Spuntino - review

Soho is magical on a Friday night, she thought to herself as she sipped a martini at the bar of Bob Bob Ricard. No, not the start of a truly terrible book, but the beginning of my weekend.  To be honest, I was trying to impress someone. And unfortunately not James Bond but my small sister, number 4, who being from West London and having gone to a girls’ school hopefully knows nothing of Soho’s electric glamour.  But she is semi-grown up now and she should, on my terms, not because she’s ended up on Shaftesbury Avenue after watching Twilight VII in Leicester Square with a spotty boy. 

The best thing about Soho is that there’s always a new thing to try.  I had never got round to Spuntino despite loving the whole of the Polpo Group so, given that it was only 6.30pm (no queue), we’d finished our (delicious) drinks at Bob Bob Ricard’s beautiful bar and unfortunately my budget wouldn’t stretch to the caviar in their restaurant upstairs, we headed out in that direction.

It’s obviously unmarked, just a couple of shops into Rupert Street, behind a frosted glass fronting and the room is fantastic.  A huge bar with a smiling team behind it, industrial exposed bricks and electrics, and great music.  I don’t normally notice music in restaurants (or bars or clubs actually, dancing just kind of...happens to me) but the playlist made me sit up and point the tracks out to my sister a couple of times, which is fun.  It was mainly 70s on the night we were there, I don’t know if it changes.

Service, as you would expect given you’re sitting right at the bar, is efficient.  I started with a Dark and Stormy, as I’m having a bit of a ginger beer/ale thing at the moment, and Sister number 4 ordered an Earl Grey Martini, which I could have told her she wouldn’t like, but you’ve got to let them make their own mistakes, don’t you? She nursed it quietly for most of the meal.  It was actually a very good martini, but it was a proper one, not apple or lychee or passionfruit – just the spirit and a whisper of vermouth (and tea) at the end, so a pretty punchy choice.

The menu is small plates and, unbelievably for me, I didn’t just immediately fixate on the macaroni cheese.  Testament to the fact that there was a lot that looked good.  In the end, we shared a truffled egg toast, a kohlrabi salad, 4 sliders and a peanut butter jam ‘sandwich’ for pudding.

The truffled egg toast is already the stuff of internet legend and I can’t disagree.  Sister number 4 said she heard her arteries screaming, but we both agreed it was the best cheese on toast in the whole world.  I’m actually not going to make cheese on toast ever again without an egg yolk and truffles, and I will go back to have it here.  That good.

The sliders (I suppose it’s a neater word than mini hamburgers) were less successful. They were all perfectly correct but just not as exciting as the toast or the surroundings, and very small.  The beef one with bone marrow was the best, but next time I think there are better things on the menu. So, potentially a bad ordering choice there.  The kohlrabi salad, however, was really very good, and showed a deft hand in the mix of the kohlrabi, leaves, feta and seeds. 

The peanut butter and jam “sandwich” was 2 triangular wedges of peanut butter ice cream, with fruit coulis and crushed peanuts. Delicious, witty and clever; Sister number 4 began smiling a lot. Although that may have been the martini.

And now for the slight grumbles.   We were sitting by the door and because of the constant ebb and flow of people into the queue, there was a permanent draft.  That’s nobody’s fault of course, but it changes the evening you have if you’re interrupting your conversation to get up and shut the door every few minutes.

I don’t normally talk about prices here, because I’m not professional and also I believe that if you like something, within reason, you’ll pay for it.  For me, beyond the obvious general budget constraints of a monthly income, which means I can’t eat caviar, price isn’t the most important factor in how, why, where or with who I eat out.  However, I think the pricing at Spuntino is a bit off, which I why I’m mentioning it.  The above food with a 50cl carafe of house white came to £75.  Which is ok, but that’s a set lunch in Mayfair. It is slightly disingenuous to have the atmosphere of a genuinely cool, laid back, New York bar with snacky food when the bill is a not inconsiderable outlay.  More than this, I think the price points were slightly out of line- the generous truffled toast and peanut butter ice cream that we couldn’t finish were £6 each, but each bitesize slider was £5.  The macaroni cheese, which we didn’t have, came out bubbling in a huge cast iron pan for only £9.  It doesn’t mean I won’t be back, as the whole thing was great.  It just means I will be doing a bit more menu mental maths and spying on other people’s portion sizes before ordering.  Maybe that’s what the queue is for.