There’s no denying it: traipsing through metropolitan east London, around an industrial estate bordering Limehouse Cut, is not a priority for most. But somewhere in the middle of the warehouses and factories, the concrete and the old cars, is a small Italian canteen called Polentina. It serves some of the finest regional Italian food in London.
The place was founded in 2020 by the photographer Sophia Massarella, Canadian-born but with Italian and Austrian heritage. The restaurant is a classic tale of lockdown-induced cooking and the culmination of passion and circumstance. The space is a canteen in the corner of a factory floor, somewhere the workforce at Apparel Tasker, a sustainable clothing manufacturer, use for break times. Massarella took it on and started cooking. Years later and it is becoming a destination.
The dining room, on the first floor of the building, is partitioned off by a glass wall which stretches floor to ceiling and grants diners a full view of the rows of sewing machines. Visit during the day and staff will be hard at work, or else next to you sitting down to lunch, whether Massarella’s or their own.
Come evening, the daytime workers rest but the open kitchen is alive with pastas, slow-cooked vegetables, braised beans. Massarella decides the menu day-to-day, week-to-week, poring through old cookbooks, recalling family recipes, paying tribute to the homemade dishes of her childhood.
A recent visit brought a salad of cucumber, melon, pecorino and basil leaves, all of which contributed their flavours to the olive oil that collected at the bottom of the bowl. This to be scooped up by soft homemade bread. Later came a plate of plump, inelegant bobby beans, cooked softly with tomatoes and herbs. They rested atop a generous bed of ricotta, slightly warm, harking back to the nonnas of Lazio, Campania, Sicily and beyond.
And then spinach ravioli in brodo — Massarella does a lot of soups and broths — with braised rabbit, the meat tender and as far from being dry as a sinking pirate ship. Finally, what might be a signature: crisp cubes of polenta with Italian sausage and fried sage leaves, the sort that are plucked up and eaten almost before the plate hits the table. These rich fats were tempered by a salad of bitter leaves dusted buoyantly with sumac.
It is a beguiling place; finding it isn’t easy. There isn’t a sign at the front of the industrial estate, nor much by way of directions. But locate the Beehive pub, enter through the steel gates of the business unit and turn left at the café in the cargo container — easily noticeable thanks to the “London Rome Paris Tokyo Stepney” wording embossed on the large glass window — and somewhere in the middle is a glass front door and a restaurant name pinned to a whitewashed wall. If the door is locked, Massarella will buzz you up, but in the evening, during service, it shouldn’t be.
There, upstairs, past an old sewing machine, bags of clothes and another staff kitchen — in the fridge, which I looked inside, there might be plastic tubs full of home-cooked meals, Coke Zero, carrots and milk; also, oddly, a tin of sardines — is the canteen. Massarella will be there running plates of food and recommending natural wines. The only menu is on a chalkboard, written in curly lettering that may require a little squinting.
Massarella’s food need not be defined. What’s important is that it’s celebratory and affirming, as if, in this pocket of working-class east London, there is a mirror to Rome. You will find her cooking the fifth quarter of the animal, or what the Romans call quinto quarto. That is to say: plenty of offal; the word “rustic” is one favoured by some. So long as people don’t use the phrase “peasant cooking”.
Some dishes might be esoteric but we are all here to learn. They meander from Bari to Vienna, stopping in Florence, Bologna and the Dolomites along the way. There could be gnummareddi from Bari, a utilitarian mix of lamb’s heart, liver and kidney served with pecorino and parsley. Or cappon magro, a layered seafood salad from Liguria. Pastas are the best representation of Italian food where the ingredients are allowed to shine; flavours are amplified and trumpeted into mouths. As for the Austrian side, expect the likes of grießnockerlsuppe, which is a semolina dumpling soup, and canederli, a dish from South Tyrol not dissimilar to semmelknödel from Bavaria.
Polentina is not the first restaurant to start its life as a work canteen. Travel west along the river to a part of London where words such as “gentrification” and “regeneration” escape the discourse and you will eventually reach the famous River Café, conceived of the same scenario. Most know the tale, how Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray originally opened up in 1987 to feed the employees of Richard Rogers’s (Ruth’s husband) architecture firm. The site was a storage facility before. Now it serves Cornish monkfish with agretti and broad beans for £67.
Prices at Polentina are more subdued, though have risen. Where dishes used to be £14, they are £18 today. It is worth your time and money. For it is a buzzing, beautiful, strange place born out of a love of food, out of need. This room, unfettered, hidden away and hardly seen is the best of London: a bright, unruly beacon; a simple, loving nod to the best feeders in the world, grandmothers. It is the best use of space in a city where space is hard to find.
1, Bowood House, Empson Street, E3 3LT, polentina.com
