GRACE AND FLAVOUR

Grace Dent finds delightful late-night divertimenti at

Off to St James’s Street this week for cicchetti, cocktails, pasta and Puglian Primativo at Café Murano. I love dinner in this slice of town, just off Jermyn Street, close to The Ritz. One can exit the Tube in tourist-hell Piccadilly, walking swiftly in the opposite direction from Eros, and in moments be in the midst of elegant London calm. Not that my gait was elegant. I visited Café Murano after a session of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — taken up to combat the excesses of being a food critic — which has left me hobbling like a recently awoken coma victim’s first forays into the hospital grounds. Obviously, the alternative to stiff exercise is to slowly become one of those endearing spherical masses one sees on MasterChef and the like roaring, ‘But this fondant potato isn’t fondanty enough,’ at some hapless berk’s dream, imagining gout is just God’s way of telling you to buy bigger socks. The thing about HIIT is that it leaves one so blindingly hungry that by 5pm I would happily punch a child for its Cadbury’s Freddo Frog, so the fact that Café Murano offered truffle arancini as cicchetti — the Italian version of tapas — as well as vitello tonnato and charred butternut squash with Gorgonzola was playing heavily on my mind. Café Murano, let it be said, isn’t remotely a café. Don’t show up in sandals hoping for a slam poetry evening. It’s a rather gorgeous, pristine room festooned with pale marble, with the kind of staff other restaurants in London dream of acquiring: engaging, attentive and, when necessary, invisible. This is the little sister of the Michelin-star spot Murano. It’s the creation of the ever-inspiring force of nature Angela Hartnett. Café Murano opens early and closes late to accommodate theatregoers, which I wish I’d known a few days previously when I watched an outstanding version of The Weir at Wyndham’s Theatre and became so weepy during one monologue that I snivelled into the shoulder of the man beside me. I wish I’d known then that Café Murano serves a cocktail called the Sulla Luna — Prosecco