Angelina, 56 Dalston Lane, London E8 3AH (020 7241 1851). Five-course set menu £38; daily plate £9; wines from £24
When I first heard about Angelina, I suffered acute flashbacks. All of a sudden it was November 2003, and I was back in a sun-drenched white box of a room in London’s St James’s, feeling unkempt and nowhere near cool enough for the walls. A waiter was offering to explain the concept behind the menu. I was trying not to flinch. London’s nasty, brutish critics pointed and laughed at the place and I pointed and laughed with them. After it closed, one of the owners, Jamie Barber, gave a spirited defence: “Some people say Shumi wasn’t a successful restaurant, but I disagree. I say it was an unmitigated disaster. I think we got everything right except for the design, the service, the menu, the pricing and the execution. It was an extremely difficult period.”
Shumi’s revolutionary idea was to fuse the food of Italy and Japan. There was a “paccio bar” where you got to eat “Italian sushi”. The risotto came with chopsticks. And so on. Barber, who has gone on to greater things, has already said what needs to be said, so I won’t add to it. Still, I did shiver involuntarily when I heard that a bunch of chefs with experience at good places like Bocca di Lupo, Bevis Marks and Enoteca Turi were coming together in London’s Dalston to undertake “a surreal exploration of Japanese and Italian cuisines, cultures and influences”. To which Karl Marx’s line about history repeating itself, first as tragedy then as farce, came to mind. Had we not suffered enough?
We can all relax, because Angelina is very much a disaster avoided – and by a long mark. Shumi’s undoing was its jaw-jutting swagger. God, but it loved itself. (I suppose somebody had to.) Angelina feels like a beautifully intentioned, low-key experiment. It’s like being invited round for dinner by your mate; the nerdy one who can really cook, and who has just gone into his Japanese phase. The most overtly Japanese elements are in the decor: the paper lanterns shading lightbulbs, for example, or the noren curtain over the doorway to the back kitchen from the open kitchen out front.
The food, meanwhile, is a gentle treatise on what Japanese and Italian cooking have in common. For surely tempura and fritto misto are two preparations with the same intent? They both want to preserve the integrity of the main ingredient courtesy of a crisp batter overcoat. Aren’t sashimi and crudo close relatives that really ought to get to know each other better? What’s key here is that the kitchen is not attempting to pretend they have completely nailed the intricacies of Japanese food. At base they are serving Italian food, with intriguing Japanese grace notes. This time round I give thanks that there appears to be space in the market for something so curious and thoughtful.
It’s also good value, as long as you are prepared for the works. They serve a five-stage set menu for £38, plus a single daily changing plate at £9. It starts with a fritto misto. There is a plate piled with cime di rape or winter greens, in a crisp, lacy batter overcoat which snaps easily. With them is a sweet soy-based sauce for dipping. On another plate there are artichokes deep-fried in what the Romans refer to as the “Jewish style”, the outer leaves crisped and fragile, alongside thick discs of long-braised pig that has been breaded and deep fried. These come with a dark Japanese-style, sweet-and-sour sauce so that you are now thinking about tonkatsu, that encouraging slab of deep-fried breaded pork loin which is one of the minor miracles of Japanese cooking.
Served alongside this, so that the table fills with dainty pieces of Japanese porcelain, is the raw course. There are candy-pink Sicilian prawns dressed only in a little olive oil and lemon, lined up on the plate like commas. They are sweet and lightly sticky. Another plate brings thin slices of marinated sea bream, the translucence of mother of pearl. A third has a heap of tuna tartare. Call these dishes crudo and they’re Italian. Call them sashimi and they’re Japanese. Your call.
Next, a risotto studded with dense, oily pieces of unagi – barbecued eel – the rice flavoured with soy butter. If I was being really picky, I would niggle over the risotto’s wobble; over whether it had been cooked out quite long enough. Then again, the pleasure of this dish trumps the technical stuff every time. It reminded me of the end stage of a bowl of unagi chirashi, in which the eel is laid over a heaped bowl of warm sushi rice. The oils from the fish mingle with the grains, and dribbles of soy lubricate the whole intense, comforting business. It may not quite be a bowl of risotto, but it is a plate of loveliness.
For the meat course it is the jaw workout that is onglet, given a serious char over the hibachi, but still very much a deep offal pink inside and thoroughly beefy. Alongside is a piece of griddled radicchio, to bring an edge of the bitter to the night. We also get the daily plate which today is hunks of their own coarse-cut sausages, with a rugged back note of the duodenal and the farmyard. It does it for me, but may not do it for others. The pieces of sausage are threaded through sweet heaps of yellow and red cherry tomatoes. It is a fair old plateful for £9.
We finish with a bit of a shrug: a panna cotta, with a chocolate mousse and black sesame. All parts are lick-the-bowl-clean good. But there’s no point pretending: both Japan and Italy have compelling dessert traditions. This is from the softer end of both, literally and figuratively. No matter. It’s still a fun ride. As if to emphasise that this is an Italian restaurant looking east, rather than a Japanese place looking west, the wine list is entirely Italian. There is also a bar which, slightly oddly, is off the bogs, though it may be the other way around.
It’s such a sweet venture, so cheerfully fanboyish in its devotion to the subtleties of both cooking traditions, that I worry it will gain only niche novelty status. I’d love them to succeed and expand their explorations. To do that the menu will have to change regularly. I’ll assume it will. Oh, and you lot will have to book to eat there. You really should.
News bites
Gaijin Sushi in Birmingham is another place born out of a non-Japanese cook’s fascination with the food of Japan. In this case, however, it’s all in. Polish-born chef Michal Kubiak has spent years learning his craft, both in Poland and here, and we are the beneficiaries. He brings grace, wit and serious enthusiasm to a mostly classic sushi and sashimi menu, and all at a very fair price (gaijinsushi.co.uk).
D&D Restaurants is to close the once iconic Kensington Place restaurant, after 30 years. Under Rowley Leigh for its first 20 years, Kensington Place in west London was regarded as a beacon of modern British cookery. If you’ve ever eaten scallops with pea purée, then you have Leigh and KP to thank. The entire site will be redeveloped.
Edinburgh chef Mark Greenaway, who recently closed his eponymous restaurant in the city, has announced his next move. In the middle of April, he is taking over the space in the Waldorf Astoria hotel currently occupied by the Galvin Brothers, to open Grazing by Mark Greenaway (markgreenaway.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
