Giles Coren reviews Trattoria Brutto

Looking back at my review, dated November 7 of that year, I see that I called up to ask why I could not book a table and was told, “We decided that we’ve done our bit, opening a restaurant that people like. And we just want to say to people, ‘We’re here, come if you like, and we’ll get you seated as soon as we can.’ ”

I was furious. “The trouble with the ‘no-booking’ thing,” I fumed, “is that it asks you – or, more importantly, it asks me – to muffle up on a wet winter’s night and skulk into town on public transport on the OFF CHANCE of getting something to eat.”

This would be okay in Barcelona or Seville, I opined, where one can simply leave one’s name at the door and mosey down the road for a tapa somewhere else and then mosey back a bit later, but not in London, where there was nowhere to mosey to. It would never catch on.

But it did. As Polpo took off, opening branch after branch and spawning a billion imitators, the principle of booking a table died out altogether for a while, as did phone numbers themselves. Restaurants simply stopped quoting them. It was the “You need us more than we need you” phase of restauration. Restaurants were like coy sixth-form beauties who wouldn’t give you their number no matter how much you begged. All you could do was show up and tap at the window and hope to be let in (which was most usefully done before 6pm or after 10pm – when one couldn’t possibly want to eat). I hated it.

But then came economic slowdown, pandemic, mass closure and a fairly rapid realignment of the old power relations. A lot of those no-bookings places that were so dependent on a vibrant, local, going out all hours culture closed – which was awful for all involved and incredibly sad – and Polpo itself went into administration.

And when Russell decided to start again, with a daring 130-mile southwesterly leap from Venice to Florence, he decided to let people book. So I did. And here I am, at Brutto, in all its dark wood and red-and-white-checked solidity, close to Farringdon station, on the site of the old Hix Oyster & Chophouse (sic transit gloria mundi), swilling a negroni (the great Ajax Kentish of Spuntino is back on the bar!) and enjoying the warm hubbub and somewhat grown-up vibe (thanks to the booking system, which weeds out young, impulsive types) very much indeed.

It is not the best table in the house, for the name of “Armando Hardwilli” does not carry the clout of some others. But, alas, that is the pseudonym I used once on a new reservation website called Resy many years ago, and I don’t know how to change it. Worse still, I’m never sure which website I’ve used to book a restaurant when I arrive at it (there are so many now) and generally go through a long list before quietly murmuring, “You could try, um, ‘Armando Hardwilli’.” I never say it first up, because of the time when I arrived at the Dorchester and said to the guy on reception, “Do you have a ‘Hardwilli’?” and he waited quite a long time before replying, “No, Mr Coren, but it’s always a pleasure to see you.”

We were right by a little service bar and bread cutting station, one of those loose tables that float aimlessly in the middle of the floor, with a load-bearing column in the way of the waiters, and Russell was mortified, bless him. But chaps like me and my mate Kenton don’t come for people-watching or sightlines; we come for a bottle of Fontodi, and then another one, and some proper food and a bit of noise and chatty staff and the sense that the weekend starts here, even if it’s a Tuesday.

The place is called Brutto for some smart reason about which I care no more than I cared why last week’s place was called Planque. Doesn’t matter. McDonald’s is called McDonald’s because it serves McDonald’s. Scott’s is called Scott’s because it serves oysters and a nice Dover sole. And Sexy Fish is called Sexy Fish because Richard Caring is mental.

I’m not even that bothered about it being Florentine. I went to Florence once. Sure, the Duomo is nice – clap, clap – but I didn’t eat well, and the streets were terribly crowded. Same with Venice, Rome… I know everyone loves Italy, but I’ve never got on with it. I’ll eat the cooking, of course, but I’m far happier doing it in Farringdon, ten minutes from Kentish Town on the Thameslink.

Trattoria Brutto

PAUL WINCH-FURNESS

The black and white A4 menu looks handtyped on account of the old-school font they’ve got going, and it has Italian on one side, English on the other. I nearly had the “Coccoli, prosciutto e stracchino” until I saw that in English they were called “Dough ball cuddles” and refused on principle. It sounded a bit Robin Thicke. A bit #MeToo, if they have that in Italy. Which I doubt.

Crostini fegatini (£8.50) involved lots of dense chicken liver piled onto toast. Not your frothy French stuff, just a lot of well-seasoned offal – as much like Jewish chopped liver as anything else – which is a big thing in Florence, I recall. Really good with the Fontodi, and presented with a serious, sheep-killing knife to halve the third crostino and avoid arguments.

In the same, simple – I was going to say “rustic”, but Florence is a city – vein was “Acciughe, burro, pane” (£8.75), in which “acciughe” means anchovies, and “burro” means butter (even I knew that) and “pane” means St John sourdough (which is an awful lot to cram into four letters). The bread was charred on a griddle and there were seven or eight anchovies – oily, tinned, very salty, so thick you could cut steaks from them – with eight proper little 1970s hotel curls of butter rolling about on them. Fat overkill? Not a bit of it. The thing with anchovies is they are so strong that they are usually used to lend their umami to other dishes (pizza, roast lamb, a puttanesca sauce), so alone they need lengthening. The butter does that. You mash the salted fish down into the creamy butter, spread it on and… Well, you know how to eat bread. But, anyway, awesome.

For the sake of our intestinal regularity there came raw veg crudites: carrot, fennel, white and red carrots, with new season olive oil and lemon (£7). This is how Florentines taste the new oil harvest each year, you see, not with bread but with raw vegetables, which bring out the flavour. Or so Russell claimed. He may have been shitting me just to see if I put it in print.

I loved the pork tonnato (£12.50) for the sweet fat and dainty rind on the meat that you don’t get with veal, the restrained drizzle of tuna sauce, the sliced caperberries and the big flay leaves of parsley. Kenton’s pappardelle con coniglio (an even cuter word for rabbit than “rabbit”) was wonderful: ostensibly sweet and blandish but with such depth and subtle seasoning that it evolved lusciously in the chew (£14). And my penne con vodka (£10.25) was a very good dish too – pasta in a rich sauce of cream and tomato – as long as one acknowledges that penne con vodka is a barefaced 1980s Italian-American sham of a dish in which the vodka does nothing. It’s a sexy name, “penne con vodka”, but it’s a fugazi, as Donnie Brasco would say. A fockin’ fugazi.

We had the smallest steak on the blackboard (it’s a Florentine homage joint, after all), 550g for £50, which was chargrilled beautifully, well rested, yadda yadda, sliced in the tagliata style, with white cabbage (£4) shredded seductively fine and sharply dressed, and then a brilliant tiramisu (£7.50). Then booked again for the following week because, as I may have mentioned, you can.

Trattoria Brutto
35-37 Greenhill Rents, London EC1 (020 4537 0928; msha.ke/brutto)
Cooking 8
Vibes 9
Bookability 10
Score 9