Like many of the restaurants I visit these days, Noci in north London is well-meaning, pared-back – and slightly wonky. There was a point during the meal when an apparently untrained server loomed towards me with a bowl of Sicilian red prawn tagliatelle, which had fallen over on to one side of the dish on its journey from kitchen to table, so all the chef’s pretty plating arrangement was ruined. “Yes,” I thought, “this is exactly where we are now.”
Not that the clumsy misplacement of this fresh tagliatelle in a rich, vibrant, tomato sauce – not exactly brimming with plump prawns, but enough to make a meaningful mark – spoiled the taste. No, it would be very princess and the pea of me to grumble about that. Still, I do wish all the hospitality people who took a break during the pandemic would come back. I miss you guys. You were ace.
Noci is a casual Italian restaurant on that pretty, green part of Islington’s Upper Street, the bit with the Waterstones and Bellanger brasserie, and handy for tourists to see everything the area has to offer. It’s a fantastic location for the Business Design Centre crowd, and for after-workers wanting dinner before jumping on the 73 bus home. Once you step inside, it is vast, family-friendly and has menu pricing that makes my eyes only semi-roll in astonishment, which is increasingly rare. “The pasta mains are quite, um, small,” a different server informed me as I perused the £14.50 lamb ravioli. “They come in 100g portions.”
It’s a mistake to tell anyone who knows their way around the 1980s Weight Watchers pamphlet that you serve pasta in 100g portions. We can visualise this in our mind’s eye, and know that 100g is that abstemious serving we permitted ourselves when 300g would have been just the ticket. Even so, I chose to visit Noci partly because its pricing felt relatively sane compared with many other restaurants at the moment. For finer dining, we are now in the era of £250-plus-a-deposit tasting menus, with extra up front for “incidentals” – pay it or buzz off. Fine dining, I fear, will soon be only for multimillionaires, so places such as Noci are vital. (That said, I’d rather be down the Binley Mega Chippy than eat nine courses in a room filled with angel investors and hedge-fund managers for a £300 minimum entry fee.)
The main thing that drew me to Noci, however, was chef Louis Korovilas and the silk handkerchief pasta with walnuts for which he became known while running the kitchen at the very good Bancone in Covent Garden. It is a simple yet compelling dish. At Noci, for now at least, it comes with asparagus, but all the vital tenets of the original are there: the confit egg yolk sits atop, still giving enough to burst over firm, jagged-cut sheets of pasta, and all in some sort of walnut butter sauce. It is simply irresistible.
It is also sort of unavoidable, because there are only seven pastas on the mains and even fewer starters, though, conveniently, even shovel hands, our server, couldn’t destroy their architecture en route from the kitchen. The calorie count on the menu helpfully points out that those handkerchiefs contain 734 cal. Thank you so much, Boris. We were almost enjoying ourselves for a moment there.
Our third bowl of pasta was the trendy-four-years-ago cacio e pepe ziti, a glorious bowl of fat, slippery tubes in a buttery, cheesy ocean made lively with a lot of black pepper. This dish always delivers – it’s posh macaroni cheese with a Clarendon Instagram filter, but wonderful nevertheless.
By this point, the restaurant had filled for Saturday lunchtime, but very little food seemed to be leaving the kitchen. The gap between our starters and mains had been arduous, and those starters were rather forgettable, anyway: seared tuna had, puzzlingly, been grilled on only one side, while burrata with wild garlic lacked any wow. The best was the hot, crisp gorgonzola torta fritta, which is samosa-like in shape and filled with taleggio, leeks and walnuts.
Post-pasta, however, something told me that the path to pudding would not be plain sailing. We had slipped into customer obscurity by this point, and hadn’t even been offered another drink after the first one, which now seems commonplace after the first check-back. Eventually, we ordered the chocolate and hazelnut budino, which was the alternative to panna cotta or three types of whipped gelato. We waited and waited, before eventually being told that our dessert wasn’t ready and was in the fridge somewhere “setting”. The bill, including one kombucha and a glass of wine, was £72.
My Noci experience is symbolic of a lot of my eating out nowadays: functional, occasionally delicious, sometimes slapdash and lacking any pizazz. I am rapidly losing reasons to leave the house.
Noci 4-6 Islington Green, London N1, 020-3937 5343. Open Sun-Weds noon-10pm, Thurs-Sat noon-11pm. About £35 a head, plus drinks and service
The next episode in the third series of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is released on Tuesday 14 June. Listen to it here.
