Tempo is a recently opened Italian restaurant on Curzon Street, right near the now-defunct Mirabelle. There is a bar upstairs on the first floor, and the ground floor houses the dining room which is contemporary but not flashy. The colour scheme offers up warm, beige-y tones and large paintings splash the walls. This is a pretty and comfortable restaurant, even if the tables are squished together and the seats are small. I guess space is precious in Mayfair.

I liked the menu. Subdivided between cicchetti (small eats), carpaccio, antipasta, pasta and risotto, fish and meats, side dishes and desserts over a compact two page format, it offered a reasonable range of choices without overwhelming the audience. It made me want to try a little bit of everything.

I dined as a guest of the restaurant. From the cicchetti section, an insalata di polpo, seared octopus, pomegranate with apple (£3.75) was lovely. The octopus was tender and and nicely seared, and there was a lovely freshness coming through from the pomegranate and julienned apples which well with the octopus.

Insalata di polpo

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Note: Chefs Massimiliano Blasone and Marco Calenzo have now left the restaurant. Consequently this blog post may not reflect the current state of affairs at Apsleys.

Back in March I went to Apsleys, a one Michelin starred restaurant, and had the five-course tasting menu. Apsleys is the London outpost of Heinz Beck, a chef who holds three Michelin stars with his restaurant La Pergola in Rome. I had therefore expected good things. Instead, I left the restaurant feeling a little under whelmed. It wasn’t a bad meal per se, but my tortellini pasta was a bit overcooked and there were inconsistencies in the presentation of the food. I also found the tuna tartare dish with herbal infusion and green tea sorbet slightly odd.

Somehow the restaurant got hold of my post. Perhaps they had a point to prove because they contacted me several months later to invite me to dine at Apsleys again, saying that things had much improved. Interestingly, The Critical Couple wrote of an underwhelming first experience followed by a much more positive one at Apsleys. I was therefore sufficiently curious to try it again.

To start was a trio of seafood amuse bouches. From left to right, tuna tartare sparkled with the gentle hint of orange pieces. Next was a seabass tartare with cauliflower and candied lemon mounted on some finely chopped cantaloupe melon. The sweetness of the fish contrasted wonderfully with the fruitiness of the melon and the acidity of the lemon. Finally, a stunning sliver of thinly sliced scallop marinated in olive oil and lemon was served on a bed of creamy amaranth (a black corn stock).

Amuse bouches

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Assaggi use to hold a Michelin star which it lost this year. But to be honest, two previous visits to this Italian restaurant have always left me at a lost as to why it ever had a star to begin with. The food was decent, but unspectacular, and very pricey. In my opinion, not only was it not Michelin worthy, it wasn’t worth the price tag either. So it was no surprise to me when it was stripped off its star this year. About time I thought. I’ve never been anxious to go back but friends who wanted to try it invited me along.

Assaggi is housed above a pub in a beautiful Georgian building on Chepstow Place. But the lovely building masks a poorly decorated dining room, which, with its bad lighting and dull wall hangings makes the restaurant feel little better than a cheap café. It was also very noisy as there is no carpeting on the floor.

Culatello di zibello, the prized cured ham from Italy, was delicious. Thinly sliced, the lovely red flesh was sweet and delicate, and further enriched by the tasty pieces of white fat running through it. The ham can be ordered with burrata, a mozzarella cheese with cream (£24.40 with cheese or £16.90 without cheese). I think the combination would have worked well had the cheese been served at room temperature. Instead, it was spoiled by the fact that the cheese had only just been taken out of the fridge and was far too cold to eat. £24.40 is not cheap for a starter, and so it was disappointing to have the restaurant ruin it through careless preparation.

Culatello di zibello with burrata cheese

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A couple of weeks I went to a ‘Discover the Origin’ event at La Cucina Caldesi Italian Cookery School. Discover the Origin is a campaign representing Italy, France and Portugal in support of five key products from those countries which bear protected origin designations such as Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC). Protected origin designations provides assurance to the consumer about the provenance, quality and the authenticity of the origin of the product. With a trend towards ethical sourcing and seasonal produce, etc, greater awareness in this area only seems fitting.

The five key products supported by Discover the Origin are Parma ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (Protected Designation of Origin (PDO)), Burgundy wine (AOC) and Port and Douro Valley wines (Denominação de Origem Controlada (DOC)). As a case in point, Parmigiano-Reggiano is not to be confused with any ordinary parmesan cheese. Under Italian law, only versions of this hard granular cheese produced in the Italian areas of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Bologna and Mantova may be called Parmigiano-Reggiano – hence the PDO designation. Similar cheeses produced elsewhere are instead to be called parmesan.

