‘This lot may be properly Sicilian, but they lack their countrymen’s warm-hearted, unrestrained generosity’
My aim is to bring you the good stuff. Yes, slamming it to the duffers is far more fun, and it’s hard to be hugely positive without slipping into the posh American lady school of writing, all perfect-peaches-at-sunset drippiness and mooning over milky mozzarella. But I spent too much time working in restaurants to deliver conscience-free slammers, so my default mode is to look, like an overfed Pollyanna, for things to make us glad.
A first visit to Iddu, a Sicilian cafe and restaurant owned by the (genuinely Sicilian) chaps who’ve got the South Kensington Club next door, is entirely gladdening. The menu is short but pleasing: we eat pristine burrata with sun-ripened tomatoes, pasta with vivid spring vegetables, tuna tartare that tastes freshly chopped, bright with lemon and capers, moist almond cake. Portions are tiny, suitable for a South Ken clientele more into their cold-pressed juices – we have a fine blood orange – than lunchtime boozing. It’s pretty, too: chic copper lamps, cupboards with icebox fittings, shelves of Sicilian produce. Barbera coffee is strong and fragrant; staff seem charming. Great, I think, I’ll tell my chums about this, and come back for dinner.
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