The website puts it like this. “Surrounded by an aura of relaxation reminiscent of a warm Italian home, every diner is ensconced in an ambience of elegance and ease. Every dish tells a story, crafted with the freshest ingredients and age-old recipes, guaranteeing a dining experience that’s truly memorable. Here, we don’t just serve meals; we create moments.” With that sort of PR puffery, you just know they’re setting themselves up for folk to take potshots at them. Of course, it’s not all bad but here goes.
It’s one of those places where they have the menu online. Not a sample menu but The Menu. Only it isn’t. The Actual Menu has changed, so those dishes that you’ve been looking forward to aren’t there any more. It’s irritating.
There are arancini. Three of them. Nicely flavoured with smoked Scamorza cheese but quite dense in texture. Almost hard work to eat. They were followed by a beef fillet salad. The meat nicely cooked and there’s rocket, sun blushed tomatoes and shavings of Parmesan. A sort of enhanced tagliata, if you will. But it’s spoilt by an overly sharp, lemony salad dressing that masks the flavour of the beef.
For the other starter, there was a big ball of creamy burrata, sat on a little tomato and pepper (?) salad. There were also a couple of basil meringues which could have been a clever idea to give a different texture if only you could have tasted basil but, instead, they were oddly sweet like a dessert meringue. No complaints about the calves liver main course, though. A tad overcooked but only a tad. Rich meaty sauce with a scattering of cocktail onions and chunks of asparagus. I think the best thing either of us ate all evening was the side dish of zucchini fritte – courgettes in a light but excellently crisp batter.
Service had been fine. And it was a nice modern room albeit a bit noisy with sound bouncing off all the hard surfaces. We’d sort of hoped that CIBO might be a contender to replace our current “best Italian” (San Carlo Fiorentina). But it isn’t.
