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.
