The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Our critic endures communal tables and a carb overload
Michael Deacon at Pastaio in London
Pastaio
19 Ganton Street London W1F 7BN pastaio.london
Star rating
★★★☆☆
Three courses for two
About £45 without alcohol
THINGS I DON’T Understand About Trendy Restaurants is a long enough list as it is, but today we add a new item: communal tables. You know: the ones stretching the width of the room, with everyone – friends and strangers alike – crammed next to each other on either side. Just like in a school dinner hall.
I don’t get it. Personally, if I were launching a restaurant, I would definitely not want my diners’ first impression to be, ‘Hmm, this reminds me of school dinners.’ So I wouldn’t fill the place with communal tables, any more than I would order the kitchen to boil up a vat of cabbage and then waft the stench through to the dining room with an industrial fan.
But even if I were consciously aiming my restaurant at the select demographic known to sociologists as People Who Have Fond Memories of School Dinners, I would still think twice about communal tables. First, for practical reasons. When restaurants with communal tables are packed – as they invariably and inexplicably are – you run the constant risk of jabbing an elbow into your neighbour’s arm, gut or beef noodles. Then there’s the lack of privacy. Being jammed hip-to-hip between total strangers tends to inhibit the exchange of gossip, jokes, slander, and other kinds of talk intended for an audience no bigger than the person you brought with you. Throughout the meal, you’re perpetually having to catch yourself before
you commit some unthinking indiscretion. In other words: the intimacy prevents intimacy.
The idea, I suppose, is that enforced cosiness will transform strangers into friends: we’ll pass the salt, smile, introduce ourselves, and by the end of a joyous night be planning our first group holiday. I can imagine it working, in a country like the US or Australia. In Britain, though, I’m not convinced, because it overlooks perhaps the key characteristic of the British: our social awkwardness. Travelling alone on train or bus, we secretly hope that the seat beside us will remain free, and sigh inwardly when it gets taken. We feel cramped, oppressed, hemmed in. So to expect us, in a restaurant, to sit at the same table as 14 confidently braying strangers, when all we wanted was a nice quiet chat with an old friend… No. We can’t relax.
Maybe it’s just an age thing. Aside from a few tiny tables for two at the back, this week’s restaurant was laid out in the school-dinner-hall style, and none of the other diners seemed to mind. But then, they were pretty much all in their 20s – and you know what the young are like, with their friendliness and optimism and openness to new people. Still, they’ll grow out of it.
We were at Pastaio, a new place in London specialising in pasta. My friend and I started, however, with the fried mozzarella sandwich, featuring honey and nduja (a spicy spreadable pork, popular in Italy). The nduja gave a nice tinge of heat, but the cheese was much too skimpy. Call me a pathological glutton with a life expectancy of 41, but when I have a fried or toasted sandwich, I want the thickest possible layer of cheese. A paving slab. A headstone. Not like this mozzarella. You could have slid it under the door of a bank vault.
It was the same with the grouse, rabbit and pork agnoli: I wanted a bigger portion of the meat inside. I like my agnoli fat, swollen, bulgingly full. I don’t want to slit each one with my knife and watch it deflate like the world’s smallest bouncy castle.
I liked the tagliatelle, though: slippery slurpy ribbons, nestling with sweet and squishy wild mushrooms. I also enjoyed the crab, courgette and tomato fusilli: bright, colourful and juicy. On first glance the malloreddus (Sardinian gnocchi) didn’t appear tremendously appetising – in my friend’s words, it looked like a heap of naked woodlice – but it tasted good, with gobbets of sausage giving it bite.
Suddenly, however, I had a problem. In total, I had just shared no fewer than
If I could offer a single piece of advice, it would be: do not eat four mains consisting of pasta
four mains – all of them consisting of pasta. Now, if I could offer a single piece of advice, based on my experiences as a restaurant critic, I think it would be this: do not, on any account, eat four mains consisting of pasta. Not even if it’s quite nice pasta, and you have to write a review describing as many dishes as possible. You probably weren’t planning to, but just in case: don’t.
It all seems fine at first. You think you can handle it. Hell, you’ve eaten pasta before. But then, just as you’re swallowing the last forkful from that fatal fourth plate, something ominous starts to happen. You can feel the pasta swelling inside you. Your trousers tighten. Your belt creaks. Your shirt buttons whimper. Slowly but surely, you are inflating: like a lilo, pumped not with air, but with flour and eggs.
Right now, this was happening to me. There was nothing else for it. Somehow I found an unoccupied square inch of my stomach, stuffed a pudding in it (the cannoli, not really worth it: a tube of cold slurry), and then bobbed balloonishly out.
I had no choice. I had to leave. At the rate my body was expanding, in another five minutes I’d have suffocated half the table.