added appreciation and respect for the final product, and Radford’s little asides and travelling tales caused plenty of laughter too.

A recurring theme of the tasting was wine from unfashionable regions, made from unfashionable grapes. Some of the producers were so aware of their region’s bad reputation that they chose not to be classified in the appropriate Denominación de Origen Protegida (DOP), a mark that’s usually used to reassure the consumer of a wine’s quality. This was particularly the case for the hotter regions of Spain, where many wines have become infamous for tasting so overly-jammy and alcoholic that they are said to have been ‘boiled to death’.

Most of Radford’s selections were still up in the 14%-15% abv range, prompting some punters to denounce a few as unbalanced. It was noticeable, however, that some of the same people had 13 empty glasses in front of them at the end of the session and when Radford put their claims out for support amongst the audience, the best they could get was a little over a third of the vote. The truth of it was that these were big, oaky red wines that would go best with food. After all, it’s highly probable that every one was made with this in mind.

There were unfamiliar grapes such as Callet, Bobal and Negral used in several of Radford’s 13, as well as wines from the promised ‘alternative’ regions, including Valencia, La Mancha and Majorca. The wines from Majorca were particularly good and easily stood up to the Ribera Del Duero Radford had managed to squeeze in at the last moment. This was the reason, he told us, for the 13 wines not 12; he decided shortly before the event that we really ought to taste this particular wine and there was no way he could comfortably leave it out.


At one point Radford began talking, totally deadpan, about a ‘great off-licence my wife has found round the corner from our house.’ Presumably, I thought to myself, this is going to be the story of a little independent wine shop that stocks some of the expensive but terrific wines in front of me. ‘An off-license,’ he continued, ‘that does two bottles for £5. Excellent for a BBQ or, indeed, if you have anyone coming round for dinner.’

Whatever this story might suggest, Radford was certainly a generous host on this occasion, and you can tell from his size and his stories that he is both a bon viveur and a raconteur. The wine and his company made for a great afternoon. I would highly recommend going to one of his tastings if you’re even slightly interested and have the chance.

A favourite from the class:


4 Kilos 12 Volts 2009. The winery where this is produced was only established in Majorca in 2006. They make modern style, hands-off wines, including this full-bodied red, tasting of spice, black pepper and blackcurrant. Made from Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah and Callet. Aged in American and French oak and available for £17-20.

Thanks to Adam Lechmere at Decanter. Photo of John Radford from Decanter website.