My aim is to bring you the good stuff. Yes, slamming it to the duffers is far more fun, and it’s hard to be hugely positive without slipping into the posh American lady school of writing, all perfect-peaches-at-sunset drippiness and mooning over milky mozzarella. But I spent too much time working in restaurants to deliver conscience-free slammers, so my default mode is to look, like an overfed Pollyanna, for things to make us glad.
A first visit to Iddu, a Sicilian cafe and restaurant owned by the (genuinely Sicilian) chaps who’ve got the South Kensington Club next door, is entirely gladdening. The menu is short but pleasing: we eat pristine burrata with sun-ripened tomatoes, pasta with vivid spring vegetables, tuna tartare that tastes freshly chopped, bright with lemon and capers, moist almond cake. Portions are tiny, suitable for a South Ken clientele more into their cold-pressed juices – we have a fine blood orange – than lunchtime boozing. It’s pretty, too: chic copper lamps, cupboards with icebox fittings, shelves of Sicilian produce. Barbera coffee is strong and fragrant; staff seem charming. Great, I think, I’ll tell my chums about this, and come back for dinner.
What a difference a meal makes. The atmosphere is less sunny, possibly due to tables filled with brooding, saturnine blokes. (I’m not sure they’re even eating; they look as if they should be smoking outside a lapdancing club.) I’d expected the evening menu to be more ambitious, but it’s not exactly rammed with things we want to eat. Apparently, it’s based on the cuisine of Sicily’s Aeolian Islands; Iddu is local dialect for the legendary volcano, Stromboli. I spend as much time as I can in Sicily, a mad, wild, ancient place, and can honestly say I’ve never met a plate of raw vegetables called “Aeolian salad” – and charged at nine quid. This snorts with rich boy derision at the island’s cucina povera.
How do they do their caponata? There are as many versions of this homespun pepper stew as there are Sicilian dialects. “With peanuts, madam.” Blimey, that’s a new one on me. They’re pine nuts, scattered through a weirdly sugary plateful.
Spaghetti aglio, olio, peperoncino is one of the great, simple, store-cupboard dishes. I thought it might have Sicilian mollica – fried breadcrumbs – to lift it, but it’s as basic as a teenager’s fridge raid.
And when you have to ask for more oil and chilli (we stop just short of requesting more garlic) to give the seized-up carbohydrate any semblance of flavour and suppleness, it’s palpably not a success. It’s also billed as being made with Kamut pasta (trademark name for an old, nutrient-rich wheat variety). It isn’t. That kamut is a nod to the place’s veneer of health foodery. In Sicily, health food is not smoking during lunch.
That tuna tartare returns, now plonked angrily on a hummock of quinoa. Still, as I munch my way through a cardboardy cotoletta alla Palermitana (basically an even duller version of the ubiquitous breaded veal), I’m trying to think positive. So the portions are weeny? Well, it is South Ken. So there’s only one wine choice under £30? Again, South Ken. And then, horrors, we discover a long hair in a cotoletta. And not just a hair, but a hair with matter attached. I have photographic evidence. The word boak has never been so apposite.
Look, shit happens. We’re offered a replacement or dessert on the house. Weirdly, we’ve lost our appetite. But we’re old friends who haven’t seen each other for a while – perhaps they might offer us a glass of wine instead? The tight-suited manager laughs in our faces. “Madam,” he scoffs, “you did not find the hair in your wine.” Any positivity I might have been dredging up runs screaming from this quite remarkable show of customer service.
In Sicily, the nextdoor neighbour who hasn’t got a bean to her name will call you in to offer some of her homemade chocolate liqueur. We burst a tyre in the signal-free middle of nowhere outside Ragusa and the local butcher screeched to a halt to sort us out. It’s virtually impossible to buy anything without coming away with a bunch of little extras “per lei, signora”. This lot might be properly Sicilian, but they lack their countrymen’s warm-hearted, unrestrained generosity. They’ve clearly been in London way too long.
• Iddu 44 Harrington Road, London SW7, 020-7589 1991. Open all week, 7.30am-10pm. About £25-30 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Value for money 5/10
