Farewell ‘old Brixton’, hello super Tuscan
Dining out on a stifling night could have been an ordeal, but for Keith Miller, this Italian was bellissima
Iam writing this on Thursday July 25, the second hottest day of Our Island Story so far. All being well, it will go to press tomorrow evening, and hit the newsstands, if there are still news-stands, on Sunday July 28. I had dinner at Maremma yesterday. These hairpin turnarounds don’t affect us very often; but they’re inevitable sometimes, for various reasons. To be honest they can even inject a welcome little hit of adrenalin – and Lord knows it’s nothing like the deadlines they have to deal with on the sports desk, say. But what follows ought to be tempered a little by the knowledge that it was an extraordinary evening; the guests and staff (especially the poor chefs) deserve a medal for having shown up at all.
The restaurant occupies the former Montego Inn, a storied Brixtonian Jamaican drinking and, occasionally, eating den, on a corner site just along from the UK’s most irritatingly named restaurant, Naughty Piglets, and near the course of Brixton Water, aka the river Effra, now deep underground, on whose banks it is said Raleigh once serenaded Elizabeth I. The outside is painted a fetching shade of British Racing Green, with a pleasing heraldic crest in the traditional Italian style dangling over the door; the inside an artfully scruffy palimpsest of previous decorative schemes. The space is nicely set up in an open-plan, upstairs-downstairs way, with some daylight reaching the lower floor on a summer’s evening.
There’s a big bar along one side of the upper level, and most of the seating upstairs is counter-style: we were put along a side wall, well within the thermonuclear blast radius of the open kitchen, with an unrivalled view of the bins on Arlingford Road. There are some excellent classicwith-a-twist cocktails, skillfully
realised by a guy I recognised, with a sentimental pang, from the demimonde of the south London gastropub scene; but it’s mostly about food – Italian food, at that, specifically, food from the eponymous region, or micro-region, of south-western Tuscany.
The name augurs well, with its whisper of the sea (not to mention its hinted promise of a maternal cuddle). Tuscan food can be a bit heavy and uber-rustic – other Italians call people of the region mangiafagioli or bean-eaters – so Maremma’s coastal accent, made manifest last night in the form of some super-fresh grilled sardines with chilli and fennel, and whole sea bass with peperonata and aioli, is welcome.
We loved our food: it’s simple and produce-led and all that, but it has a kind of swagger about it, a parade of robust flavours. Cold roast tomato soup wasn’t just a welcome option for these dog days; it was a rhapsody on the theme of its lead ingredient, earthy and sweet, with a comma of lemon ricotta and an intense bloblet of whizzed-up herbage sitting on the top to complete the tricolors. There are some tempting pastas – after the weather breaks, maybe – and last night’s secondi included a tagliata (cut-up steak) and a wild boar belly/chop arrangement with sticky figs and a sweet balsamic reduction. The veggie option, a chickpea pancake with crispy aubergine, had notable levels of oomph.
Gold and silver medals in the pudding race went to a pear ice Maremma’s hernia-risk seating belies its simple, swaggering food cream with cubes of fruit and little leathery tongues of chilled parmesan (there’s a cute folk rhyme about how unwise it would be to let the countryfolk know that cheese and pears go together: al contadino non far sapere quant’è buono il formaggio con le père); and a pungent grappa-laced panna cotta, which wasn’t quite as firm as it might have been – though I think that we can put that down to the heat of the night.
So I hereby welcome Maremma into the neighbourhood, and I commend it to you. It’s been open for a few weeks but it feels like it’s always been there; the servers and chefs were the very definition of grace under pressure, bringing an impressive level of sangfroid to bear on the inevitable challenges of a hot evening service. I suppose it’s not supersubtle – you’ll need to like big, robust food to really love it (though they don’t make as much of a thing about steak as a more Florentine-accented Tuscan place might) – and yet it’s somehow not quite as informal as it might be. I would like to see a couple more “ordinary” wines on an interesting, but pricey and faintly recherché, all-Italian list – they have an excellent vermentino blend among the whites, but a morellino di Scansano, say, would be a hard-working addition to the reds.
I have to say I wish it had more proper tables – it’s a perfect restaurant for grown-up couples who, OK, may know what each other looks like, but might not mind being able to look one another in the eye without risking an inguinal hernia from time to time. Lastly I can’t help mourning the passing of the Montego Inn, and I worry a little about Bruce, its legendary chatelain; its replacement with somewhere that’s, if not quite posh, definitely shooting for boho-posh, seems to mark a near-final nail in the coffin of “old” Brixton. But I guess there’s no reason to suppose Bruce hasn’t cashed out happily and gone off to enjoy a peaceful and wellearned retirement.
36 Brixton Water Lane, London SW2 1PE:
020 3186 4011; maremmarestaurant. com