Hungry like the wolf – Bocca di Lupo review

Bocca di Lupo – 12 Archer Street, London W1
 
After failing to get a table anywhere in Soho after an exhibition opening the other week, M and I ended up in BdL again, and wondered why we hadn’t just gone there in the first place. I love this place. There’s something about the earthy, unrepentant flavours that you get here which is just incredibly sexy. Don’t go there if you don’t love food. If you don’t know it, it specialises in regional Italian dishes, nearly all of which you’re guaranteed never to have tried. Pretty much everything is available in two sizes, so you can treat it like tapas if, like me, you’re a gluttonous pig and want to taste all of it. You don’t always fancy every dish on the changing menu (I’m glad I’ve tried the foccaccia with lung and spleen simmered in lard with smoked ricotta, but I won’t be trying it again) but there’s always enough that intrigues and then delights to make you feel like raving about it. I used to feel the same way about St John (in Farringdon – there’s also a smaller one in Spitalfields), but now I only ever go there for roasted bone marrow and anchovy toast in the bar. Serving hare leg and mash without gravy, twice, counts as two strikes in my book.
 
This time at BdL (where, incidentally, they might actually have the nicest staff in London) we were bowled over by a frittata with spaghetti & mullet bottarga (roe), a kind of ultimate picnic dish from Campania comprising both breakfast and lunch. I really enjoyed the porcini and fontina arancini, though they could have done with quite a lot more porcini. Our favourite dishes were two very, very different sausages which actually made us pause in our gossiping and stare at each other – rustic pork and foie gras sausage with farro & porcini from Trentino was coarse and punchy with none of the smooth finesse you’d expect from foie gras, while cotechino with lentils and fig mostarda from Emilia-Romagna was soft and delicate, almost patéish – both completely opposite from what we had expected but both obscenely delicious. Though we didn’t have it on this occasion, I think it’s worth mentioning what I think is the best dessert I’ve tasted in a long time, which is sanguinaccio – a sweet paté of pig’s blood and chocolate from Abruzzo. My friend S and I tried it the first time we ever went to BdL, and we’re both still tiresomely going on about it. It’s like a chocolate pot – sort of a solid mousse, or a cold ganache – but rather than becoming cloying and over-rich halfway down, the blood cuts through the sweetness of the chocolate and gives it a freshness that S first mistook for herbs. I suppose you could imagine a slightly metallic edge to it if you tried hard enough. It is simply one of the most miraculous marriages of flavour I’ve ever experienced. They serve it with sourdough bread (yawn), which I think unnecessary, and for some reason they insist on topping it with uncooked pine nuts, which I think is just perverse, but others disagree. I just pick them off and scrape it all out with a spoon. Divine.
 
The wine list is also very good, but one of the best things about BdL is the staff (did I mention the staff?), all of whom know all about the food, how it’s made, what’s in it, whether particular dishes will fight against each other, and they can always suggest a decent wine (regional, Italian, naturally), which you can buy by the glass, carafe, or bottle.
 
The exhibition, by the way, was The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters at the Royal Academy, which is well worth braving the inevitable seething mass. The first two rooms are a bit brown (being before the painter moved to the south of France and discovered colour) and will be a bit frustrating when it’s full, but from room three onwards it is a glorious revelation. Sunflowers, which hangs in the National Gallery and is appallingly lit, pales beside these vivid, luminous canvases, which reproduce that sort of ear-splitting light that you get in the south of France in a way which no camera will ever match. Alongside the paintings are some of the many hundreds of letters that Van Gogh wrote during his life, often to his brother Theo (who bankrolled him for the whole of his ten year career as a painter), in which he talks poignantly about his state of mind and explains what he has been working on, using exquisite little sketches to show his brother how the work is progressing. It is both beautiful and moving. M, who works in contemporary art and was thoroughly gloomy about being dragged along to see it, was completely blown away. If you can, go.

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