Bocca di Lupo - review

And now for something completely different. Not really, but it isn’t French.

My friend who moved all the way to Dubai just after our perfect evening of Colbert and Bond (she didn’t think it was so perfect, clearly), was back in London for a few weeks, so we went to Bocca di Lupo for lunch and a long catch up.

I had always assumed I’d been to Bocca. Not just because everyone has been, but because I can picture the room in my head, I’m pretty sure I’ve met the chef, Jacob Kennedy (untrue), and I have the cookbooks; even the black and white one specifically about pasta shapes. Who would do that if they hadn’t even tried the restaurant yet? Turns out, I haven’t been, I’ve just read a lot about it. This happens to me sometimes when I read too much. When I was 8 I became convinced that I was actually Laura Ingalls Wilder from Little House on the Prairie.

We sat at the bar, which I already knew was thick, cool, white marble with rounded edges, although actually I’d never seen it in real life. The menu, which again I was familiar with, is fantastic and I could have ordered everything. My friend has actually been before, so knew the score. We ended up with a couple of starters, some pastas and some grilled meaty bits, all to share. She didn’t want to drink too much so we had a nice bottle of white from Puglia (Bianco Salento, Lamadoro).

Venison tartare with parmesan was completely delicious, not that I expected anything less from the cervine version of one of my top things to eat, ever. Two small pastas, sea snail tagliolini and veal and pork agnolotti with walnut sauce, were excellent. The sea snails were finely chopped; you couldn’t see them, they just added a vague, sea salty flavour to the ragu. The fat, pillow shaped agnolotti were even better – the walnut sauce on top…oh my gosh. We also had a deep fried courgette flower each – crunchy and perfect.

For our ‘main course’, although, really, everything was little and could perfectly happily have come in any order, we had a lamb sweetbread and artichoke skewer and a slice of buristo each. Buristo is a blood sausage. Not nice as a concept, but it didn’t have the gritty texture that black pudding has, nor that worrying, ferrous tang; it was fantastic and relatively non-scary. Not having troubled ourselves with anything green up to this point, we ordered a side dish of agretti. That’s monksbeard, in English, so I basically still don’t know what it is; it looked like a smaller, wispier version of samphire. Very nice, sautéed with butter and lemon.

From the interesting, tasty food, via the smiling, efficient service, to the buzzy, warmly lit room; everything was perfect. Over the course(s) of a long lunch, Bocca has become one of my favourite places in London. Which is why I’ve been there so many times before, obviously.