You know how it is when you walk into a high street Italian restaurant? You don’t need to see the menu as you know exactly what’s on it. It’s the same as the last high street Italian you went to. And the one before that. And the …
But not here. This isn’t an Italian restaurant – it’s a Sicilian restaurant. The menu has loads of dishes I’ve not even heard of, let alone eaten. Just like a trattoria you might come across in a small town in Italy – a commitment to regional dishes and a pride in local and seasonal ingredients. Rustic furnishings and decoration just add to the ambiance. It was packed on a midweek evening and the warm welcome confirmed that we were heading for a lovely evening. Service throughout was seamless – the front of house crew working as a team with everything happening just as it should, often without you realising it was happening. None of the “who is having the fish” lark. None of the constant check backs interrupting your dinner.
As for the food, let me share with you a dinner as faultless as the service. There’s a clue here in that they make their own pasta and pastries. But first there was bread – a foccacia dripping with olive oil. And a carafe of tap water is brought – none of the immediate upsell to buy bottled. One starter was dead simple and dead tasty – chargrilled spring onions, wrapped in guanciale. It’s a Palermo street food item and you can see why – the sort of thing you could happily eat with your fingers. The other was panielli – chickpea fritters, crisp on the outside, soft in the middle, seasoned with salt and lemon. It’s a standard menu item but there was a “special” topping them with crab and a little bit of chilli. The menu tells you that it’s another street dish and panielle are often stuffed into a sandwich .
At the beginning, we’d asked the server if we could split a pasta course as a second course. Well, of course you can – and they should advertise that you can. We pick another distinctly Sicilian dish - buccatini con la sarde. Buccatini is my favourite long pasta, because it’s quite thick tubes so has good texture, particularly, as here, when it’s cooked “al dente”. It goes well with the sauce that reflects Sicily’s past history of Arabic control. So, there’s sardine, onion, raisins, saffron, wild fennel and pine nuts, all topped with toasted breadcrubs. One of the best pasta dishes we’ve eaten in a long time.
For main courses, I went with char-grilled swordfish. It’s topped with a thick sauce-like coating of breadcrumbs, tomato, anchovy and Ragusano cheese. You get a choice of contorni – roasted vegetables in this case – pepper, aubergine and courgette. I felt transported to the Med. Across the table, nine king prawns, shell on, fill the plate. They are dressed with orange, ginger and garlic. Perfectly cooked, juicy with a hint of sweetness to the flesh. A rocket salad went well with them
As for dessert, we really didn’t need the menu. Sicilian restaurant? That’ll be the cannoli, then. They come in large or small and in four flavours. One large with the ricotta flavoured with lemon. And two small – one lemon, one just sweetened ricotta. Just a lovely end to the meal. We finished with espresso. It was good. Of course it was.
So, we got the bill (and very reasonable it was fr what we ate). It comes with a selection of sweets from the Swizzels factory just down the road. Unfortunately, no Love Hearts – a childhood favourite.
