‘Everything is as fresh and salty and real as a saunter down the Spaccanapoli’
In a back room, Maria Grazia is making pasta on a long table against a backdrop of log piles, a roaring, wood-burning stove and bashed, rickety furniture. She’s wheeling out sheets of eggy pasta dough, slapping them with flour so they don’t stick, each movement fluid and expert. She rolls little dods of more dough down a ridged wooden bat, knocking out fat cavatelli to be served later with egg and pancetta. Then back to the sheets, dotting them with blobs of ricotta and herbs, cutting and folding into ranks of identical tricorn tortelli, a study in seemingly effortless skill. “I learned it,” she says with a smile, in halting English, “from my grandmother.”
Forgive the plummet into simpering romanticism: blame Campania & Jones. It is the prettiest place, a ramshackle charmer that makes others’ attempts at artless, rustic chic look like a Hilton executive suite. Formerly a dairy, its premises used to house actual cows. Yes: in the heart of Hackney. (The faded S Jones sign from those dairy days is still above the door, the parvenu “Campania” hiding on the window.) The front room is all Italian cafe meets rus in urbe idyll, coffee machine hissing away; rooms are linked by a “garden” looking into the small kitchen, flagstoned and dripping with ossifying plant life. A handful of outdoor tables offer the primest espresso-drinking real estate. The original, Campania Gastronomia, landed around the corner on Columbia Road in 2008, a fixture of the Sunday morning plant-buying frenzy, but having taken on this gem of a building dating from the late 1800s, owner Emma Lantosca has created something truly special.
Continue reading...