La dolce vita: each bite at Manteca has a razor’s edge balance of tradition and modernity.
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)To misuse a famous saying, restaurant critics plan and God laughs. My original thinking for this week had been to finally make a first, long-overdue trip to Rules in Covent Garden, the venerated 223-year-old bastion of perspiring silver tankards, British culinary indulgence, and the sort of glittering, timewarp atmosphere that would serve as the perfect way to tie a big festive bow on the year.
But then, somewhat tragically, I actually went to Rules and found it to be a tremendously bad hang. The food was unmemorable and timidly seasoned. Service had a robotic, tourist-trap briskness to it. And then, oh yes, one of the first things I saw on entering was a wooden donation box carved into a grotesque caricature of a black man, red-lipped and grinning like a minstrel. Having mentioned its offensiveness to staff on the way out, I was told that they were “looking into changing it” but that the centuries-old nature of the boxes makes this complicated; I would gently suggest that it should probably be quite a high priority that some of your patrons aren’t depressingly dehumanised by the decor before they’ve even taken their coats off.
So, yes, things had not gone as I’d hoped. But, lo, there was still time for a minor Christmas miracle in the form of a restaurant that I had visited on a whim a few days earlier. That restaurant is Manteca — chefs Chris Leach and David Carter’s Shoreditch-based, Italian-accented nose-to-tail spot — and the silver lining to all this is that it is one of the year’s most triumphant openings. To call it new would not be strictly accurate. Taking over from what was previously a Pizza Express, this is the latest iteration of Manteca following a debut Heddon Street residency in 2019 and a short stint in Soho. The hope for Leach and Carter — who I should declare here that I know and like a fair bit — is that this third time will be the charm. And as I arrived on a blustery Friday to its ambitiously vast hall of warm amber tones, blonde wood, and central, roaring pizza oven, you could feel the bustling crackle and excitement of somewhere recently anointed A Hot New Thing.
The fresh pastas still stand out even in a city drowning in the stuff. There were sturdy, toothsome folds of fazzoletti (aka silk handkerchiefs) in a rich, wine-spiked duck ragu and bulging little bonbons of partridge balanzoni, lurking under a heady pelt of shaved black truffle. Cured meats — Manteca’s signature mortadella now joined by thin-sliced sheafs of excellent coppa and salami — were all sharp salt and creamy, fatty sweetness, piled high on crunching beds of oil-dribbled focaccia.
But it was the smaller, trickier-to-classify plates that really showcased the kitchen’s enjoyably forceful approach to deliciousness. Pig skin ragu was a moody bowl of uncut, porcine intensity, crowned by a ghostly baseball mitt of bubbled crackling; beef sausage with scorched sprout tops and pale shavings of fresh horseradish distilled the flavours of a roast into a handful of majestic bites; kale salad was an unsung hero, with its jolt of a chilli-flecked sesame dressing. Each bite had care, punch and a razor’s edge balance of tradition and modernity.
And so, more frosted mini-steins of on-draught 40ft Brewery Disco Pils were ordered, lunch somehow drifted into its third hour and, though there wasn’t a piece of tinsel in sight, I had that definably festive sense of unplanned revelry; of a restaurant experience so pleasurable, and run with such attentive charm, that you just sort of forget to actually leave.
I do not doubt that some people find this sensation at Rules, eating pallid cauliflower cheese beneath Santa-hatted antlers and portraits of Churchill. But the lesson in all this, if there is one, is that in pursuit of a specific sort of old-fashioned Yuletide glow, we can perhaps miss the moments of forward-thinking, joyfully indulgent magic that are right under our noses. Manteca 3.0 has a brilliance you can hang a bauble on. Embracing culinary tradition doesn’t have to mean standing still.