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Having recently gone to Polpo and enjoyed it, I couldn’t wait to try its recently opened sister restaurant, Polpetto. Perched on top of the legendary Soho pub, The French House, it is a tiny imitation of its bigger sister. Not only is the dining room smaller, the décor, with its hole in the wall look, is more subdued and relaxed. Unlike Polpo, Polpetto doesn’t come with its own bar area, so I can only guess that those waiting for tables must do so in the pub downstairs.

The menu is similarly designed to Polpo’s – barcaro type eating at reasonable prices. We started with several items from the cicheti (small bites) section. Our first choice was the duck and porcini meatballs (£1.50 each) which were divine. Packed full of rich duck and porcini flavour, the only slight drawback was that I got too much black pepper in one particular mouthful as the seasoning hadn’t been evenly dispersed throughout the meat. The meatballs came out piping hot – so hot in fact that it made me wonder if they had been microwaved before serving.

Duck & porcini meatballs

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I’ve been past a Polpo a few times, and the queues have always deterred me from going. The restaurant operates a no-reservations policy during dinner time which means if you want a table, you have to go early, wait or get lucky. So I decided to try my hand at turning up at 6.30 to see if I could avoid the queue. But alas, it was to no avail. A 45 minute wait ensued, and I have to say, it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences. First, the bar is tiny with barely any standing space. Second, there were already loads of people waiting, which made the tiny space seem claustrophobic. Third, we were told we weren’t allowed to wait outside with drinks even though some people did. And finally, to make an unbearable situation worse, our drinks (a glass of proseco and coke) weren’t cold. The coke hadn’t been refrigerated, although we did get a glass of ice to go with it. Hmmm.

But when we finally did get a table, I found the food to be quite delightful and the prices reasonable. Polpo is a Venetian style Bacaro with tapas-style dining. We started with some chopped chicken liver crostini (£1.50 each) which was rich with the flavour of pure liver. This was very tasty but it could have done with a little acidity to cut the richness.

Chicken liver crostini

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Note: Chefs Massimiliano Blasone and Marco Calenzo have now left the restaurant. Consequently this blog post may not reflect the current state of affairs at Apsleys.

Heinz Beck has the distinction of being the only chef in Rome to hold three Michelin stars with his restaurant La Pergola at the Rome Cavalieri Hilton. And Apsleys, at the Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner, is the London offshoot of this internationally acclaimed, German-born, Italian-based chef. Apsleys opened about two years ago, and this year, it received Michelin acclaim when it earned its first star in January.

As befits a restaurant that is housed in a St Regis hotel, the Apsleys dining room is a statement in jaw-dropping art deco elegance. It exudes luxury, with three massive chandeliers holding centre stage as they dazzle in front of your eyes. The interior designer was none other than Adam Tihany, the internationally renowned restaurant and hotel designer. Pierre Gagnaire’s Sketch counts as one of his designs, and notable upcoming projects include the redesign of the Mandarin Oriental in Hyde Park which will feature the new Heston Blumenthal restaurant which will open this autumn.

Being an Italian restaurant, there are the usual antipasti, zuppe e primi and secondi courses on the menu. There is also a five course (£59; with matching wines – £89) and a seven course (£79; with matching wines – £119) tasting menu. The five course tasting is based on the seven course menu, but with no lobster starter and a choice between the sea bream and the venison courses rather than both.

We selected the five course menu which kicked off with a ‘Chef’s Surprise’ amuse bouche of an arancini (a rice ball coated with breadcrumbs which originates from Sicily), and a sweet pepper and courgette terrine. The arancini, which tasted like a deep fried risotto, was pleasant but unspectactular. The terrine was filled with natural sweetness and had a lovely soft texture.

Amuse bouche

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Ricardo’s Italian Restaurant is a little Tuscan eatery that we – two girls at a loose end as to where to eat on a Saturday night – stumbled into. It’s not a well known restaurant, but I’ve driven past it a gazillion times and it’s always full, so I figured it couldn’t be half bad.

Although we had not booked, we managed to get a table, which was a bit of a squeeze. The dining room is rectangular, and most of the tables are packed very tightly along the wall. The menu makes for difficult reading as well. It’s one long laminated list of starters, pasta, fish and meats, in no particular order, which caused us some confusion as to what were starters or mains. There was also a shortlist of the day’s specials attached to it.

Fish soup with Sardinian fregola

We started with a fish soup (crab, clams, prawns) with Sardinian fregola and chilli (£9.99). I am a big fan of Sardinian fregola, which goes deliciously well with fresh seafood and a rich tomato base. The menu listed crab as an ingredient, but this was hard to detect in the soup. There were two decent sized pieces of butterflied king prawns which were crunchy but not particularly flavoursome, and the clams were ok. This was a passable dish, but the soup lacked intensity of flavour.

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