Gnocchi with sausage, Bocca di Lupo, Soho
Once London’s seedy, porn-driven gangster manor, Soho’s raison d’être nowadays is the smart dining room and private members’ club. No more leery provincial businessmen furtively deceiving their wives, today it’s all weary media execs seeking gastronomic titillation. At weekends, hoi polloi may still be out on the pavement, throwing up, drunk, but in the refurbished Groucho Club, the concern is Henry Harris’s new menu; in Soho House it’s whether it’s warm enough yet for an Aperol Spritz on the roof.
There’s usually trouble around the corner in Soho. This time it’s developers pushing rents up so far that even what’s left of the porn business is being sidelined. There’s a new campaign to stop further gentrification, to keep the colour – some of the seediness even. What campaigners want is to forestall a bland Covent Garden-style makeover. And while London really doesn’t need another open-air shopping mall for tourists, the debate is just getting into gear. On one side, Stephen Fry passionately bemoans the sudden closure of Madame JoJo’s, a historic landmark of gay cabaret and drag queen exotica now destined to become luxury apartments; on the other, Times restaurant critic Giles Coren can’t wait for more rapid change, citing his own mugging at a cash point many years ago as evidence enough.
Bocca di Lupo, Soho
There remains a whiff of times past. You can still get a drink at 3am, but legally, rather than from a crate of booze in an unlicensed speakeasy under a minicab office. Strippers still occasionally totter by from one afternoon dive to another. In The French, Soho’s most venerated hostelry, the nostalgia can be disarming, literally. One wag reminisced recently about his buddy turning the tables in a stickup:
“That thing real?” he says to the gunman, an addled junkie apparently. “Cos if it is I’ll give you five hundred for it right now.”
“Just gimme your wallet.”
“Seriously, is it? There could be a grand in this for you.”
“Course it’s not real. Just gimme!”
Whack! Kapow! End of stickup.
Until now, the gentrification has been reasonably kind. Archer Street, for example, was dominated for years by the “Charlie Chester Casino”, an undesirable low-rent gambling joint. Named after a long-dead music hall comedian it may have been, but there was nothing funny about it: its 10p tables attracted flotsam and jetsam punters, while those riffraff too drunk to get in were welcomed with open, ahem, arms by a battalion of grim prostitutes outside in dark, dingy doorways leading to porn shops and brothels. Away-game football supporters made visiting Archer Street more a rite of passage than a dark back alley. It could be a deeply uncomfortable, not to say dangerous, thoroughfare to walk down late at night. I did not like it one bit.
Bocca di Lupo, Soho
Until, that is, the casino became Bocca di Lupo, Jacob Kenedy’s modern Italian. In 2008 this transformation was a pioneering landgrab by the “new” Soho, replacing salacious decadence with the pleasures of the table – or rather the bar, since the best seats in this house are the stools along the counter. (especially numbers 1/2/3 in front of the chefs). Soho has always had strong Italian traditions – Lina Stores and Camisa remain the two finest old-school delis in London, though who knows for how long – not to mention a whole generation of red sauce trattorias, remembered best for their slim-hipped waiters bearing oversized pepper grinders than for their spaghetti bolognese.
I’m pretty relieved I didn’t live in the Soho of the last century, and quite happy that I won’t be around for the Soho of the next
But Bocca di Lupo is of another order. Specialising in regional delicacies and sourcing fine ingredients, it celebrates true cucina italiana. Along with Polpo, Andrew Edmunds, Jeremy Lee’s sublime cooking at Quo Vadis, and Barrafina, it helps form a gastronomic bulwark against the incursions of more flash-in-the-pan burger options, bone-broth kitchens and casual grazing stations. At Jacob’s counter, the rules are straightforward: simply presented food that tastes of Italy.
In spring, when I last visited, this translates as dressed young broad beans, singing with lemon zest, mint and soft smoked ricotta; wafer-thin slivers of raw sea bream (“carpaccio”) slicked with orange and rosemary oil, and the most buttery, delicious polenta outside the Veneto. At lunch, the service is frenetic, the pass an inferno of activity: out come whole roasted legs of suckling pig, “fossil fish” (delicate, fleshy sea bream charred in a salty crust), and dishes that use blood oranges, in their short season, to sensational effect: sliced with red onions as a sharp salad, or frozen into a moreish granita.
The wines alone are alluring, with the youthful sommelier keeping up her sleeve surprises ranging from the driest, palest pink Prosecco through spicier Vermentino to beautifully lush Dolcetto D’Alba and beyond, almost all available by the glass or carafe. A sweet red Aleatico di Puglia is a heady climax, matched with more blood oranges, this time bathed in caramel.
Such feasting is the joy of Soho, one of the perks of working in the area. I’m pretty relieved I didn’t live in the Soho of the last century, and quite happy that I won’t be around for the Soho of the next. Right now, I’d just like to keep this version please, the one that’s neither one thing nor the other. Grazie mille. C
12 Archer Street, London W1D 7BB, UK
020-7734 2223; boccadilupo.com