ONCE UPON a time, nearly three decades ago now, Italian
restaurants meant candles in straw-swaddled Chianti bottles, zealously wielded oversized pepperpots and porno- don with everything. But the days of Mario and Luigi are long since over, and the recent renaissance of northern Italian cooking tells a different — and elegant story.
The River Cafe, Riva, Cibo and L'Altro have dictated what the well-dressed fashion plate is wearing. Forget escalope of veal
and lasagne al forno, these days any tratto- ria worth its sale offers instead rocket
dressed with balsamic vinegar, garlic- bristling bruschetta and thick soups stud- ded with beans and dappled with olive oil. This is the acceptable face of healthy eat- ing: no butter, no cream, no fuss.
But that's only part of it. Bologna, the gastronomic centre of Italy, tells a different story. Here, all our modern villains are rehabilitated: the tables groan with fat yel- low cheeses and rich red meats. Come back, butter and cream, all is forgiven. The Osteria Antica Bologna in downtown Clapham doesn't advertise itself as a haven for cholesterol addicts, but robust eaters south of the border know when they're on to a winner.
This little wood cabin of a place is busy enough to need booking well in advance. It doesn't look like a fashionable restaurant, but it is more intensely Italian than any other place around. Its robust rusticity is more than a designer concept: the food is cheap and plentiful, and the service admin- istered — by waitresses with a lot of hair and a lot of eyeliner — with courtesy but without ceremony.
A kind of pick and mix approach is encouraged with their starters, a list of assaggi , or 'tastes'. It is the custom for the Bolognese, they inform you on the menu, to go out and share together a few of these dishes. This is all very well, but I always want to assaggiare too much, which is why I always find buffets such torments. When there's so much to choose from, it feels impossible to make the right selection. It all gets too• much for me, and the pile of dishes that I haven't got room for, respectably, on my plate looms seductively till I walk back to my place with a moun-
tain of ill-assorted bits and pieces, like something out of the Beano. This is by way of excusing the fact that although there
were only two of us dining together at Antics Osteria the other night, we man- aged to polish off five assaggi.
The salsiccia and polenta we picked at while we made up our minds what to order next, a most civilised practice. The sausage, shiny and garlicky and beaded with pearls of fat, was cut into thick juicy slices and mixed carelessly but judiciously with chunky cubes of oil-crisped polenta. This spurred us on to a dish of pebble-brown lentils, glossy with oil and spiked with shards of red chilli and blood-brown dried tomatoes, the gamberi pommarola, large pink prawns, smothered in diced raw toma- toes, summer on a plate, fasol rebecca, a plate of grainy white beans flecked green with parsley, garlic and oil and an earthen- ware dish of seppia con patate e piselli, a sweet, buttery stew of squid with chunks of potato and bright green peas which tasted rather like an Italian mutter paneer. All these plates were wiped clean with thick, rough white bread.
Not unsurprisingly, after that the pasta proved too much,. but too good to ignore altogether. I had chosen the garganelli al ragu di salsiccia. Garganelli are a particu- larly Bolognese form of pasta, from the town that practically invented pasta. (The city created both tagliatelle, in honour of Lucrezia Borgia's long, blonde hair, and tortellini, in honour of Venus's navel.) Lit- tle quills of pasta are made and then bent into rings, a perfect trap for the winy, chopped-sausage sauce. I did my best with it.
The agliata was perhaps a wiser choice after the heavy intake which preceded this course. This is more properly a Piedmon- tese dish: slithery ribbons of pasta in a wal- nut and garlic sauce, thickened with milk-soaked breadcrumbs and gently com- forting. With this we managed a bottle of garnet-red Barbarossa del Bertinoro from the idyllically named Fattoria del Paradiso, but there was no room . for tiramisu, no room for plum tart, no room even for cof- fee. And with five starters, two gargantuan bowls of pasta and a bottle of soupy red wine, our bill didn't even hit £50. I'll be back.
Osteria Antica Bologna, 23 Northcote Road, SW11; tel 071 978 4771.
Nigella Lawson
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