A little corner of the Amalfi coast can now be found down a Clapham backstreet, and it’s proving to be wildly popular
Sorella has shape-shifted since its previous incarnation as The Manor. It has let its hair down. Out with the chicken butter served on pebbles, liquid nitrogen puddings and partridge autopsies. Farewell to chefs blowtorching mackerel tableside as you shield your eyebrows. Owner Robin Gill wooed and wowed the food scene’s most nitpicky with puzzling plates of high drama, but he’s now jacked that in, at this venue at least, and started serving pasta. He’s doing the Amalfi coast down a Clapham backstreet, and on the Saturday I swung by, the change was proving popular. As the restaurant world tightens its belt, with new closures daily, I wonder if Michelin-flirting whimsy will be a chief casualty of the cold front. For it’s a limited audience who will return to places like The Manor time after time, but folk will always want pasta.
Or, more accurately, they’ll always want a flute of rhubarb bellini, then a zinging bowl of fresh linguine with crab and fennel, after perhaps a bowl of breaded, deep-fried sweet nocellara olives and a helping of small, feisty truffle arancini. This is now a neighbourhood joint where families sit and honk with laughter, rather than a room where serious souls bearing Canon EOS 5D Mark III 22.3 MP DSLRs harvest content.
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