Ambience: 3/5
Food: 2/5
Modern air travel is defined by rules and stringency: inflexible final boarding times, terror-thwarting 100ml liquid limits and Christmas travel plans lain waste by possibly imaginary drones hovering over Sussex.
But there is, I think, a fascinating freeness to departure-area behaviour. We lollop around in elasticated flight wear, intensely appraising neck pillows; we nearly miss planes because we are spritzing duty-free Tom Ford on to little strips of card; we partake in the (possibly doomed) tradition of over-exuberant morning drinking and generally forgo our daily snobberies in favour of a happy dive into a harshly lit consumerist netherworld.
Cool isn’t much of a consideration when you step through those security gates.
So the news that Spuntino (Polpo’s teeny, abidingly hip dive-bar sibling) was bringing its sliders, fried stuffed olives and dinky Negronis to the frantic thrum of Heathrow Terminal 3 struck me as more than a little intriguing. A locational glitch not unlike chancing upon a Dishoom next to the massage chairs in Membury Services.
With a serendipitous post-Christmas work trip to Helsinki in the diary, I smuggled my wife along and we found ourselves kidless and a little giddy, deposited at a table in a big, bright, busy neo-diner space (reclaimed tiles, accordion gates fashioned into table dividers). It was filled with a transient crew of families, couples and lone travellers digging into enamel dishes of Italian-American comfort food.
Cocktails (a forcefully spicy Bloody Mary and an alcopop-ish, sloe gin-laced Ted Damson) got us off to a passable start. But then the notional starters came flying out (as they should, when a departures board on the wall is ticking down) and things got shakier.
Pea and feta salad was a broad mass of greens dotted with pieces of faintly roasted squash, thick slices of radish and not nearly enough dressing. My truffled egg toast (normally a legendary luxe-filth spin on egg-in-the-basket) arrived as a sad, strangely cold brick of bread bearing a honking, gluey duvet of melted fontina/Gruyère mix and an oil-splashed egg.
The Eagle Rock dog had a slobbery charm but was perplexing in its own, nagging way; an unpleasantly mushy frankfurter — lacking the plump, satisfying ‘pop’ of even an Ikea number — covered in a barely discernible trail of Russian dressing and crushed crisps rendered uselessly soggy by a thorough drenching of ketchup and mustard.
Partial redemption came with the bracing chilli heat of potato pan hash, crowded with hulking mushrooms, scraps of smoked pancetta and half a dozen other things that gave it the feel of a mammoth fridge clear-out. Puddings — a gooey pecan pie and a blueberry sundae blobbed on crispy pieces of doughnut — repeatedly clanged the same bell of unstinting sweetness (and arrived so late they were removed from the bill) but taste-wise they were… all right.
Service was sparky and capable throughout and it feels almost cruel to detail what was clearly a haphazard afternoon for a kitchen still finding its feet. And if you reason that, because of the built-in time constraints, all airport food is an exercise in managed disappointment, then there are certainly worse places to fuel up before doing a panicked half-sprint towards your gate.
But, in its current form Spuntino Heathrow feels like an off-key cover version; a dispiriting watering down of one of London’s more pioneering, nimble and focused concepts.
In airports we may be listless, half-drunk impulse buyers, swerving mankini-ed stag groups in pursuit of a Wetherspoons G&T at 9am. But surely, isn’t Spuntino meant to be better, cooler and tastier than this?
Spuntino Heathrow
1 Bloody Mary £7.50
1 The Ted Damson £8.50
1 Half Camden Hells draft £3
1 Truffled egg toast £7
1 Potato pan hash £9.50
1 Eagle Rock dog £11.50
1 Pea feta salad £10
1 Pecan pie £5.50
1 Donut sundae £6
1 Yorkshire tea £2.75
1 Desserts removed from bill –£11.50
Total £59.75
Spuntino Heathrow, Heathrow Airport Terminal 3, Hounslow, TW6 1QG (heathrow.com; spuntino.co.uk)
