Giovanni’s, 10 Goodwin’s Court, London WC2N 4LL (giovannislondon.co.uk). Starters £13-£22.50; pasta £19–£27; mains £24–£36; dessert £8.50–£11.50; wine from £38 a bottle
Restaurants rarely make old bones. It’s too precarious a business for that, too hand-to-kitchen-to-diner’s-mouth. The issue is usually generational. Survival for 40 years may be manageable because it’s within the lifespan of the founders. After that it all gets a bit tricky. The offspring don’t always want to take on the hours. Rules on Maiden Lane in London’s Covent Garden has been trading since 1798 and has somehow managed to pass through only four sympathetic families or owners. There’s Wiltons on Jermyn Street and Mon Plaisir on Monmouth Street, claiming the title of London’s oldest French restaurant. That opened in the 1940s.
What defines all of these is a deft ability to laugh in the face of the changing times, while not becoming a prisoner to their own history. They have remained very much themselves, while also quietly modernising, but not too fast or too much. Rather like this magazine, as it marks its 60th birthday. Rules will never serve a pan-Asian, small-plates sharing menu. Mon Plaisir will never offer a deconstructed boeuf bourguignon. But in time things have moved on, just enough to make sense.
And then there’s Giovanni’s, which has belonged to the Ragona family since 1952 when Virgilio Ragona from Sicily opened it on Goodwin’s Court, just off St Martin’s Lane. By the time this magazine launched in 1964, it had been trading for 12 years. By 1971, when I was first taken there as part of my privilege-sodden childhood, it was a London landmark, albeit a quiet one. Goodwin’s Court, with its bow windows and gas-style lamps, has a strong Diagon Alley vibe.
The restaurant is accessed via a locked wooden door, bearing the instruction to knock. My memories, cross-referenced with my sister’s, are all positive: of being treated like a person at Giovanni’s rather than as an annoying child, of big bowls of pasta and of blowing out candles on birthday cakes, which were then shared out around the narrow dining room.
It doesn’t look like much has changed, which is the whole point. The walls are thickly tiled with pictures of the famous clientele, which include the obligatory shot of David Suchet (he seems to eat out an impressive amount, that man). There’s one of Lulu and another of Elizabeth Taylor. There are a couple of astronauts, seemingly the whole of Queen and, er, Kermit the frog. That must have been quite the night. Lights are low. Candles flicker. Enormous pepper grinders are proffered. It is all sweetly funny in the best way, but it is also something important. It is very good.
The cooking is an extremely solid take on the classic Anglo-Italian repertoire; those crowd-pleasing dishes which, during the so-called trattoria boom of the immediate post-Second World War years, introduced London to the promise of garlic-spiked sunlight and olive oil-slicked vivacity. There are no bargains here. Our bill will be chunky, courtesy of £25+ plates of pasta, and £30+ meat dishes. But the ingredients are terrific, and the execution really is spot on.
Before I visit, my sister and I share fond memories of a twinkly welcome by Giovanni himself. After a little online research, I conclude that we both might have been the witting victims of advanced hospitality. These days, the room is overseen by the founder’s son, Pino Ragona, a compact, salt and pepper-haired man in a white jacket, his name stitched at the breast. I tell Pino I used to come as a kid. He says he knows. I’ll take him at his word. I ask if there ever was a Giovanni. He grins and shrugs. “No, but you know, people liked to think there was.”
Pino is, shall we say, attentive. He enthuses about his family’s native Sicily, recommends dishes, gets you to order zucchini fritti you didn’t know you wanted and roast potatoes you didn’t know you needed. My companion is the fabulous actor Sam West whose partner is the equally fabulous playwright Laura Wade. “As Laura would say, he’s a little overwritten,” Sam says, as Pino sets off for another circuit of the dining room. “Perhaps we can get him right in the second draft.”
But anyway, the food is exactly what you want it to be. To go with warm rounds of bread, we have plates of peppery olive oil bobbing with marinated tomatoes and celery, and another of salty olives as black as night. The spaghetti casa nostra is actually a carbonara by another name because, Pino says, too many customers would expect it to be made with cream if they called it that. They make theirs with egg yolk and pecorino and crisped guanciale or cured pig’s cheek. It is, as it should be, as rich as an oligarch, but so very much more entertaining.
Pino suggests the ravioli with ricotta and spinach for me, but there is a special today of spaghetti vongole. I tell him it’s his fault I must order that, because I can’t resist it. The dish is joyfully, tearfully perfect. The broth is buttery and lightly salted, with an edge of chilli fire. It is loaded with clams. Most importantly the slurpable pasta has just an edge of bite.
There is veal saltimbocca, with the saltiness of prosciutto and the perfumed heft of fresh sage. There is impeccably cooked liver with planks of crisped guanciale performing the role of bacon. Those finger-thick courgette chips soak up the pan juices. We drink a chunkily priced pinot grigio and finish with a tiramisu and a canoe-sized cannolo filled with sweetened ricotta and studded with candied peel. Across the room a dessert is delivered, complete with burning candle. Happy birthday rings out and in the quiet embrace of the banquettes and the low lights I am for a moment transported. There are places in London playfully reimagining the Italian culinary experience. Giovanni’s is most certainly not one of them.
The bill arrives with no reference to a “discretionary” service charge or tip. “It’s up to you,” says Pino, who is still telling me in great detail about the way they source everything from Italy and the attention they pay to quality and the joys of Sicily. I point out that we’ve eaten dinner and paid the bill. He can stop selling the restaurant to us now. I’m completely sold on it already. Just as I have been these last six decades.
News bites
Leeds is to get what its owners are saying is the city’s first “authentic” Filipino restaurant city. The menu at Sakku Pinoy on St Peter’s Square, will feature pork in many ways, including as lechon hawala or crispy deep fried pork belly, pulled pork and vegetable spring rolls and slow-cooked pork cheek with pandan rice (sakkupinoy.co.uk).
Meanwhile, hospitality website Code has reported that Birmingham is to be home to the first outside London venture from the Paris-based Big Mamma group, already known for the exuberant, foliage-rich Italian restaurants Jacuzzi, Ave Mario and Carlotta. La Bellezza, which will open at the end of the year, will have 150 seats both inside and out, and will be located in Chamberlain Square, which already has an outpost of Dishoom (bigmammagroup.com).
Another dispiriting closure with the sad news that Café Kitty, at the Underbelly Boulevard Theatre in London’s Soho, is no more. The restaurant, which I liked very much when I visited at the end of last year, was part of the Kitty Fisher’s group. A note posted to the Café Kitty website announcing the closure said simply, “It was a wonderful restaurant, so we are all understandably gutted, but in life some things just don’t work out.” The theatre has said it is working on a new plan for the upper floor space.
Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (Penguin, £22), is available from guardianbookshop.com at £19.80
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
