3 hours ago
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There’s an enormous new “Italian” restaurant just a skip and a jump from the City of London, close to where the country’s money is looked after. But the multi-floored Campanelle doesn’t deign to open at weekends (for now, anyway), because, well, why bother? Who would go? Mind you, on the Friday lunchtime when I stepped into this elegant, all-day brasserie in a Grade II-listed building that was once home to the London Shipping Exchange, the whole place was empty, save for a flurry of diligent, all-female staff. Friday, it seems, is also not a busy day in the City.
Campanelle’s à la carte menu is similarly sparse, and oddly uninspiring. It offers the likes of lobster linguine, breaded veal cutlets alla Milanese and Amalfi lemon tart, and claims to be influenced by the whole of Italy. At breakfast, however, it serves buttermilk chicken waffles and cornbread with organic nama yasai berry jam, though, curiously, not much in the way of fine Italian pastries or coffee.
Restaurants of this kind, which are apparently designed to take money from people with money, tend to drill down on one specific region – let’s say Puglia – before creating an intricate, often fictitious backstory about how Puglia is sealed in the chef/patron’s heart via his nonna in the Foggia mountains. Not so here, however; they haven’t even bothered with a ChatGPT-generated yarn. Instead, there’s just a short list of antipasti, fritti and pastas, as well as pesce and carne that’s reportedly cooked on a charcoal grill, although during my visit I sniffed not a whiff of smoke in the air. Furthermore, Campanelle’s menu makes no claims that its capelli d’angelo (angel-hair pasta) or linguine are handmade, even though a main course serving of pasta carbonara and a painfully lacklustre beef shin ragu fettuccine both come in at £26. That ragu, by the way, was in such dire need of seasoning that even a humble Oxo cube would have worked wonders.
My starter of langoustine arancini turned out to be the highlight of the entire meal: two plump, hot, crisp balls of breaded al dente risotto rice, generous with the shellfish and with a real kick of chilli. They came perched on puddles of what was little more than a glorified mayo, but they were satisfying nevertheless. By comparison, the angel hair pasta with baby ceps was a sadly rudimentary affair that tasted mainly of garlic and field mushrooms.
Alone in my quiet restaurant hell, my solitude was soothed by the arrival of another diner, a forlorn, hedge-fund manager sort who mooched in for his reservation for two while cursing the secretary who had scheduled a Friday lunchtime client meeting. After that, a few sombre-looking groups took up some of the other tables in this corporate-facing and not-very-Italian-at-all restaurant. These were clearly work teams who at some point had agreed it would be “great to get together and grab a bite”, and now here they were of a Friday afternoon, grabbing that very bite, without wine, in a stiff City restaurant while sitting elbow to elbow with people they had nothing in common with other than matching security lanyards. Campanelle is a great illustration of the pros of working from home.
The whole “let’s get back to the office” brigade should be condemned in the afterlife to spend eternity in an upscale, business-lunch restaurant of this sort. Just as they are at Campanelle, the banquettes will be comfy, the light fittings expensive, the air-conditioning cool and the wine list impressive, but each plate of crab salad with smoked celeriac will be accompanied by the terror of hearing Julie from Rushmore Infinity Brokers’ faltering anecdote about her cockapoo, while her colleagues quietly die inside.
The tiramisu, you might at this stage be unsurprised to learn, is not an authentic, multi-layered slice of semi-orderly, cocoa-encrusted stodge. Rather, it is a neatly stacked, precise and pretty tiramisu that’s plated as if it’s off to Royal Ascot on top of someone’s head. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my tiramisu scooped from a bowl and hitting my plate with a wobbly splat; I also want a blast of amaretto so strong that it grows hairs on my face. What I don’t want is a tiramisu I can eat between meals, like a 1970s Milky Way bar, without ruining my appetite.
Campanelle is a restaurant for people who don’t want to go to lunch, but absolutely have to, mainly because they are contractually obliged to entertain clients. If you are one of those people, the nicest thing to be said for this place is that it’s close both to the office and to several mainline train stations, and that the bill is far easier to get through corporate accounts than the nearby Jason Atherton and Gordon Ramsay places. Other than that, this is definitely not la bella vita.
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Campanelle 19-21 Billiter Street, London EC3, 0203-745 0909. Open Mon-Fri 7.30am-9.30pm. From about £65 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.
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The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 23 September – listen to it here.
