When I was younger, I lived in an apartment in an ex-council block in Clapham, South West London.
I was at the bottom of the Northcote Road just a stone's throw from Wandsworth common. If you know London then you know it’s not uncommon to have some dusty old flats parked up next to some pretty nifty houses. Just around the corner from me was Bolingbroke Grove, a row of spacious Edwardian houses with lovely black and white checkerboard paths leading through the front garden to wide colourful front doors.
I’d walk down the street in my Carhartt hoodie and with my Sony ‘5 Graphic Equaliser’ Walkman passing the old men with their brollies and bowler hats; we coexisted happily enough in each other's worlds. You see, the secret to a city is its neighbourhoods.
The best neighbourhoods are alive and consist of a diversity of races and interests, plant life and animals.
People living there are out in the street, walking to the bus stop or train station, doing some shopping, hanging at a bar or cafe or my holy grail, sitting in the small neighbourhood restaurant, tables perched on the pavement, wide glazed windows alluring to the world inside.
When I was on Northcote Road, this was Ristorante dal Romano on Nightingale Lane. My flat was to the east side, the posh houses west side, and our cucina like a beacon on the street corner, where hoodied lads and ‘pin striped’ city types would graze together on the finest homemade pasta and a litre of Tuscany’s finest.
With my Indian roots I have always been bowled over by French cuisine, but have always found French food quite exotic and at times lavish and extravagant compared to the communality of Indian dishes. To this end, I have always been very close to Italian cuisine in which I find far more similarities - creating the base mixture, working with the flour, the familia of the dishes.
So it was life changing for me when at a Grey Lynn book fair many moons ago, I found a 1960s Italian cookbook.
You can see it now… pictures of Rome and Milan, Vespas and old school Chianti bottles and the classic recipes of each region done ‘the old way’ - the original bolognese recipe including chicken livers, pork mince, white wine and other super secrets from mama’s kitchen entombed within this magical book.
Hues of brown, beige and dark green exuding from the Romanesque parchment, each page a slice of Italy in a time when the whole world felt so optimistic, and the food on your hearth was simple, elegant and delicious. When I’m feeling down, all I have to do is open this book and let it fall on any page, and joy seeps and then gushes back as I work on whatever enchanted recipe is presented to me, ‘Veal Marsala with a 1961 Barolo’.
And that brings me to one of my own fine little neighbourhood gems, Gusto Italiano in Three lamps.
You know it's the real deal when the owner’s favourite football team’s flags and shirts are adorned on the wall next to pictures of the Colosseum and Tuscan vineyards. Gusto plays it the way trattoria and cucina's have done so for millennia - Antipasto, Primi, Secondi, and Dolci - like the musical notes on a stave. And to their signature dish, Tortellini Porcini e Tartufo - homemade tortellini, sauteed in a truffle pesto and a porcini cream sauce topped with parmesan and Italian herbs. Heavenly.
The texture of the tortellini is silky and firm with the earthy savouriness from the truffle and the decadence of the sauce and parmesan and then the herbs just zinging at the last furlong in the palate.
What do you dare put next to this dish? Only one of the greatest producers today in Italy - Le Macchiole. Their vineyards are on the western edge of Tuscany along the coastline of Bolgheri. The soils of Bolgheri are thin and free draining, not too dissimilar in principle to our own Gimblett Gravels in Hawkes Bay.
This winery now labelled a ‘Super Tuscan’ turned heads with its trio of global superstars - The Scrio, Paleo and cosmic Messorio - Syrah, Cabernet Franc and Merlot respectively; these will cellar for many many decades. Le Macchiole have also produced a wine which blends all three of these varieties, Bolgheri Rosso.And so we try the 2019 vintage with Gusto’s tortellini - and when the two come together their wavelengths combine to create a tsunami of complementing flavours - and then there you are back in the old country gazing out over the vineyards and olive fields out to the ocean, the threads of distance and memory existentially morphing into one reality…and suddenly a green link bus flies past outside the restaurant doors, and you realise it's time to go back to work. (Puneet Dhall)
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