Le Langhe, Peasholme Green, York (01904 622 584). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60-£100
Le Langhe in York is a beautiful shop with a bafflingly bland restaurant space attached. Up front is a cheese cabinet laid out like a display at Tiffany's. It's a wonder there aren't dribble marks down the glass. There are soft tobacco-leaf-wrapped cheeses and raw cow's milk cheeses. There are others pockmarked with peppercorns. There are balls of smoked mozzarella, boulders of pecorino both mature and fresh, and rounds of 24-month aged parmesan. A lot of cows have been milked to produce this back-lit largesse.
Against the wall behind the counter is a glass box for the salamis, many and various, dangling like so many church bell pulls, awaiting their moment. There are pastas and oils and cakes. There are wines from obscure vineyards, many in verticals of vintages, for they also have a wholesale business importing the stuff. I have friends who say they can spend £80 a week in here without meaning to. All it takes is a reasonable appetite, a bit of good taste and slack morals in the matter of credit cards.
Past the long cheese cabinet are a couple of steps which lead up to… a conservatory in Penge. It's like the wardrobe to Narnia in reverse. You pass through an edible wonderland festering with temptation and end up in a glum space of bare-wood tables that seems an afterthought. It looks like the kind of place you'd go for carrot cake and a badly made latte. Still, I have been told I can eat very well in here and based on the spread at my back I am inclined to have faith.
That said, I cannot think of another restaurant I have heard (and read) more bitching about. Mostly it is to do with the service, which locals say can make the plot of a Faydeau farce look ordered and efficient. It can, they say, be less a meal than a random sequence of events.
The funny thing is that all this – the humdrum environment, the unreliable service, combined with great food (and the food at Le Langhe really is great) – is exactly the sort of thing that certain travellers venerate about undiscovered gems in Italy. "Darling!" they holler, because they all talk like Nancy Mitford, "It was marvellous. Scrubby little place. Chef shouting at his wife all the way through dinner and the service was a circus act. But the food! It was divine!"
Except that Le Langhe, which refers to the hills of Piedmont where chef-owner Otto comes from, isn't in Italy. Other standards apply. It started on a small site next to York Minster as just a deli. It now occupies a redbrick building opposite the kind of office block on the outskirts of town that could house a call centre. Given it is serving some of the very best food I have ever eaten in York, a city which has always punched well below its weight, it is just odd. For the record, our service was fine if occasionally chaotic. Then again, it was a lunchtime with only six other people there when we sat down.
The menu is complex. There are individually priced dishes, combined prices for starter-main combos, the offer of a four-course tasting menu for £22.50 ringed with lots of imperatives (the whole table MUST participate, the chef decides what you're having), plus cheese and meat boards of various widths and depths. At night there is a seven-course tasting menu for £38.
By contrast, the list of dishes of the day makes everything seem relatively straightforward. There's a soup, a choice of five pastas (£8.95) and four mains (£17 with a small pasta dish). The latter, it says, require "30 min waiting time". Always good to get your apology in first.
For £3.10 there's a soup of lightly bitter cavolo nero with spelt and the piginess of pancetta thrown in as seasoning rather than protein. It bobs with crisp, rugged croutons. Is it too damning to talk of the glories of leftovers, of the way ingredients that started with other dishes in mind can end up creating something special in their own right? I don't think so.
The list of sauces, which they insist will dress rather than bathe their pastas, has a certain melody to it. There is pumpkin and goat's cheese. There is a gutsy-sounding calves' liver sauce, or one of speck, gorgonzola, dolce radicchio and walnuts, which sounds like a high-class buffet thrust together in the Large Hadron Collider.
I have ground veal and finely diced porcini, the two ballsy flavours and textures hugging each other, atop broad egg-yolk-yellow ribbons of a pasta so thin and silken that you have to hold them in your mouth to clock the bite that is still there. The long-aged grated parmesan helps to dry out what would otherwise be too slippery a moment. It is quite simply one of the best pasta dishes I have ever eaten. A main of braised oxtail brings five or so lumps of bone the colour of a heavily creosoted fence but altogether much tastier, alongside a dark sticky jus that has to be the braising liquor reduced and strained and reduced again. A pile of coarse and neutral polenta serves as ballast. I suck the bones clean.
And then a board, one half with stinky cheeses, both running and blue, the other with their meats. There is a dark, muscular wild boar salami and slices of their own porchetta, spiked with fennel seed and garlic. There is a little Parma ham, but that is overshadowed by a soft game salami, which is closing on a terrine, the funk of the meat a vehicle for the ivory blobs of powerful fat. It's not simply the quality that shines through. It's how well they are kept.
For dessert I am led to a display of that day's offerings. A bread and butter pudding is the only thing that does not hit home. It is compressed and stodgy. A hazelnut torte is a different matter entirely. It looks dry and biscuity, but has a luscious, buttery crunch. The thick cream helps. The wine list, as you would expect of an importer, is huge, the choice by the glass light, pleasingly on cliché. How best, then, to sum up Le Langhe? It is, I think, a great restaurant, but only in spite of itself. It does things its own way. If you can cope with its own way you can eat very well here. Otherwise, it would be better you went elsewhere.
Jay's news bites
■ Francesco Mazzei's L'Anima, in the City of London, is the opposite of Le Langhe. It's all thick tablecloths and tinted glass and swish and gloss. For that you will pay, big time; in return you'll get very good Italian food. His linguine with crab, chilli and Amalfi lemons is a thing of beauty only bettered by his fish stew with fregola. A cheaper L'Anima Café has been promised for later this year (lanima.co.uk).
■ Recent discovery: the boho Pall Mall Wines tucked away down the Royal Opera Arcade off London's Pall Mall, which opened last year. Essentially a wine merchant, the space is scattered with barrels around which you can sit to try wines by the glass from an exceptional list both in terms of breadth and price. There's cheese and charcuterie to soak up the booze. Just don't tell everyone about it (pallmallfinewine.co.uk).
■ It's official: the chummiest pub in Britain is The Pheasant in Allithwaite, Cumbria, runner-up in Britain's Friendliest Business Awards (yes, they exist). Not only do they serve a killer pint, apparently, they also help run the local meals on wheels service.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
