GRACE AND FLAVOUR

Grace Dent finds the sauce of Italian food at L’Anima Café

I’m watching The Sopranos from the beginning again. Fifteen years after my first viewing, the episodes now seem rather gently meandering, but they still provoke a ferocious passion to eat Italian food. Sadly, Carmela Soprano is the only woman, real or fictional, who can eat a bowl piled with baked ziti every day and still wear size four linen trousers in marigold. For the rest of us, moderation is key.

My favourite Italian restaurant in London is Café Murano in St James’s. It does simple northern Italian cooking, or at least that’s what the management claims, but if I ‘simply’ tried to create truffle arancini or girolle with wild garlic gnocchi of that standard, it would be a laughable chain of events. After that, there is L’Anima, tucked away around the business-orientated Liverpool Street. L’Anima is elegant, with oodles of white décor, a besuited clientele and perilous prices. The beef tagliata with marrow bone and Ovinsardo is £32.50, and a side of zucchini fritti tagged on is £7. I literally love this place — if, literally, someone else is paying. So when I heard that L’Anima Café, a cheaper little sister, was opening around the corner, I was overjoyed. I will not pretend to understand the current restaurateur fashion for opening a second, cheaper restaurant in proximity to the original, thus alerting everyone to the fact that the first is very pricey. Not to mention merging the reputations of both by inferring a strong connection and causing diners to turn up at the wrong restaurant and bumble about like characters from The Brittas Empire.

I must add that L’Anima Café does not take reservations, meaning I almost didn’t visit as I couldn’t face the possibility of queuing or eating late in the evening, but when I arrived at 8pm on a Thursday the place was almost empty. The emptiness made it powerfully evident that L’Anima Café is enormous. If this is a ‘little’ sister café, then she’s the sibling who stayed home and ate a lot of Calabrese pizza.

At the door is propped a randomly placed Lambretta scooter and some sort of staged ‘harvest festival’ of Italian food products one might find in an M&S themed section. The service is cheerful and made me smile, although it’s difficult to be aloof when one asks for bread and a vast cart is pushed to