‘The second outing from the team behind the Clove Club is a departure: this time, they’ve come over all Italian. Well, ish. They call it “Britalian”’
I promised myself I would not use the words “difficult second album”. Fail. But burden of expectation is a terrible thing, the reason so many people go to restaurants cursed with the full gamut of Michelin stars, or those lurking at the top of “world’s best” lists, only to come out thinking, “Is that it?”
This second outing for the team behind the Clove Club, chef Isaac McHale with Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis front of house, was always going to be under the beadiest of scrutiny. The starred parent restaurant is something of a foodist cult (René Redzepi has slung tacos there) and I’m a fan, too: McHale is that rarest of chefs, a creative risk-taker who never loses sight of the need to nail that all-essential deliciousness. But haute cuisine, even in Clove Club’s semi-informal garb, is notoriously hard to monetise: why do you think Heston inflicts his seasonal bacon-and-banana trifle on us? So Luca is the diffusion line: a large, coolly glamorous and grown-up new gaff looking like it belongs off Milan’s gallerie in the 1950s rather than 21st-century Clerkenwell. It’s a long way from their edgy pop-up days.
Related: Restaurant: the Clove Club, London EC1
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