The sauce is dull and sugary the modest amount of al dente pasta is the only solid part of the dish. If you find yourself counting the shells and only getting to three, something is up. Then there’s that lean seafood pasta for £46. It suggests they’ve been sitting on the pass for a while, long enough to give the thinly sliced fried zucchini topping a decidedly fishy character. Calamaretti and gamberi fritti are limp, as if the shiny surroundings have given them performance anxiety. Photo: Sophia Evans/The ObserverĪppetizers take an age to follow with the waiters giving unsolicited updates. How can they think this banging piece of weatherstripping is okay? It starts with an average selection of poorly made breads, including swabs of focaccia with the dense, moist texture of a soggy Tena pad. Sometimes, when an experience drops from mediocre to “I want mommy,” I worry that an exquisite dish will come up, the praise of which will upset my frenzy. Shut up and drink your wine.Īnyway, we’re here for dinner, so let’s move on. I find a lovely Villa Sparina Gavi for £80 which I can buy in the shop for £16.45.
Though the chickens made the trip, none of the winery’s whites did. Because of course no mediocre British chicken will do.
Yes, he says excitedly, it’s a Tuscan chicken. I ask the waiter if this means the chicken literally comes from Tuscany, an achievement given the current state of air traffic. We get a lavish talk about how all the ingredients are organic, in keeping with the winery’s deep commitment to sustainability, and how much of it is transported from the winery itself. Vaguely terrified-looking waiters float around with carafes of aggressively priced red wines, their spouts so performatively long and thin you don’t know whether they’re going to refill or catheterize the gamblers’ glasses. It gives you access to a strange, roaring alternate reality, where tables of open-collared men sit staring at their phones, their faces bathed in a blue glow, or barking at each other about the latest top deals from HSBC Global. But even taking that into account, I wanted to know: does more money make better food? Obviously Il Borro has Mayfair rent and laundry to meet and a DJ with extremely dodgy taste to support. The basic proposition is exactly the same the pricing and approach, slightly less. Russell Norman’s Brutto is an elbows-on-the-table kind of place in Clerkenwell, busting out shaggy plates of panzanella for £8.40 and penne for a tenner. That’s intriguing because London got one just two months before it opened. And second, Il Borro has the words “Tuscan Bistro” above the door. First of all, this man cannot live on small plates and “curated” lists of natural wines served only in former warehouses. ‘Large mouth-drying chunks’: stewed beef stew.
This Tuscan way of life includes enough beige furniture to make a White Company buyer horny, awful tartan suits for the head waiters, and a menu priced to part bored rich people for their money. The restaurant’s website says it wants to introduce us all to their “Tuscan way of life”. In Mayfair, that last sentence works as foreplay. Opened last November in a cavernous two-storey marble and blond wood site in London’s Berkeley Square, Il Borro is a spin-off of the high-end Italian winery Il Borro near Arezzo, owned by the luxury fashion brand Salvatore Ferragamo. The seafood pasta only had one langoustine, one shrimp, three clams and three clams for 46? I wasn’t sure which was worse: the somber music or the seafood pasta with just one langoustine, one shrimp, three clams and three clams for £46. Now Il Borro’s DJ subjected us to an ugly, misshapen cover of the best of Manchester. We were already subjected to sterilized versions of Madonna classics. When they started pumping a soft, lilting chill-out cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division into the dining room, I really started to lose the will to live. Il Borro, 15 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DY.
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