Lunch in Locanda Locatelli

If I think of the food I love to eat then it has to be Italian food. I loved my mums Spaghetti Bolognaise as a child and was heart broken when I discovered that this wasn’t Italian at all but in fact Antipodean. My first real cookbook was Marcella Hassan’s essentials of Italian Food.  I didn’t know it at the time but this book is a classic of Italian cookery. I still remember reading the tomato sauce recipe in disbelief.  Was that it: slowly cooking down the onion in olive oil until sweet then adding fresh tomato and cooking slowly.  I was only fourteen at the time but I can still recall that evening, my younger brother coming into the kitchen to give me a hard time. I can still remember the taste of this sauce, sweet and acidic at the same time.  A real eye opener for a young chef in training. I still have the book.  So simple, how could it be so simple I thought to myself?  But as I have learned this is the paradox of Italian food. Simple yet complicated.  The perfect ingredients, perfect cooking, perfect table, the wine, the oil, the salt and vinegar, and bread. All comes together to create the complicated simplicity of the Italian meal.  To make the simple spectacular takes skill. 

On my first visit to London the autumn had arrived and the weather was cool.  I had a Saturday lunch booking at one of my favorite Italian chefs and authors Giorgio Locatelli.  His restaurant is in Westminster and thus I found myself walking up and down the freezing bleak streets of central London, quite lost.  I was quite excited to eat this food, having worked in an Italian restaurant I wanted to see how we stack up.  The room itself was sleek and dark in a casual modern lounge bar kind of way.  My table was pulled out and I sat in a semi circular booth. The most over the top bread basket was delivered piled high. Over whelmed with bread followed by a quail starter a bowl of razor clam and fregola broth arrived. Deep red, steaming hot and filled with mysterious bits of seafood. The deep flavor exploded in my mouth, salty and sweet like putting the north Atlantic on your palate. This was Italian food at its best.  The simplest idea, a fish soup with tomato and cous cous.  Yet it was driven into new heights my flawless technique and the use of the best possible ingredients.  I walked out into the cold of London with the memory of this dish forever trapped in my mind.