Telephone: 020-7387 2521
Address: 45 Grafton Way, London W1
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
And to think that I went with such high hopes. It was when the waitress grabbed the elephant-sized pepper grinder that I knew where I had met Sardo before.
What is it about Italian restaurants and pepper grinders? I thought that they had been retired years ago, but here they were, massively erect as ever, and grinding away like billyo.
Sardo, you see, occupying a discreet corner of Fitzrovia's adland gulch, is really a Mark 2, or possibly Mark 5, version of all those smarm-joints of the past, of which San Frediano and La Famiglia are such gnarled survivors, with their bright, sunny interiors, Apicella tiles, bombastically warm greeting and promiscuous use of pepper grinders on food that, for the most part, was as bright and jolly as the decor, and a pantomime pastiche of the real Italian stuff.
We're all too sophisticated to fall for that baloney any more, aren't we? Well, to judge by Sardo's lunchtime trade, the magic of the light, bright interior, the sexy service, now female rather than male, and the lure of the pepper grinder still prove irresistible.
As you may know, I have devoted a good many of my field trips to trying to find restaurants that accurately serve up the food of various parts of Italy, food that is pure, virtuous and unmucked about with. Every now and then I get a glimmer, the full-blown experience even, but more often than not I leave crestfallen. I have nothing against la cucina nuova in theory - every country has the right to renew its culinary culture (would that we would do so to our own). But in practice there is rarely anything new or inventive divvied up in the name of Italian food in Britain, just perfectly decent Italian dishes messed up with French saucing and English vegetables.
To be fair, the food at Sardo isn't the pantomime pastiche of old. In fact, much of it is pretty good, but we should not kid ourselves that it is really Italian or, more specifically, Sardinian. It's the details, pepper grinders aside, that give the game away that this is a newfangled Brito-Italian restaurant. Alongside the proper Sardinian carta di musica bread was some very sub-fusc ciabatta, a bread that itself was invented in the 1970s for the overseas market. Alongside that was the now inevitable saucer of olive oil for dipping in, which I have never come across in Italy. Then there was French-style saucing and a salad of such casual indifference that it could only have come from a bag, and vegetables on the same plate as the meat or fish, and - well, a host of minor irritations, none catastrophic in itself, just depressing in their cumulative effect.
It was interesting that the mini-menu handed to me on the way out contained many more typical Sardinian dishes than appeared on the menu from which Agnolotta and I chose our lunch - spaghetti with bottarga and tagliato di manzo con formaggio Sardo for her, and moscardini alla Campidanese, fregola alle cozze and finally salsiccia sarda for me. Along would come the plates bearing perfectly respectable food, and the next thing you knew they were threatened with assault by the penile pepper grinder.
It took a very firm, "No, thank you very much" to see it back on its shelf.
If I want pepper, I'll put it on myself after I've tasted the dish. The moscardini, tiny octopi, in a mellow tomato sauce, did not require pepper.
Neither did the spaghetti with bottarga, salted, dried mullet roe, although it could have done with more bottarga - "E spaghetti all'olio," said Agnolotta dismissively, and she knows about these things. The fregola, tiny pasta made from a kind of couscous, unanointed with pepper, were happy enough in their thick mussel broth, although clams are the traditional shellfish for this dish. The salsiccia, which looked like a mini-Cumberland curl, was dull and the potatoes and salad that came with it even duller. Not even a hailstorm of pepper could have saved them. And the beef, lightly grilled, sliced and served with a rich cheesy sauce, while tasty enough, suggested a creation designed to satisfy the international palate rather than something handed down from generation to generation of Sardinian cooks.
The bill for all this came to £103, which included a bottle of splendid Sardinian red, the name of which escaped my notes. Either way, it is a not insignificant amount of money. But I don't want to be too hard on Sardo. It is a perfectly decent place in many ways, and is obviously trying to smuggle the interesting and excellent food of Sardinia into London in disguise. The trouble is that the disguise overwhelms the decencies of the dishes. Why can't it have the courage of its convictions and dispense with all the distracting, irrelevant frippery and, most of all, those bloody pepper grinders?
· Open Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12 noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-11pm. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access(no WC).
