Food critic Giles Coren's review of St John's Wood latest offering.
Babbo, a name I remember as a Mayfair Italian owned by two long-forgotten Chelsea footballers, David Luiz and Willian, that closed down and promised to reopen but never did. Until now, popping up on the site of what was once the well known Harry Morgan’s Deli located on St John's Wood High Street. Dancing on the graves of my grandparents. And so I came to bury Babbo, not to praise it.
“Ooh, it looks nice though,” said Esther as we rolled up for a 6pm family supper on the Sunday of its opening week (catch it before it’s ready, kill it in the womb). “With that daft little Cinquecento parked up behind a rope? Give me strength!” I replied. “And as for the hired muscle outside, he had better say, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and not, ‘Have you got a reservation?’ or I’m leaving without even sitting down.” “Good evening, sir,” said the fellow.
Inside, the separate takeaway and eat-in rooms of the old café had been blown away to make a cosy, elegant dining room: tiled floor, red and ochre tones, sexy wall lights of fluted glass, warm acoustics, moody bar with mirrored ceiling and burgundy leather, slightly dodgy pop music where a bit of Dean Martin would go better with the Little Italy/dolce vita vibe, but you can’t have everything.
The girls wore elegant red dresses,the guys good suits and sharp haircuts, and though handsome young men of Mediterranean mien, they hailed not from Italia but from Hungary, Turkey and Brazil. Not Matteo and Francesco and Nico but Patrik and Yuri and Selim. And they were all marvellous. Pure charm. Open, honest and really nice to my appalling children.
And the food was absolutely spot-on. Not madly ambitious, but very precisely executed, which is what you want from a glittering local restaurant in a wealthy neighbourhood. We had two sets of fried calamari and gamberi (£15) for the kids; truffle and autumn squash arancini slathered with winter truffle (£15); a plate of pollo crocante (£9), which was a stack of fried breaded chicken fillets to keep the kids happy, but came with a spiky ’nduja sauce; and a really stonking vitello tonnato (£15) with such juicy, rare, pink roast veal that I wished I had ordered the piccata di vitello al limone for my main, then remembered that I had.
Before that, though, I sneaked in a Babbo parmigiana (£14) because I always used to love that as a kid and saw it as something of a benchmark, in the days when I cared about things like benchmarks. Here it was perfect, the aubergine slices slender as millefeuille, silky as cream, the mozzarella loose and wispy like cobwebs, not stringy like pizza cheese, sweet tomato, aroma of dried herbs — as fuelling to the nostalgia engine, to be honest, as any kreplach or kugel. The kids, seeing “Babbo meatballs” on the menu and also an array of pasta dishes that looked a bit grown-up — capelli d’angelo al tartufo nero; conichiglie, basilico e stracciatella — asked if they could have spaghetti with meatballs. “Well, we’ve got meatballs and we’ve got spaghetti,” said our waiter. “So I’m going to go with a ‘yes’.” Which is exactly what you want to hear, but don’t always in the fancier joints.
And then came my piccata al limone and it was a 1970s thing of purest joy. The meat mild and milky, the juices gently fruity but not sharp or curdy, with some mashed potato and a glass of chianti. My eyes rolled with the simple pleasure of it. And the very fact that I was still pleased to see it after so many other dishes was a testimony to the light and skilful hand in the kitchen. I was not overly impressed with the zucchini fritte though. Round slices not matchsticks? Come on. In this part of town, you say “zucchini fritte”, we think of Giorgio Locatelli and that glorious, salty stack of greaseless kindling for which Locanda was (and is) so famous.
Grand tiramisu for Kitty, sensational coffee and hazelnut ice cream for Sam, perfect crème brûlée for Esther with a pod of refreshing raspberry sorbet on top, and my double espresso brought out — without my even asking — at the exact same time as the desserts. Not annoyingly soon, not irritatingly tardy. That is the very essence of service.
My grandparents would have loved Babbo and come here often. And so will I.
Article originaly source from the The Times
