Telephone: 020-7730 3366
Address: 85 Duke Of York Square, London SW3
Rating: 15.5/20
OK, I give up. I think that I will have to abandon all hope of ever finding what strikes me as authentic Italian cooking in London. The trattoria at the back of Valvona & Crolla comes closest to the real McCoy in Britain, but Valvona & Crolla is in Edinburgh. Assaggi is the nearest you get to it in London, with Riva a stylish second. There are several very classy Italian restaurants, too, Locanda Locatelli, Zafferano and Passione among them. But none of them serves up food of the kind of bare-boned simplicity and beauty that you find in the country of origin. It may well be that no restaurant in the capital would survive the three-lamb-chops-on-the-plate treatment. Perhaps our own raw materials are just not produced to stand that kind of intense scrutiny. More to the point, schooled in the ways of French cooking and our own gastronomic past, a dish that doesn't have gravy or sauce and vegetables doesn't look properly dressed. We'll eat plain grilled chicken with gusto in Rome or Florence or Turin, but serve such a naked dish in London, Manchester or Leeds, and people will complain about shortcomings and value for money.
I had high hopes of Manicomio. It was an offshoot of a company called Machiavelli Foods, which imports high-calibre Italian produce for the restaurant trade in London. It has a deli attached. Ho-ho, I thought when I first read about it. That sounds good. A plate of top-quality mozzarella, still oozing whey; or one of cured ham, pink as coral; roasted leg of rabbit, brown and juicy, with a side plate of fried potatoes - that's what I want to eat. It seemed an even better idea when, Tucker having booked us into a gastropub that didn't open for lunch, we trailed forlornly up King's Road looking for a sanity-saving alternative. And there was Manicomio, part of a new development on Duke Of York Square, a trim, tidy, modern, surreal parallel universe to the rest of Chelsea. Better still, it was warm, it was clean, it was bright, it was lively and it had tables to spare.
The menu looked quite hot, too. Cannelloni farciti con piedino di maiale e sedano rapa (pig's trotter and celeriac cannelloni) caught my imagination (well, it would, wouldn't it?). And there was agnello alla griglia con ceci marinati (grilled leg of lamb with braised chickpeas), though in my mood of bristling authenticity, those chickpeas were a problem. Never mind - the combination seemed about right. In fact, it was about right - but not on the same plate. The chickpeas were excellent, cooked through, yet still holding their shape in a tomato-based sauce of some depth and splendour, while the lamb was tender, with lively burned edges, but whatever true flavour it might have had was lost against pulse power.
The pasta of the cannelloni was exemplary in every respect, subtle and silky, and the filling had the gentle richness of pig's trotter tempered by the mellow herbiness of celeriac. It was as fine a dish for a day with a chill, cutting wind as you could wish to find, and had no need of the French-style reduction and some other sauce that came with it. They were good in their way, too, but they rather clouded the issue.
Tucker tackled capesante candite con salsa di nocciole e capperi (fried scallops with walnut and caper purée) as a first course, and pronounced it very fine, with the mushroomy nut offsetting the sharper capers. I managed to scrape a bit off his plate, and agreed that it was a rather good, if odd, mixture, walnuts being largely grown in northern Italy while capers are very definitely a Mediterranean product. I suppose it might be a little-known variation of the Ligurian salsa di noce. Anyway, authentic or not, it sat well with the fat scallops and set Tucker up for his roasted rabbit with Parma ham, polenta - and the inevitable sauce. This was a dish in which the parts were well cooked - succulent rabbit, medium-sloppy polenta, good gravy - which ate splendidly, but you'd be more likely to find it in Aix-en-Provence or Arles than in Milan or Monza.
Manicomio is a difficult one to call, because there was a lot to admire and to enjoy about the food, which was thoughtful and well-prepared. The focaccia was first class and the plate of cheese with which I rounded off lunch was generous and exemplary - rather better, in fact, than most of the cheese I have eaten in Italy. The wine list does not conform to bland convention, either. It isn't huge, but it seems well chosen and not exorbitantly priced: our bottle of above-average red was £26.60. Even so, our bill came to £90.35 including the wine, water and espressos, which does not make Manicomio, for all its cheery informality, a cheap eat. A superior eat, possibly, even if it is Italian-inspired rather than Italian in fact, but not a great value-for-money gaff such as, say, the trattoria at the back of Valvona & Crolla, which remains the model for all such enterprises.
· Open Lunch, Mon-Fri, 12 noon-3pm (Sat & Sun, 5pm); dinner, all week, 6.30-10.30pm. Wheelchair access & WC.
