There is no chance this one passed you by. It was one of the big stories, up there with Donald Trump, Brexit and all the rest. The food writer and chef Rosie French went to an Italian restaurant in London and was charged extra for parmesan on her tagliatelle. It being 2018, she didn’t take it up with the restaurant – Ombra in Hackney – but with Twitter, specifically Jay Rayner of the Observer, who added extra outrage (no charge). Others weighed in and it became a thing – grate-gate, if you will (you won’t).
To be fair to Ombra, the parmesan supplement was on the menu, although it didn’t help that it was listed as £1 when French had been charged £1.50. Nor did it help that parmesan was spelled “parmisan” on the bill. People were cross. If there is one thing worse than a gold-digger, it is an ignorant gold-digger.
“I was like: ‘What are we going to do? I think we’re in big trouble,’” says Ombra’s head chef, Mitshel Ibrahim, eight months on. “I didn’t know how it was going to turn out.” He says he understands people do not expect to be charged for parmesan and that they would not be in Italy (he is from Naples). But he also points out that it is expensive – he pays £22 a kilo for parmesan that has been aged for two years in a cave in Piedmont by a man named Giorgio – and that their tagliatelle is served with parmesan already on it. “It’s more about stopping people ordering parmesan on dishes we don’t think need it. If you really want it, you’re going to pay for it.”
Ombra survived the storm and Ibrahim is still head-cheffing there. More than survived, actually: did well out of it. They were definitely busier afterwards, he says. “At the end of the day, people who hadn’t heard about Ombra heard about us.”
They even had a parmesan party, attended by Mr Parmesan himself, Giorgio, who had come over from his cave in Italy. They invited French and Rayner, but they didn’t come.
I had lunch there the other day. The tagliatelle, of course. D was delish, by the way (not that they need any more publicity), if a little bit cheesy. That was only because I asked for extra parmesan, which was begrudgingly grated by Ibrahim himself.
And there it was, on my bill at the end, 1x 24-months aged parmigiano reggiano (they are making a thing of it). Spelled correctly, charged correctly (£1). Unless you still think it is wrong.
