Pucci, 39 Maddox Street, London W1S 1FX (020 3887 4363). Pizza £8-£45. Sharing plates £6-£26. Desserts £7-£9. Wines from £28
If the past is a foreign country, its embassy is currently located at the corner of Maddox and Mill Streets in London’s Mayfair. This, I think, is intentional. Pucci is presenting itself as the direct descendant of a place on the King’s Road in Chelsea called Pucci Pizza, which was once the haunt of famous people with terrifying haircuts. Rod Stewart, Brian Ferry and Diana Ross went there, as did George Best if he could ever drag himself away from the pub. Or as one review put it in the 90s, eating there meant there was always a danger “that you will share the basement with minor celebs from other decades who will be trying rather sadly to attract attention to themselves”. You get the idea.
Owner Pucci Albanese closed the original restaurant in 2010, and now here it is again in Mayfair under the direction of his son Rufus. He’s a pleasingly broad-shouldered man who will make sure you have a good time, or bloody well die trying. “Everybody happy?” he demands of a party of eight next to us, as their food arrives. “Ecstatic, darling,” one replies, on cue. He comes direct from a time when restaurant managers were referred to unironically as “mein host”. I’ve missed mein host. Happily, he’s back.
The walls are of bare red brick and hung with 70s pop art paintings of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. The button-back banquettes are in olive green velour. It’s like sitting on a sofa in a front room in Penge, circa 1973. The ceiling has gnarled, thin wooden beams. It’s a wealthy person’s version of a humble farmhouse. The calamari is served in rings, like they always were in that taverna on Mykonos run by that nice English couple called Beryl and Graham who decided to escape the rat race. The music thumps, but it’s good music so we don’t care: Dean Martin bellowing Volare; a winsome Chet Baker sighing out Body and Soul. We even get Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World, because it’s required under a retro restaurant by-law.
When the menu arrives at our table, so does Rufus. He wants to know if we understand the “concept”. I shudder. I can’t help it. I’m a very low-concept kind of chap. Happily, so is this place. They have a list of ultra-thin, Roman-style pizzas of the sort they used to do on the King’s Road. Apparently, they’ve been famous since 1977, though this is the first I’ve heard of them. There are also some small sharing plates cooked up by Rufus’s other half, Tilly Turbett. You can have a pizza and then some small plates or the other way round. That’s the concept. I grasp it fully. The website describes Turbett as an ex-Noma and Gordon Ramsay chef, which is obviously impressive. Tilly’s LinkedIn profile says she did an unpaid stint for a few weeks at Noma in Copenhagen, and was a chef de partie at Maze, which is indeed owned by Gordon Ramsay. You have to sweat your assets.
So far, I’ve managed to make Pucci Mayfair sound faintly ludicrous, which it is. But it’s ludicrous in an extremely appealing way. It’s the kind of room in which you can have a very good time, though ideally with someone else’s money. You really might need to be a Chelsea refusenik to swallow some of the pricing: £18 for a pizza is enthusiastic; £45 for one under drifts of shaved black truffle looks like a menu item designed for a man who is going to have to overcompensate big time to impress his date (simpler pizzas are just £8).
Happily, the essentials of those pizzas are very good indeed. The crisp base is what I dream of being: remarkably thin. The crust is bubbled and singed. We have one with generous amounts of nose-tickling nduja and snowy burrata and a dribble of honey to soften the chilli hit. It’s a fine piece of work. Other things are as well. Beef brisket is long-braised then pulled into tangles and slicked with lip-sticking jus. It is heaped up on a silky mound of hummus with additional chickpeas that have been roasted. It’s good value at £12. A sizable duck breast is crisp-skinned and pink, dribbled with a pomegranate molasses sauce and dropped languorously on a heap of finely mashed sweet potatoes. A salad of baby gem and Treviso with parmesan and anchovy is bitter and salty in all the right places.
Not everything is right. The calamari rings really are baffling. I claimed a couple of months ago that salt and pepper squid was now so ubiquitous it had acquired the rank of British classic, and with good reason. Flat pieces of squid, carefully scored, so that they curl in on each other alongside tentacles, are cheery tender items, and a quiet reminder that the big thick rings of our youth died out for a reason. They are just so many elastic bands. The only reason I can imagine for doing them that way now is because you have an elastic band fetish, you accidentally bought a job lot of geriatric squid or are trying to plug into a nostalgia market. Given the banquettes, the art and Rufus, let’s go with the latter.
The other duff note is advertised as courgette fritti. These are turning up on menus all over these days and demand courgettes, sliced into the thinnest of matchsticks, battered and deep fried so that they stop tasting of courgette. It is the perfect way to hide a vegetable’s true nature. Not here. Pucci do them in big beermat-sized slabs. Flick one of these across a room and you could take off a toupee at 20 paces.
Order and calm are restored by £9 worth of a truly magnificent Rubensesque pavlova designed for sharing, piled with slices of cardamom-poached pear and lemon verbena. The meringue is crisp and chewy as it should be, the cream a soothing, cooling presence. It’s what come-hither desserts should look like, and a reminder that classic dishes are always such for a good reason.
We drink something chilled, white and Italian, fight with the determined waiters to be able to fill our own glasses, sing along to some 1950s bangers and accidentally run up the kind of ton-and-a-half bill that will drive certain people completely nuts. But what can I say? We had a very good time, visiting the past. We revelled in Pucci’s unconscious act of nostalgia. I liked it a lot back there.
News bites
Pucci’s £45 black truffle pizza manages to make the offering at Jean-Georges at the Connaught, the London outpost of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s empire, look good value, an achievement of sorts. When I reviewed their black truffle pizza in 2017, it was £29. It was absurd, but I admitted that, were I drunk, I could imagine eating it again, by accident. Currently it’s £35. Inflation, eh? (the-connaught.co.uk)
The management of the Carluccio’s chain has offered to pay the settled-status application fees for its 1,550 employees from the EU. Chief executive Mark Jones said the group would not exist were it not for the journey from Italy that Antonio Carluccio originally made. ‘We are passionate about the value they bring to our business and it is something that we are keen to protect. It’s what Antonio would have wanted,’ he said.
Both Cantor’s Food Store in Chorlton, Manchester and Restaurant 92 in Harrogate, which were reviewed on these pages immediately before Christmas, have closed. It may be a sign of the tough year to come.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
