iip(MIUMER
•••■•S•
N.Z' ra, FOR a restaurant critic, the only piece of news more welcome than the information that a good restaurant has just opened is that a good restaurant has just opened where the critic happens to live. It follows that I am more than ordinarily pleased at the arrival of Cibo, a new Italian restaurant (Orso food without Orso prices is how its earliest fans are describing it) tucked away in a little road in otherwise unpromising W14, about five minutes' drive from my front door.
The comparison serves, inasmuch as Orso has become a byword for imaginative but redolently authentic Italian food, the sort of food Marcella Hazan and Anna del Conte write so well, so welcomingly about. True, Orso is not the only restaurant in London that dispenses it. The River Café, Ziani, and its sister restaurant, Ziani Dolce are all admirable exponents of what I will admit is my favourite sort of cooking. Cibo, a smallish, unremarkable-looking place situated between the Kensington School of English and a newsagent's, proc- laims itself in the curved capital letters of a distinctly 1970s typeface, etched in grey on a vanilla-coloured awning. Inside it is a friendly place, full of cosy bustle. Cibo is, simply, Italian for 'food', and the food is simple, perfectly cooked Ita- lian, an early taste of which is provided by the dish of crostini, carciofini sott'olio, slithers of salame and slices of mozzarella- topped polenta which is placed in front of you as you study the menu. I always regard it as a sign that I'm in the right sort of restaurant if I want to try everything on the starter menu, and I had this trouble here. Apart from a small disappointment with the risotto, of the four starters I tried it's difficult to say which one truly has the edge on the others. The warm, or rather more precisely hot salad of sautéed spinach, Crumbled luganega (the subtly spiced saus- age for which Apicius sets out instructions In his De re coquinaria), wild mushrooms with balsamic vinegar was perhaps my first favourite — if I ate it every night for the rest of my life I don't think I would tire of it. But then, I felt the same way about the squid, the flesh striped by the grill on the outside, white and soft within, set around a rosy tangle of tentacles, oil-softened and smokily scented. But if, for you, eating Italian means eating pasta, try the slippery- soft ravioli, lightly sauced, and fragrantly summery. I was excitably advised to try their risotto, but in the event, this seemed their least successful dish. In order for risotto to acquire the right sticky creami- ness, it needs to be stirred continually during its cooking, the correct rice has to be used and it has to be served straight away. This risotto had slightly too runny a consistency and tasted stewed. Improbable as I feel it must be, the rice didn't taste like the right rice: it just didn't have the nutty, starchy fatness of correct arborio. I had no such setbacks with the main courses. The dense and filamentous flesh of the duck was perfectly offset by the faintly metallic taste of prune and sweet waxiness of chestnut it came with. Slices of cotechino, the pork sausage pearled with fat, came in a wintry mound of lentils and grilled polenta, drizzled with glass-green olive oil. The zuppa di pence — chunks of fish and seafood in a grainy terracotta soup — was steamily odoriferous and the fish of the day, a soft-fleshed, meatily compact sea bream stretched out magnificently on the plate, achieved, unfussy perfection.
For pudding, finish the job properly with the tiramisu, a spongy mixture drenched in liqueur, coffee, cream and chocolate. Ita- lians don't have many puddings to boast about, but this is one of them. Another is zabaglione; and here it comes not in a glass but poured over a plate of fruit and quickly blistered under the grill and then topped with a dollop of ice cream.
They have done an admirable job of compiling an inviting and affordable wine list (20 bottles under a tenner), but being at the tail end of a cold, I thought I may as well stick with the house (£5.95 a carafe) which, in both red (Montepulciano) and white (Trebbiano d'Abruzzo) was better than seems reasonable to expect. On neith- er visit did dinner or lunch for two (three courses, half a carafe and coffee) go above £55 with tip, which I reckon is about £20 less than you would pay at Orso or the River Café. And should you be interested, they are now planning a special New Year's Eve feast.
Cibo: 3 Russell Gardens, W14, tel 01 371 672112085. Booking is advisable, and they will be closed from 23-27 December.
Nigella Lawson
Previous page
